The toxicity | The cure
by Zoeyjane
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.
