CONTENT – Suicide. Abuse with few specifics. High emotion and anger. Not a light entry.
I stayed in bed three days with the lights out. I fed the animals and went back to bed. The world felt too big and too dark. Now I’m in the weeping side of grief.
I was talking / weeping to my BFF that the memory of the various events is as clear as the day they happened. The fear was so incredible but someone had to do something!
My head is full. Sleep is a joke. I keep accidentally calling the cat by his name. It freaks me out a bit.
The image of him at age 3, turning and smiling that smile, it no longer makes me feel warm and sentimental. It makes me angry. I want to know if he would do things differently if he had the chance to learn the Gospel truth that “this too shall pass.” I’m angry.
I talked / blubbered to my BFF about how I can see better just how emotionally unwell my mother was. I can see how we ended up the way we were. I know the difficulty I have functioning even with my large support system. She had nothing. No information. No experts taking care of her mental health, like I have. She was shell shocked after the divorce and just lost. I pity her. No family who loved her. No friends to talk to intimately. No one to trust, and two kids in tow. Yeah, I pity her.
Her anger about life was coupled with mental illness, paranoia and OCD. It made every day a survival course. Here’s my thing, I see the paranoia clearly in her behavior, but I also know that her response to the paranoia was chosen and thought out. Her first choice was always violence. She said a person needs to be humiliated in order to learn. That’s not mental illness, that’s just messed up.
I always felt responsible for helping her feel better. If my mother cried, it all but destroyed me. I couldn’t stand to see her cry. She cried a lot in her room. I used to hang hearts all around the hallway and her room to prevent her from killing herself. It never crossed my mind that it’s the child who we’d lose to suicide. I was suicidal too, so was my sister. An entire family of suicidal people.
When I think about it, my sister and I were the focus of my mother’s paranoia. She always accused us of stealing, lying, etc.
As I sit here I still pity her. Pity feels much better than hate. Pity feels warranted.
I empathize with her being unprepared for the divorce and have two small children. I understand how things got crazy. I know she managed to keep a good job but still had us sleeping in the car. I know that her mental illness fueled that. But the violence, wow, just wow. That was always her first response, violence. You never knew what the heck she was plotting in retaliation for some false issue she accused you of. I couldn’t trust the moment, and once 3am hit, God help us bc it was about to get bad!
She hardly ever raised her voice, hardly ever cursed. She was a professional who men fawned over. She dressed well. At 5’10 she was a sight to see. Despite being pretty, my mother had one boyfriend when I was growing up. That is a whole different story.
I remember the last conversation I had with the child before the police took him away for good.
It was a house of horrors, period. I thought by getting him out of there he’d have a chance. Now I ask so many questions, did I do it soon enough? Were the things he endured from her too much to bear or was it an accumulation of things? Did I fail him? I can never forget the last night he was there. My God! My God! No one should be asked to endure that.
I know I didn’t fail him. I risked my life for him. Right now, holding his memory instead of his hand I think to myself, it should have been her, not him. But really, any suicide turns the world upside down and sets it on fire for a very long time. My heart is still in flames.
Faith