Our teacher announced that it’s art time and we all knew the drill. It meant clearing our desks of everything to make room for whatever creative activity we were about to get into. We’d put the large sheets of newsprint out to protect the table surfaces. Our teacher would bring out and place the supplies needed on the tables around the classroom, such as paper plates, dry pasta, colour paper, or straws, or yarn—whatever the project called for. Sometimes, instead of assigning tasks, which I thoroughly dreaded, our teacher would just instruct us to organize ourselves and choose our own preparatory tasks.
We’d get to work, “I’ll get the brushes!”, “We’ll fill the water cups!”, and “I want to get the towels!”, and so on. We’d take out the glass vases that hold the paint brushes from the cabinet they were stored in, distribute the child-safe scissors around the room, and bring out the little shallow plastic cups, not quite as clear as they used to be after years of use, putting them on the various tables while our teacher walked around with paint tubes to fill them up with the primary colours and black. But there was one other thing that always required doing and dealing with. The singular most distressing thing that filled me with terror each and every time: the PVA glue.
I hated to look at it. I hated to touch it. Sometimes our teacher trusted us to do our own paints and glue prep, and I wished they wouldn’t. I hated the idea of having to pour the glue out from the large jug it came in into those little containers—spills were inevitable, and considering my small size at the time, needing to secure the jug by hugging it close with both arms, it meant that I had to get unbearably close to the mouth of that jug—because most of all, I hated the smell of it. It made me want to cry.
I always tried to immediately busy myself with a different task. On the times our teachers assigned tasks, I tried my best to dawdle or pretend to have heard otherwise, or ask another person to do it. I would try everything in my power to avoid going near the glue. During the activity, I would locate the longest brush I could get my hands on and stop inhaling for a few seconds while I dipped into the glue, applied it as sparsely as possible, and would not take another breath until the brush was placed back at a safe distance from me. I would try to breathe with my mouth as much as possible.
It was exhausting.
However long “art time” was, it was spent in nervous agitation and seemed endless. The minutes passed slowly and the anxiety I felt was difficult to distract myself from. I felt so alone in my distress. I knew that I couldn’t possibly express my disturbance because, based on how every other student seemed to react, it appeared to me that my feelings were not shared by anyone else around me. The last thing I wanted was to draw attention. I knew I had to keep it to myself.
And then, not only did the other students not mind the glue, it was their favourite thing to handle—especially during clean-up time. They would clamour and rush to clean up the cups at the sinks, and they particularly loved pealing off the dried glue that would settle around the edges or bottom of the little plastic containers. It wasn’t so bad when it was a dry smear, it was basically odourless then. But even small globs weren’t safe to touch, with only a thin layer of semi-hardened skin separating the glue enclosed within from my olfactory aversion…too tempting to the other students not to squish.
When it came to clean-up, I had to be very strategic. My primary objective: to avoid dealing with the glue. Every few art classes, so that a pattern couldn’t be detected by my teacher, while frequently looking around at the work of the students around me, monitoring our collective progress, feeling my way through the passage of time, and reading our teacher’s body language, I would try to anticipate the approaching end…the call from our teacher to wrap up and start the cleanup process. Even better was when our teacher would let us know that we’d have another five or ten minutes to go. But whether I had to make my own intuitive guesses, or had the benefit of our teacher’s advance notice, I had to time things right. Not too soon, not too late.
When it felt right, I would ask the teacher if I could be excused to visit the washroom. When given permission to do so—thank you God—I would make my way out of the classroom, at first walking at a normal pace, then, when I was out of earshot, make my way hastily around the corner and down the corridor, fearful that I’d be seen by another teacher—because that happened once and they didn’t believe me when I said that my teacher said it was okay and they sent me back to class—I’d hurry to the girls’ washroom, go into my preferred stall, and wait.