Raising Zoeyjane

“By the pricking of my thumbs // Something wicked this way comes.”

I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh lord. It’s building up again, but there’s remarkable differences, despite the fact that it’s almost the exact same point of time on the calendar. I haven’t taken to ordering and devouring of family-sized meals and desserts on a nightly basis from the pizza place down the street – after eating an entire cheesecake. I’m medicated. I’m not sleeping in until way past the time when Zoë wanted to be up and outside, remaining in my pajamas for most of the day, under the guise of ‘cleaning’. There was no precursory guilt-inducing sex act… oh, wait, scratch that part.

What’s the same is that I do consider devouring those meals, and have instead poured my appetital energy into root beer and all of the foods that Zoë can now eat, when I’m not fighting with that anorexic motherfucker that woke up in my brain last month. What’s the same is that I largely feel like throwing away any semblance of health right now because it feels so not worth it. What’s the same is that I’m back to feeling overwhelmed, not good enough, a failure, and any other thing that could probably be pinned upon volatile relationships and Daddy Issues.

What’s different is that instead of accepting this, I’m fucking pissed off.

***

Part of my anger is stemming from the fact that I feel so damned helpless and sorry for myself. I detest sorry-for-myself. Prior to downswings and medication, my life was carefully crafted, so as to control every single mechanism within it. So if something ‘went wrong’ it was my own fault, I could kick my ass a bit and move on. This is completely, I now see, out of my control.

I did everything right. I took the medication. When it started to work, I enjoyed it. I slept responsibly, I ate healthfully, I gained karma by yelling less at my child and not at all at my ex. I stopped smoking as much, I quit drinking for a large chunk of time. I simply started to enjoy life, and being alive, and even awake, and hell, even got what the definition of happy meant.

Now, that’s ebbing away and I can’t do a damn thing about it. And that makes me want to cry more than the specific mood swing does.

I know what I’m losing. For the first time, ever.

***

I have things I want to do. Important things. Like bake, and freeze batches of meatballs and tomato sauce. Hang curtains. Write letters. Tweeze my eyebrows. Work. Work more. Save money. Understand how other single, full-time-working moms do it. Read. Dance. Write for the hell of it. Write for the profit of it. Sew. Crochet. Strip my cupboards of their horrible shelf liner.

But no. I can barely type out a blog post, if it’s not fuelled by self-piteous rage. All of my efforts are going into doing the bare minimum right now and I want to be better than that.

***

I don’t like the idea of living on the system. My area of the world is extremely giving to single parents. I qualify for a number of programs, and I won’t lie, I receive a few of them. I have a basic moral qualification for this: without them, Zoë and I might live further away from our major supports, her babysitter, her father, in a more stressful, less safe environment. Rent is extremely expensive in this city, and until a week ago, so were our grocery bills.

So, I’ve applied for and accepted assistance for my rent – it’s more expensive than some of your mortgages. And I receive benefits on her behalf – always with the intention of putting them away for her, and never quite finding the money left over to do so. There’s other programs I could apply for, like subsidized housing, that I haven’t. Or welfare. Or the food bank.

I don’t like living within the system, and I think there are people who need and deserve it far more than I do. So I set a goal, to work X amount of hours per week, to bring my income up about 300%. To stop collect low-income, single parent aide.

I can’t do it. I couldn’t do it a month ago, when everything seemed fine (in my brain). I can’t make it much more past 10 hours a week, before I feel like I’m going to explode.

I used to work over 70. How did I fall so far?

***

Here’s the thing about all of these financial aide programs: some of them don’t play well with others. So, say, if I were to apply for disability – which I qualify for, and would be approved for, after a long and entirely-too-bureaucratic process – just so that I had a fall-back during those hard-to-keep-my-head-on-straight moments, I would be disqualified from receiving the rent assistance. Sounds fair to me, except that rent assistance is a static amount, and disability would fluctuate, based on my earnings – for the first year, at least, they’d deduct, dollar for dollar, what I made.

Have a good month and make $1 over disability benefits? I get nothing.

If there’s anything you need to know about me, it’s that regardless of how all-over-the-place I am, I need stability in relation to my home and money. More than food, smokes, sex, shirtless Jason Mraz, that scene from 8 mile when Eminen and Brittany Murphy get it on in the factory, ooh, or the coffeeshop bathroom in Unfaithful.

