Lead Shoes-4

Chapter 4

Wow life can certainly turn on a dime right?

It’s been a few days since everything started to change and well I’ve been just really busy. We pretty much called it a day once we had gotten home and got my things in my room and then made supper. We actually made supper together and had spaghetti. It’s so nice not to feel useless y’know.

I filled the pot and added salt and she showed me a good trick for me. You can get these pots with colanders in them and we left it in and then just took it out of the water to drain the pasta. She’s not the best cook but it’s a far cry from the semi-old person food Nan cooked. Ragu sauce right out of the jar and those little rounds of pepperoni from a pizza pack baked on a cookie sheet in the oven until they got like all crispy and we crumbled that over it and added a bit of cheese from a pre-shredded bag.

Actually not half bad.

I had something called a McCain cake for desert. It’s like Canadian Sarah Lee I think but from a French fry company?

I have chores.

I do the dishes and yes we have a dishwasher and a lot of our stuff is cheap from places like Dollarama so we don’t stress it if I spazz and break something. I also am to swiffer the floors and do my own laundry plus we trade off days to clean the bathrooms. I’m also tech support, she has a decent if dated gateway computer and she’s sort of computer literate but I go over stuff with her and make sure that she’s got a good grasp on the stuff she has. Mostly the usual stuff but some business software and stuff too.

She leaves me at home with a cell phone while she goes to work at a tattoo place a couple of nights and a bar some other nights. She trust me, I really try and not to wreck that trust either.

She came in this morning and had heard me cry out when the spasms and the cramping made me cry out waking me from being asleep. She came in and she held me and when the spiking pain passed she looked at me.

“How’s your arms?”

(Sniffle.) “Okay…it’s my legs this morning, it’s almost always me ff.. legs.”

“You mean your fucking legs?”

(Sniffle.) “Yeah…”

“Sucks right?”

“Yeah…”

She holds up one of my pillows. “Hit it.”

“……..”

“Hit it, it’s not fair, it’s not fucking fair and you bottle all this shit up and you need to…”

I don’t let her finish as I start hitting the pillow she’s holding and over and over and I’m not very good at hitting stuff but I really cut loose on it and I’m swearing a streak of profanity until my throats sore and I can’t see for the tears and she pulls me into this hug and the dam breaks and I bawl my eyes out.

And she rocks me and say’s. “It’s okay Kayla, its okay to feel just the way that you’re feeling.”………………. “Yeah, that’s it, let it out, get the poison out, that’s a good girl.”

It’s okay…
I’m a good girl…

Anguished crying shifts to this relieved crying and when I’m done she helps me massage my legs and do some exercises with them. “If you’re in pain now Kayla then maybe we can work it out some.”

Aunt Holly does those things for me. The little huge things.

Today’s a hard one, I took some of my meds and they’re to help me sleep when I’m having pain. But they only last so long and they don’t stop what’s happening with my body so after the pain starts to fade from my cramping up it feels like I’ve been beaten then tossed on The Rack. What a good way to start the day.

She helps me get a handle on myself but not too much more than that. She’ll help me if I ask for it but she doesn’t do stuff for me.

More pain meds and some of the others and I sit in the bath awhile then she comes in with a few things. “I figured you were having a shitty morning honey so I thought this might set you off right.”

She sets down a mug of coffee and my i-pod but there’s this girls shaving kit or something like it called Veet. Aunt Holly kisses me on the cheek. “Okay, I’m going to work so call me if you need me but take anything you can out of you’re room today okay we’re going to finally fix it up when I get off tonight.”

I hug her really hard. “Thank you, you just…today would have been really sucky without you.”

“Hey I’m just taking care of my girl. Wash up then relax the shampoo and stuff and just girl out getting pretty and listening to tunes while drinking your coffee.”

That’s what I do. I read the instructions while sipping my coffee and soaking the I-pod on its little stand and I start getting rid of all the unwanted guy hair. It’s like I’m using that scraper thing to peel and scrape off a layer of unwanted boy.

I get so into the way it feels and actually getting girly the pain and just the stuff that’d drag me down just fades into the background and I’m singing along with Katie Perry, Avril, Destiny’s Child, Pink…omg…I love Pink and stuff aunt Holly showed me Heart and Wilson-Phillips and I’m singing out loud at the top of my lungs along with them to Hold On while I’m singing to my hair brush and putting on my make up.

“I know this pain…”
“why do you lock yourself up in these chains?”
“No one can change your life, except for you.”
“Don’t ever let anyone step al over you…”

“Just open your heart and your mind….mmm”
“Is it really fair, to feel, this way inside…..?”

“Ohh! Someday, somebody’s gonna make you turn around and say goodbye!”
“Until then baby, are you going to let them hold you down and make you cry!”
“Don’t you know! Don’t you know things can change?”
“Things’ll go your way…if you hold one for one more day…..”
“Can you hold on…for one more day?”

“Things’ll go your way…hold on..for..one..more..day”

I keep singing in and out of that song and it’s just so much like something I’ve been living in and like getting out of the leg braces when I was a kid, like shedding off all this stuff that got piled on me living with Dad and Nan and bursting through to this new life where I’m really me.

Getting rid of my body hair that I hate…huge.

Sitting on the seat/stool of my walker in front of the music doing MY hair and My make-up in the house alone and TRUSTED…huge.

Listening to girl’s music as loud as I want without getting hollered at and I get to SING at the top of my lungs and just be a girl!

