Lupron Doom

Lupron has never really affected me before. No hot flashes, no headaches. I can usually even manage to leave only the teensiet dot at the injection site.

Maybe this time is only different because I am already dealing with a really difficult and emotionally draining situation on top of this, but I am a complete wreck. I am pretty much moments from tears at all times. And I have no control of it at all, no "not now" face to put on to at least get through the day before collapsing into a disastrous heap at home.

I never really wanted to write about my daughter in this blog. Not because I don't think she is actually the most fascinating part of my life, but because she is old enough to want to have her life to herself. But I should say that as much as I have hoped for another child, this one is the perfect one for me. She is usually described as "old-fashioned" or "an old soul", and she doesn't participate in most of the manufactured tween culture that girls her age tend to get caught up in. She does love to read the fug girls, and she has an ipod full of music - but it's Blondie and Abba and the Go-Gos, which most other kids have never heard of. And of course, that's the problem.

It's just so hard for her to find kids she really relates to. I think all parents start out thinking that kids should be allowed to be themselves and not get sucked into a clique mentality. But the bottom line is that if kids have a natural clique - the sporty kids, or the game-boy nintendo kids, or the miley montana wannabes, or the horse-riding girls, etc - then they have a group that more or less forms itself and becomes a circle of friends. Kids who watch Alton Brown and want to be Shakespeare for Halloween are just nerds who get left alone - unless they find their nerd people and then they can spend lunchtime rewriting their math book in iambic pentameter.

My daughter is in a class this year with only four other girls in her grade (in a mixed grade classroom). Those four are two sets of best friends who have known each other since preschool. Because she has already skipped a grade, the older girls are really two years older than her, at an age where two years makes a big difference. The teacher tells me that she is really quiet and withdrawn, that she goes through the day just waiting for PE, when she can be with her friends, who were all put in the other class. I tell you, it is just not natural for the nerdy child to desperately look forward to gym class!

I know I'm not the most objective observer, but it's not as if there's anything wrong with her. She doesn't pick her nose or smell weird. She has great clothes, she is unbelievable funny. When she's with her real friends she's animated and silly and happy. I can't figure out why they ever thought it was a good idea to organize the class placement in this way. My poor kid is basically doomed to a year of loneliness. This is a small school, so there is no reason that this couldn't have been foreseen. But the thing is, I can't even call the teacher back because I can't stop bursting into tears.

Even though I know that I am so wildly overreactive, that it's all about the pill and the Lupron and the pressure of the do-or-die cycle, I am really unable to function like a regular human being. Maybe I can pull it together over the weekend, invite some of the other nerdly children over to play, and stop feeling that everything is so unfair.