I think I got distracted, there.

***

Okay, distraction. There’s another thing that makes me mad. Apparently, when we have the precisely perfect (I know that was redundant, thanks) medication levels going in my brain, my attention span will just, like, poof, be normal.

It hasn’t been normal EVER, but okay. I’ll go with this theory.

But then why, for the love of melted chocolate (on Ryan Reynold’s abs) (okay, on Scarlett, too), is this focus shit getting harder? Why do I have to stare at a single thing or person, most of the time, to just finish thoughts? Why can Zoë not be in the same room as me while I’m on the phone now, without the conversation on the other end being muted, however temporarily?

And when I have my attention span back (poof!), will I stop feeling so fucking stupid? Because I may never have thought I was much more than a 6, but I alway knew I was smart. Now, I feel Ketamined-out (aka dum) (b).

***

Like I said, I’m feeling sorry for myself. Like I said, I’m angry. Worse, I’m back at the “this isn’t working. FUCK IT. I’m not going to take this shit anymore. I’m done!” place I last was in, in 2005.

Absolute fucking worst: I realized yesterday that this is, officially, the rest of my life.

I’m so tired, already.

When your doctor’s office calls you in, using the word urgent, you hop. And then you listen, finding out that the medication levels in your bloodstream are toxic, so they need to reduce your doses, and a little tiny thing you didn’t know had been born, deep inside of you, starts to wilt. As if it were something more entertaining, as if it were two rails you were putting up your nose every hour or so for the duration of a responsibility-free weekend, you realize that you’ll miss the drug that they’re taking away. So you ask for a prescription for the pill. Just to balance out the high, I guess.

***

It’s harder now. Harder to stay awake at some points; harder to go to sleep. I’m back to that mambo with insomnia and over-tiredness that leaves me feeling suspended in hyper-zombified gas. There’s no up or down, but there’s also no middle. Right now, I’m just waiting to find out the next step, because this one isn’t working as well as the one that could have killed my organs.

***

Yesterday, I bought Italian bread. Glorious, white, barely nutritious at all, thick-sliced Italian bread. I also bought yogurt and cheddar cheese. Last week, Zoë ate chicken fingers from a restaurant kids menu. A bagel. A hot dog at Ikea. Fruit Loops. All of this junk she’s been barred from for years. My baby’s grown out of her gluten allergy.

It’s like Christmas. I see dollar bills. I see time. I see not having to scrupulously examine every ingredient, deciding it would just be safer to prepare everything from scratch. I was a good cook and baker before the allergies popped up, but afterwards, the need to save pennies instead of buying the certified gluten- and dairy-free prepared foods made me a great one. I see a freezer full of regular baked goods, that no one turns their nose up at.

And she might start growing again. In an obvious way. It’s a little frightening, really, when all of your friends’ kids go through growth spurts and yours is still wearing the hand-me downs she got two and a half years ago. Because she can.

***

Home schooling has been tossed off the agenda. Instead, she’ll go to the school up the street, and barring my success at saving, I’ll go to the school at the end of the bus route. After each of us get let out, she’ll have extra stuff to do – a fraction of home schooling, if you will – and I’ll have homework. I think it can be alright. I think that maybe she’ll be okay with having to sit and not speak out of turn. I think she’ll learn to go to the bathroom after she’s asked to.

It hasn’t killed my basic assumption that she shouldn’t have to learn any of those things. That she should be allowed to chatter all damn day, like she does now – sometimes for 12 hours straight, I swear. It hasn’t murdered my concern that she will be bored, doing the same work, under the teacher’s schedule and direction – but that’s why she’ll have extra stuff to do at home, so she doesn’t lose any sense of wonder about learning. It doesn’t feel right, but it doesn’t feel like there’s a better option, either.

She’s too smart for me to handle. There, I said it. And I don’t mean handle as in control. I think that if I tried to home school her – besides the obvious financial implications of me not being able to work, and the joyless implications of me not being able to go to school myself – it would be disastrous because of two reasons: I would fail to provide her with enough stimulation; and, she doesn’t want to be taught.

If you’ve ever tried to teach a child who does not want to be taught, you know where I’m coming from. Everything about Zoë and her intelligence and the lessons she’s chosen to absorb have been about her deciding she wanted to learn, in her own time.

