The Existential Voice
My son has an ingrown toenail, and I have an internal monologue that is getting very redundant.
I don’t cut my son’s toes often. He’s got this whole sensory thing around his feet. Won’t let you touch them. Won’t let you look at them. The only time he isn’t wearing socks is when he has a bath. Cutting his toenails involves like 3 days of preparation. The first day is me telling him I gotta cut his nails. The second is for me to forget to do it. The third is for my daughter to remind me that I have to do it and for my son to begrudgingly accept his fate. For a while, I had to bribe him with prizes, and my husband had to help hold him while I did the clipping.
This one time my parents were over, and my dad was like, “Yeah, it hurts when your mom cuts my nails.”
And I was like, What the fuck, Mom cuts your toenails?
Like, I didn’t say that. I thought it. And then I thought, Damn, the undiagnosed autism. Makes sense, though. Explains a lot…
The other night, I was cutting my son’s toenails. He’s better at accepting the reality of it. He established rules this time. He had to do it in his room, on his bed, with the door locked and only me in there. So I did that, and damn, the kid was like screaming with each toe, screaming to the void:
“AM I REAL? I’M DEAD. I’M DEAD. I’M NOT ALIVE ANYMORE.”
Like real existential shit, man. It was kind of fascinating, and also sad, because he was crying and clinging to his gigantic stuffed Winnie the Pooh bear that he calls “Pooey”. He has no idea who Winnie the Pooh actually is.
He asked for breaks between each toe, which was fine, because I had to find the toenail clippings in his sheets so they wouldn’t scrape his legs at night. (That is not a new fear I want him to unlock.) I collected them into a little pile on his nightstand while he was doing his deep breathing exercises between each toe.
Then I got to the foot that scared me…the one with the ingrown toenail. It’s something I’ve been dreading for a while, but couldn’t to much to prevent, considering my son’s total aversion to having bare feet. The nail is growing sideways, and now toe is all red. It’s gross, but it’s not infected. Not yet. But soon. Probably.
He was freaking out while I was trying to examine it. I touched it. Asked him if it hurt. He said it didn’t. I said I’d have to figure out what to do. I clipped the nails a reasonable length. He lost his mind. He had a mental breakdown.
“I’M DEAD. I’M NOT REAL.”
I asked him, “Am I real?”
He shook his head.
“Who am I then? Who are you talking to?”
“GOD. YOU’RE GOD.”
“Yeah, dude, I’m not God. This is like…it’s just happening, kiddo. It’s going to be okay, but you’re really gonna have to learn to not wear socks a bit. Overnight, at least.”
He told me I was annoying him, He told me I was the most annoying person ever. I tried not to cry because I felt bad for him. He told me he just needed some time, so I left him.
“I’M DYING. I’M DEAD.”
I collected the toenails from the nightstand and brought them to the birdcage. The cockatiels like chewing on them. Then I sat in front of my computer and had a look at the abandoned shopping cart full of lingerie I’d filled earlier during an online shopping spree at this Scottish lingerie store. Supporting small business was good. I needed new knickers anyway.
“JUST FUCKING DIE. FUCKING KILL YOURSELF.”
That was my internal monologue. Not too different from my son’s. Just a bit more aggressive. More hate-fuelled. More transgressive. More mature.
I thought, You don’t wanna die, girl, you’re just tired.
It’s taken me months to get to this point. It’s just kinda jarring when the angst pops up out of nowhere, for what feels like no reason.
Cutting my son’s toenails used to be so painful. Like, it used to be a big fucking deal, and now it’s just like this thing I do as a parent that sucks, and somewhere between really struggling with it and simply accepting it as a parental task, I never acknowledged the struggle of it all. I’ll be in counselling and the counsellor tells me “you’re a mom and you work and you’re a writer and that’s hard” and I always think to myself, It’s not, though?
It’s moments like this where I realize why I’m always constipated, and why I’m always exhausted, and why I tend to be hard on myself, is because I somehow get through every difficult moment and I never take the time to simply reflect. I just internalize it as something “normal”, something that everybody should just be able to fucking do without complaining about it.
Just the damn toenails in the birdcage and be normal, you stupid bitch. It’s not that hard.
Is this masking? I have no idea. I don’t know anything.
I guess that whole toenail situation was hard.
At some point, I’m gonna have to figure out how to peel the ingrown nail off his toe a bit. That’s not going to be fun at all. I’m dreading it, but I’m also already numbing myself to the task, like, fuck man, it’s on a step-by-step Wiki-how article…
This shit should be easy as fuck. You have no reason to complain. You’re not even a good mom if you can’t fix your son’s ingrown toenail.
At some point I realized that it’s shit like this that prevents me from having the mental capacity to write. It makes me angry. It puts me down the spiral of questioning.
What if I didn’t have kids? Maybe I’d have published like 3 novels by now. What would they even be about? Certainly not parenting, or kids, or any of the angst you’re currently dealing with, which you do enjoy writing about. Don’t lie. If you didn’t have kids you’d probably have nothing to write about anyway.
I just hate that it’s taken so long to get here.
Anyway, at some point I had the thought that I should give one of my protagonist’s kids a perpetual ingrown toenail, which then further escalated the thought spiral.
Is that too close to home, though? Just write it anyway, bitch, you have nothing else to write about. You don’t have to include it in your stupid book. You’re not even really going to fix that scene tonight. Just write a new scene. Write something. Something is better than nothing. Just fucking write it. Just do it.
And so I started to write, but I hated it, but I kept writing. I kept trying. And then my son started talking to himself upstairs.
“YOU’RE SO ANNOYING. YOU’RE SO ANNOYING. STOP.”
He was having the same mental crisis that I was. And so I went upstairs and asked if he was okay.
He said, “Mom, can I put my socks back on now?”
I wanted to tell him no, but I was like, “Fine, whatever, but let me put some Polysporin on it first.”
He nodded, somewhat nervous, but it was a nod, which I don’t get all that often.