Entries from June 2009 ↓

This post is all about guilt and envy. About passing a buck and picking up the reigns. About how nothing is ever good enough for me, for long.

When Isobel was a hair over a year, nearly a month, really, she started acting differently than she was before. In the context of her – the child who came out blue with a cord around her neck several times and a decreased heart rate, who started screaming and didn’t stop for nearly six months, who walked at nine months without taking more than 20 steps gripping a table-top, that said mama and dada and gagoo and no by eight, who rolled over about two months before learning to run and still hasn’t mastered getting a spoon safely to her mouth – it was like night and day.

She started hitting. Then kicking. A bit of biting got thrown in, but was quickly dropped when she was once aided in biting herself. I didn’t agree with biting her back, but I was fine with making her bite herself when I was in the path of gnashing.

The tantrums got severe, sometimes lasting up to two hours, so long that she didn’t remember why she was upset, if she ever knew to begin with. She wasn’t sleeping much – napping was sporadic and bedtime was a few hours’ battle. She was eating everything she could get her hands on and not growing or gaining weight, still nearly six months behind her peers in size.

I spent my days extolling the benefits of speaking, communicating with me. I talked to her all the time. I never raised my voice or got too frustrated in front of her. Not even when she started hurting herself. Not even when I got kicked in the face. Not even after 40 minutes of her screaming like the world was ending did I freak out at her. (For that, I’m actually proud, given my temper and how severe it was.)

I slowly taught her that she could be upset in her own space, safely. That she could be angry without violence. That going to bed wasn’t necessarily what she wanted to do, but it was still happening.

I watched her, like a hawk. I waited for some magical sign that would tell me what was going on, if there was a red flag that made her more something than other children, or if I was just being uncharacteristically wimpy. It all seemed so wrong.

Coupling that with the multiple sicknesses, infections, infections as a result of antibiotic reactions, and the fact that she’s never quite digested anything particularly well, including breast milk, I consulted Dr. Google multiple times and eventually bullied our way into an appointment with a pediatrician.

Who said that she’d come down with a nasty case of the terrible twos. At 13 months. I walked away from that with the message that I would just have to learn to cope. But I watched her moods get more severe and her food pickiness emerge.

Last summer, I’d over-read enough.

The research connecting dairy consumption and ear infections was just too swaying and after her (I think it was) 15th one, I cut her off of cow’s milk. Not one more infection befell her. In the fall, a switch was flipped in her body and she seemed unable to tolerate cheese any longer.

By her 29th month, again my instincts were calling out to me. Things were just as bad as they’d been with her, mood-wise, she’d dropped naps altogether and I had a few evenings where I’d put her to bed and then just cry. At the frustration and concern. Because I felt guilty, wanting to hit her back sometimes. Because I wanted to run away, drop her off to her dad and say, ‘you deal with this, I’m not big enough.’

I’d cry because I couldn’t do any of those things – hit her or ship her off – and because I just really needed her to be okay and kind to me. Or a vacation. And the vacation wasn’t coming any time soon. And she’d started pissing on the floor when she was really mad, in a completely obviously vindicative way. I mean, she would call me over, and then pee while smiling in an Omen-like manner.

Something had to give.

We went back to a pediatrician and we did an elimination diet. Wheat and dairy gave her a nearly immediate reaction. Those were cut out. For the most part, wheat gluten as a whole has been cut out and on the few occasions since February when she’s been exposed to either of those food groupings, she’s been sick, twisted and mental. It’s obvious to anyone who knows her, even a little. She’s just not her.

Plus, she ends up looking like she’s been in a bar fight.

Here’s the double-standard.

I wanted something to be wrong with her. I wanted her to be diagnosed with something concrete, so that I’d be able to take care of it. There’d be a solution, she’d be fixed, and we could be a happy, loving family 99.1% of the time. And that’s almost exactly what happened.

She went off the wheat and the freakishly long, violent tantrums ended. In fact, by now, tantrums are kind of a rarity. She lost all dairy and things firmed up in the digestive department and she stopped getting sick, well, almost ever, instead of every couple of weeks. Things couldn’t be more perfect.

Except.

Her eyes are still puffy and purple, rimmed in red, with an ocean-liner’s amount of baggage underneath them, and she’s still getting allergic-reactions in the form of rashes – which indicates that there’s still something in her environment or diet that is wrong for her.

Now I must rigorously examine the label of every food stuff we come into contact with, bake almost everything from scratch and she’s still losing weight sometimes – she’s nearly three, still wears a lot of 18-24 months’ sizes and on a very good day, weighs in barely over the 27 pound mark. I weighed that when I was one. Her diet is probably 60% produce, 25% protein sources and the remaining 15% is wheat-alternates. She’s not taking in enough calories, and god help her waistline on a day when there isn’t an abundance of energy-dense snacks for her.

Everything I buy at the grocery store is expensive. I can’t afford to eat organic, because we already spend over $500 a month on groceries – closer to $600 most months. I buy everything that she can and will eat on sale. I stock up. I cook from scratch. It’s so much money and time.

I wish there was nothing wrong. I miss the days when I could have on-sale generic cereal bars in the cupboard and hand her one whenever she asked for a snack. Her, at nine-months old, stuffing fists-full of lasagna into her face. When I didn’t have to buy a carton of soy milk every other day because I’m buying the largest container in one of the only two kinds she stomachs well (which are 210% the price of cow’s milk). I miss watching her peel string-cheese and having a menu plan open to anything. I miss not stressing out servers in restaurants, or having to prepare her her own meal to go to one.

I envy every parent I see, every day, who can go shopping with a stroller, hand over a bagel and have silence during the whole time, while they buy whatever the fuck they feel like. I hate that I saw safe cake mix on sale at the store two weeks ago and after checking it’s expiry date, bought all of them except two.