Case in point: she refused to learn the alphabet until she was ready, half-way through preschool last year. Now, she can read early reader books. But not if I push her to do it – only when it’s her idea.

Two weeks ago, she started learning Grade 1 math. Because it was her idea. Also, she wants the certificate at the end of the workbook.

She is her mother’s daughter. And that’s fucking frightening, when I remember how much I sat in the classroom, waiting for more.

***

I’m going to study interior design. I don’t know that a degree or certificate will particularly get me anywhere in Vancouver – it’s an incredible over-saturated industry here – but it’s as close to a passion as I have. It’s something that makes me pet and talk to structures covered in silk fabrics, envisioning an 18th-century salon, complete with glod-flecked garden tables. It’s something that hums a little inside of me, so I’m going to study interior design. I hope that I can couple writing with it, as well as my sewing knowledge and who knows. Worst (or best) case, a friend mentioned that I could end up working on set design – staging some of the shows that Vancouver is host to filming.

***

It amazes me that I still haven’t pulled out of my enough money is good enough mentality. I would have thought it would have grown off of me, moulted. But no, I’m still here, living cheque-to-cheque (with the intention of savings, really), and rarely feeling as if I want or need more. Could I be one of those rare people, content to have a few months’ worth of bills in the bank, just in case, with a $25K annual income? Probably. As long as I can afford rent, food and tea, I’m happy.

It seems like a clear delineation from how I grew up, and it seems that I should be the opposite because of how I grew up. Living on welfare and from the food bank, shopping for school clothes at the Salvation Army and Value Village… Rarely having a car, or birthdays, or really Christmas outside of my Grandparents’… why don’t I seek a lot more? Why aren’t I money crazy? Why don’t I have the need to make more more MORE, just so that a sense of panic in my belly is satiated? Where is that panic, period?

Why am I so different?

***

I took a big step two days ago. I went to a different hair dresser. My passive-aggressive people-pleasing ability was annihilated when I sat in the chair and complained about my last few times in the other person’s chair. I love what I got in return, and the new place is much more my vibe, but I couldn’t help but worry that if I saw my old person, he might be hurt, or think I was a bitch for abandoning him.

Yes, I am that self-important.

***

I want so very much to scrub my apartment, from top to bottom. But I just don’t. I don’t know why. I want to create a curtained off area in my living room for my bed, but I haven’t. I wanted to build Zoë a loft bed with built-in storage, but she’s adamantly decided that an out-of-the-box Ikea bed is the one for her. I wanted to bake five loaves of banana bread this weekend, some with blueberries, some chocolate chips, some juice-soaked apricots, filling my freezer with foil-wrapped deliciousness. But I didn’t. All I did was read a book and accidentally watch a Roman Polanski film, which has left me feeling as though I should put in 100 hours at the rape relief centre in penance for.

***

You know what makes me smile, lately? Couples, walking down the street, holding hands. Kissing goodbye at the bus stop. Smiling in that ear-to-ear way at each other. I love seeing love.

***

As for me, I’m still firmly off the market. Despite the fact that I’m not receiving any lack of male (or female) attention – including the four five guys with girlfriends who’ve hit on me in the past month – I’m just not into it. Dating. Getting to know someone in a getting-to-know-you atmosphere. Surprisingly, I’m also not much into the opposite, getting-to-know-you-nakedly sense.

It’s all just too much work that I’m not cut out of right now, and I have other things on my mind and in my heart. Plus, I’d probably have to commit to shaving my legs a lot more often.

Fuck that.

“Sanity may be madness but the maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be.” – Don Quixote

I guess the best way to say it is this: Lithium sucks.

A truer way to say it is this: Lithium is saving my life, it seems.

But, I’ve already gotten ahead of myself. The new dose. It’s fucking fabulous, except for all of the damn side effects. The facial tics have thankfully disappeared. The all-day nausea is almost gone, too – the nausea that caused me to lose over ten pounds in a month because I could only stomach about half a meal a day, which caused me to feel weak all the time and have to not only quit running, but also severely limit my activity because it was causing dizzy spells. The headaches are pretty much done, as long as I have at least 10 glasses of water a day and limit anything dehydrating.

