Suicide note...

It's been a long time since I felt, really, like killing myself.

Truth to tell, I thought I'd outgrown my self destructive impulses.

But when faced with days like today, all that goes out the window and the call of it returns. "It would be so much easier than this half-assed survival that I call a life."

It didn't take much to set me off today. My kids anger and contempt, my spouses absence, my inability to reach out, loosing the dog because I'm too worthless to have the responsibility to take care of an animal.

First the kid..

It's hard to write about the kid because I'm never sure where reality begins and ends with him and me.

He claims a tortured childhood filled with emotional and physical abuse, I tend to remember something less horrible than that.

I remember when he was born, lying in the hospital thinking of nothing but him for days. But they'd taken him away from me, and put me in the "surgical ward" Back then if you were giving up a child for adoption they just wouldn't let you see it for fear you'd bond with it and then keep it.

I remember refusing food until a kind nurse who knew me came in just as I was being given a tray, and cut up my food for me and gently pushed the tray toward me. I wish, knowing what I know now, that I'd never picked up that fork.

Back then, if you were a pregnant teen of a catholic family you were kept inside, with no contact with the outside world for nine months. After that, I suppose, if you kept the baby, you and your child would be kept in until it was supposed that the neighbors forgot where it came from, however long that happened to take.

After he was born I came home, alone, with empty arms and an empty belly, and my heart ripped out lying in a trash can somewhere.

For the first week I tried to recover from a rough birth, and deal with the visits of friends. I can still remember the sharp pain that sort of went through every part of me and up to my temples. I remember the unintentionally cruel words. No one knows what to say when you give your baby away.

Worst was the attitude of the family, who didn't have a lot of good thoughts for me. In my family, this was not considered a noble and selfless act.

But I remember, really well, my mom saying just one thing. "If you don't go get him and bring him home, I'll do it".

Well... I honestly don't know why I did it. Maybe at that point I just couldn't handle the pressure of her hating me any more. Maybe it was the torn out heart, and his heart beating separate from mine. But eventually I did go get him and bring him home.

Then I was 17 with a mother who (not surprisingly) still hated me. She was mad and didn't want me to "get away with it". She wanted me to "sleep in the bed I made". Live a life of disgrace with an infant that was also a disgrace.

But how can a 17 year old look down at the infant she'd brought into this world, knowing that it would forever be labeled, along with her, as damaged, "bad", unworthy. Looking at a baby you love, knowing you'd brought this precious thing into the world to be despised by everyone.



Back then there were support groups for young single mothers. I was in one. I was the youngest. I remember the horror of being there with the young-twenties and older teens, and, lacking a better idea, spreading a blanket on the floor for my baby to doze on.

Through a freak event, and desperate move, I ended up living with a much older man for a while. The pressure put on me by my mom was unrelenting. I had to leave, and even though this situation was horrible, at least I was in a new environment, and treated as a new toy by this man. He was ugly and fat and filthy. But he seemed totally enthralled by me. He got tired of me after a year or so.

Then I re-met an old boyfriend, got pregnant by him at 19 and finally thought I'd found an escape.

I remember my journals through those years. They were horrible, filled with words of self hatred and pain. I destroyed those journals years later, after my husband looked at one, trying to see if he could catch me being unfaithful (he couldn't). I poured bleach on them in the bathtub, smashed them as my nose burned from the fumes, and then poured the mess into trash bags as pulp. My blistered hands were all that were left of those years of horror, pain and misery.

Except for two things. My boys.

Yes I remember screaming at them, swatting them, grabbing their arms hard enough to leave finger-print bruises and tossing them in their room. No, not hard enough to injure them. Just their hearts and souls where damaged, because today, neither of them are talking to me.

But I also remember rocking for hours and hours and hours with one or both in my lap. Laughing at their little boy antics. Cheering their little successes. Teaching them to sew, or multiply or plant potatoes. Helping them give their stuffed animals clever names. I remember the good times, too. I remember telling them both a million, trillion times how much I loved them and how wonderful they were.

But neither of them do. I know this sounds suspect, but they both remember things that never-absolutely-never and could not have happened.

____________________

So, where to go from here with it? I've told them I am sorry. I've acknowledged their feelings, and never once have I said one word of anything other than complete and total humble repentance. Even when they said things that didn't happen.

And yet still, they rage at me, and I at myself.

The oldest lives at home with his clinical depression (that he flat refuses to treat). At odd, vulnerable moments he attacks me for the type of parent I was.

I'm looking for forgiveness, but I'm not sure who needs to forgive me. Am I waiting until their rage subsides, so that I can explain to them that I wasn't entirely criminal and monstrous? That my way of parenting didn't come out of a vacuum, but from never, once, in my entire life having been loved or supported myself? That I did better than their grandparents did, by a good, long bit? And maybe, maybe, someday at least having them acknowledge that I was horrible, but I was good, too?

Or is it myself that has to forgive me? I can't. No matter how I think of it, I can't let go of the feeling that I carried my unworthy existence on down to them, and made them undesirables, too.

The few adults in my life when I was young that showed support for me where men that were attracted to pretty young girls.

My mother detested my inability to agree with her on her strange, skewed perception of the world. She played dirty and hurt me any way she could because she absolutely hated me, what I thought, and how I perceived myself

My father only wanted me close so that he could press against me. The times he managed to get me alone and touch me, I blamed myself for being an idiot. I'd been warned and let my guard slip. Stupid, stupid, stupid...

Ahhhh... excuses, excuses. I want the boys to let go of the excuse of bad parenting and get on with their lives, but I don't do the same for myself.