I hate that there’s still something clashing with her system and that I can’t just fix it like I imagined an answer would give me. I wonder if anything will ever really seem easy, or if it’s always going to be so damn hard and exhausting.

Some days, I truly hate myself for trying to find out what might’ve been wrong, when I could have sailed along on an inexpensive raft of laziness.

My first boyfriend wanted to kiss me. We’d run around the fair that’d been taking place at our school – I don’t remember the why or when, but know it was toward the end of 7th grade – and every once in a while, he’d catch my hand in his own, clammy one. When we neared the back of the gymnasium stage, where the heavy fake velvet curtain gave up privacy from the where the cake walk wares were displayed for ogling, he moved in for the smooch.

I kneed him in the balls and ran away.

Spencer, I never let him in at all. He wanted to be in – as much as the popular boy who already had a popular girlfriend could be – with me, the quiet, assumed brainiac, former-fatty-turned-walking-human-skeletal-lesson. I denied his phone calls, the notes he’d try to give me. I was beneath it, having a relationship with someone who couldn’t even confront who he wanted to be with, or why.

Summer didn’t want a relationship, but she wanted everything one came with. I gave her half.

The first high school boyfriend told me he loved me and we were going to get married and have children. Too bad I was 14 and already (still, really) looking in the direction of someone else. Someone very not available to me, emotionally or high-school caste-wise. I told him that I loved him too – the only person I ever knowingly said it to, lying – and after a year of on and off, we were off.

The next boyfriend, The Rock Star Ex, lasted nearly four years. We were engaged for most of the last two of them and still, I wasn’t in love. It’s easy to say that we fell out of love, which was a good thing to realize shortly before a wedding, but in reality, neither of us knew who we were or what the other was, or where our paths should or would travel. Never mind if we should be on the same ones. I don’t think we were ever in love with more than the idea of being each other’s futures.

Next, if you’re not counting the boys who were kind of relationships, but only by their own definitions, came The Ex.

Like the others, I only gave him enough to make him want to stay. When things were good, they were the image of perfect: fun, carefree, honest, expansive. When things were bad, I was proven time and again why I shouldn’t trust or contribute fully to a relationship. Why I should never give me, if I couldn’t afford the cost. I loved him, but to say I was in love with him would be pushing it.

To say that I still love him, facets of him, the possibility of him and us, wouldn’t.

But we’re not going to happen, regardless of the number of times we play house and pretend as though being friends when we’re friends is enough.

There’s someone else. A friend. That, you know, is a little more than a friend in my mind, and also completely unavailable to me.

That’s me M.O., you see. Pick the ones that won’t have me, 100%, or let the ones I won’t have pick me.

I’ve been single for a year now, since the day that The Ex walked out, after moving back in for two weeks, after I’d started to hemorrhage and before I had to call in friends I barely knew to pick me up from my self-created hell. I had to ask for help, something I’m not known for doing in any facet outside of hair cut, wardrobe or tattoo advice.

That taught me about me. My ability to weather another complete life change, and what it was like to trust people with my child and my broken, arrhythmic heart. I moved on, except I didn’t.

He’s always been a safety net, The Ex. Well, I guess in another way, for the past five years, so has the Rock Star Ex. They’re both there, as long as I’m here asking them to be. I am apparently a constantly replenishing buffet item that they keep coming back to, whenever they’ve made some room. I’m laden with MSG, known to cause bloating, migraines and greying hair (not to mention hair loss), but yet, the craving is enough to merit the health hazard.

Because of these safety nets, I’ve had the ability to cast off any need to remedy the very daddy issues that have created for me these (ultimately unwanted) relationships. Since I nearly always have some ability to satiate my thirst for contact or love or worship, I didn’t have to stop being aloof and unavailable. I most certainly didn’t have to date, and had the confidence to turn down a number of people because I just wasn’t interested in trying.

This is changing. Techtonic plates have slid against each other and suddenly, I find myself with some regularity, feeling lonely. I want someone to care about. I need to understand what it’s like to look at a person, or think of them, and feel it, inside, and know that there’s nothing wrong about that feeling. To feel freed by it, you know?

It’s melting, my exterior that doesn’t allow trespassers and I don’t know what to do with the person whose left inside, damp and shivering. I know I’ve created this reality – the one where The Ex is just as likely to love me as hate me, want me or leave me. Though The Rock Star Ex’s appetite is contrived merely of appreciation for our chemistry, it never goes further than witty conversations, watch ups and toe curling, and it never will – that’s not healthy for this still-enclosed me, either.

And newsflash to me: I don’t want those two men to be more than they are. In fact, I don’t want those safety nets any more.

I’ve come to realize that a net shouldn’t weigh you down. It should catch you when you fall. My liability within these two men’s lives should be negligible, if one exists at all. I shouldn’t be their anything, besides a once-upon-a-time. This is not a moral contention, this is merely, fact for me.

So. How to go about that…moving on without the safety net? Opening up without the immediate paranoia of pain. Walk away from the abandonment fantasies, so that I can actually put someone in the position to be able to abandon me.

I have no clue.

But this morning when I woke up tired, I still put on makeup. And when I wanted to spend the whole rainy day in flannel, I still put on new boots, fitted jeans and a shirt that cost more than 5 dollars. I wore my favourite bra, my red lipgloss and I walked out the door with Isobel to the library without a trace of scorn at the world or its inhabitants.

I think a start is doing that more often. Because for once today, I didn’t feel invisible by design, and I wasn’t looking for attention to mend a warped sense of confidence. I wasn’t paying attention to whose eyes were looking where, or why, and whether it was with appreciation or a snarl. I wasn’t measuring any one’s self-confidence and malleability by their body language.

Maybe today was the beginning of another rebirth.