Unfortunately, the tremors aren’t gone and have actually spread and increased. So I have good moments, and mostly bad ones, where all of my extremities are shaking and I look like I must be freezing. I’m not cold.

Things that are hard to do with tremors: ice cupcakes, shave your legs, light a cigarette, type on a keyboard, drink hot tea, remove piping hot pizza from the oven.

The typing part is one of the more effecting symptoms, because I only have so much good time during the day that my hands will cooperate – so I’ve been using those good times for the stuff that will pay the bills, work. And I haven’t been emailing or on Twitter much because of it.

But there’s an underlying side effect that no one every mentions: Lithium causes whateveritis.

No, that’s too blasé.And not very eloquent.

What I mean to say is that it makes you not give a flying fuck about anything that you don’t have to.

Case in point: I haven’t mopped my floors in almost two weeks. If you know me, you know that might actually be insane. I haven’t taken a toothbrush out to anything in weeks. I haven’t fanatically checked my email, leaving it open all day and wiggling my mouse with every walk-past, in forever. I barely even remember to check my personal email. I don’t check Twitter, I have to remind myself to check my reader, Facebook really doesn’t exist anymore. Something in the back of my head told me to post this, but I don’t really give a shit about this blog.

I could quit the Internet and be okay with it.

Instead, I do care about spending time with friends, laughing in that way that makes me throw back my head, speaking in a calm and gentle tone with Zoë, baking and cooking with her or alone, consciously and unselfishly co-parenting, creating a once-again-maybe friendship with The Ex, reading with Zoë, doing work that challenges me, witnessing my internal back-off alarm when I’m too stressed or anxious, fabulous shoes, building a dress collection to die for, faking confidence until I feel it (it’s coming quicker and better, lately), planning my next few years’ finances so that I can completely pay off my student loan debts, considering buying a condo once my debts are paid off, sitting in the sunshine, reading interior design and architecture case studies, making people happy if it doesn’t make me unhappy, daydreaming of the fall.

Here’s the major change, in a nutshell: before, I was compulsive about nearly everything, and that made me anxious, I’d get quickly over-stressed and often take that out on Zoë, while I flaked out on my responsibilities because I couldn’t handle the stress-load. Then I’d both withdraw (from real life) and become increasingly social (online).

And I can tell you exactly why. Because no matter how many of you I’ve hugged, or spoken to, or eaten with or said “of course online friends are real friends” to, you people were safe. I’ve had this long life with really shitty lead characters in it, and it basically, repeatedly rammed in the notion that friends will fuck you over, or hurt you, or leave you once you become too X for them. Every single person I’ve ever met, I’ve assumed, at some point, was my friend out of convenience and that they’d eventually cut and run when a valid excuse popped up. S’why I’ve always been a people-pleaser, often creating huge costs to myself.

And online friends, even if we’re real-life friends… you’re not real. You’re words on a screen. You could bail and I might not notice, or I’d be able to chalk it up to my blog not being entertaining enough, or that I didn’t @ you enough. It was safe-feeling, because I never really depended on anyone, from my personal life or my online life, and proven, it seems because it was only when some body made the leap from Inet to Real that something would happen.

So, before, I was compulsive about maintaining my (old) blog, because without those readers, I might have no validation of my existence – because eventually all of my real life friends would leave, right? I was compulsive about Twitter because I needed the support, just in case I didn’t have them in my personal life, and because I needed the distraction when stress was too much. I was compulsive about cleaning because… it just meant the world was right and I wasn’t a failure. I can’t explain that further.

And now, I’m not any of those things. I have friends I laugh with every single day. I have a daughter who is just as much she-devil as not, but I’m finally able to be proud of her and see the good in her always. For the first time in my life, love is not conditional – I love Zoë even if she’s being a bitch to me – and I don’t cut it or affection off. For the first time, I’ve realized that I love a man. But I’m not going to do a damn thing about it, because to do so, to tell him, would be for my own selfish needs and would most likely cause him harm. I’m not taking on too much work, like I used to do because I thought that clients wouldn’t be happy with me if I didn’t. I’m not staying awake past 1am, feverishly working or reading or planning.

Now, I’m me, calmer, happy, level. I’m living.

So, Internet, I’m not quitting you, but I won’t be around much. But trust in this: it’s not you, it’s me.

And I’m fucking delighted by it.

* Can you name the movie the title’s quote is from?