It pushes me through the hard drag you down stuff. It takes me awhile to get dressed only because I’m choosing My outfit. I love my bra I love my panties I like getting dressed up as the person I really am inside even if the only thing I’m wearing is a long sleeved T-shirt and girl’s Nike sweatpants. I look in the mirror and I see Mikayla, I see me and while I’m not all the way there…

I can actually see my life from here.

I go out to the kitchen with my walker and make myself some breakfast I’m learning to cook a bit. I make scrambled eggs, and a dish of granola and then do the dishes. Then the washing. I well we’ve developed a cheat where I have the plastic laundry basket hooked to a leash and just pull it behind me and the floors are ceramic tile mostly for my wheelchair so it’s not like I’m going to hurt much. My walker’s good for all those things with the bench seat and everything and I separate stuff then hand wash the other stuff in the sink

It’s nice to actually feel like I’m accomplishing stuff y’know.

My room’s the biggest deal and I crank the tunes and clear out my things. That’s sort of easy with me not having really unpacked a whole lot and I cheat. I put stuff in the seat of my wheelchair and use it as a walker. It’s all hard work really but it’s almost not work with the tunes from my i-pod hooked to the stereo and everything.

I got as much as I could done short of moving furniture and got all the laundry done both mine and Aunt Holly’s stuff too.

I even make supper. I looked online for some simple stuff and I end up making pork chops that we had in the freezer thawing them out and pouring a can of Heinz chicken gravy over them and some salt and pepper and put them in the oven and along side of them some baked potatoes and a drained off can of mixed veggies in the microwave.

You can cook stuff pretty easy and generally pretty edible if you take your time and just go slowly. I put it in at about three hundred and almost two hours later I’m getting stuff out of the oven and setting the table. Just a cup towel on my walker’s bench seat and I can carefully walk the hot baking dish from where I took it out of the oven to where I can set it on the table. The same deal with the dishes and stuff. I love not being helpless.

It was way cool seeing her tuck into the food with me after she got out of the shower and the happy smile with her mouthful and stuff. Aunt Holly leans over and kisses me on the cheek.

“Thanks Kayla, coming home to something like that after work was really nice and it saved me from cooking and it was really good too.”

I blush at the praise and still from hearing her using my name just like it…well Just like it was my name.

We both take a break after supper and watch a little TV and she falls asleep on the couch through those entertainment news shows which I’m not a fan of and I switch over to watch Endgame on Showcase that’s got this Russian chess master who’s this agoraphobia but ends up solving cases that are brought to him and stuff.

She gets up after her nap and we move the rest of the stuff out and then get the other stuff from out of the garage.

She gives me all these books and magazines to cut out stuff I thinks cool while she pulls the stuff off that frames the walls and the doorway and windows and then tapes off the windows. She got this compressor thing from so guy she knows on lend and she spray paints my room while I’m cutting stuff out and changing and stirring cans of paint before loading them into the thing that sucks up the paint.

I get paint and stuff all over me and I almost get upset by my clothes being like that when she grins and yells. “Relax Kayla! Now you have official real female work clothes!”

She has a point. It’s actually kind of cool.

We paint the walls this coral color that’s white with grey and some rose in it and once that’s dry we put up wall paper sheets as like these dividers for like sections of my walls with this really girly floral kind of prints and then we fill each of those sections with posters and inspirational stuff from the magazines, the dancing I-pod girl silhouettes and stuff.

Another section is just all pictures in frames of dancers or all kinds and another section she has blank until she gives me these books of quotes and stuff from just those places like the dollar store with like Wisdom for the busy woman or Advice for the heart of the Teen girl and I start writing down the ones that move me on that section.

Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass…it’s about getting out there and dancing in the rain.

Guys watch out, anything with breasts and wheels will give you problems…I’ve got both.

Come live in my heart and pay no rent.

Love is what makes you smile when you are tired.

Sometimes you put walls up not to keep people out but to see who cares enough to break them.

Any idiot can face a crisis, its day to day living that wears you out.

I do things for the joy that it brings; ‘cause I’m a joyful girl and because the world owes us nothing but instead we owe each other the world.

I’ll know they’re the one when they make me feel like a woman and a little girl at the same time.

Toronto’s like a really smoking hot Brunette in dirty underwear.

Sometimes I would give Anything just to be something more than nothing.

Sadness is ungrateful.

There’s more that I write down and I leave room for others but it’s a start and I can see some of my self up there in the wall. No, I didn’t write down who say these things I honestly don’t care it’s the words and the messages that I want there not the facts about those words.

By the time that’s done Aunt Holly has the mouldings back up and all repainted a nice white that sets off the rest of the colors and she’s screwing in this matching bookshelf to the wall and another tall table that is just the right height for me to sit at with my walker and …do my make-up…I smile a big smile as she adds a mirror over the table. We get finished with this redone rear car seat with a leopard print seat cover as a window seat which is kind of cool and then a wall unit for my TV and my playstation and stereo to be set on in and.

“We’re done, we’ll get a few other odds and ends as we go but how do you like it Kayla?”

“I love it. It’s really mine isn’t it? This is actually going to be mine? My life?”

“Yes, Yours, your life, and your home.”

I hug her.

I do that a lot.

We leave the rest of the stuff until tomorrow and to let some stuff still dry and to air out and stuff and it’s kind of late so after getting cleaned up and having ice cream while watching a little more TV we go to bed and Aunt Holly lets me sleep with her.

I got held in her arms that night being held by someone…by someone who really should’ve been my mom more than my mom and I fall sleep, so fast, so deeply.

“I love you Aunt Holly…”

“I Love you too Mikayla.”