ailbhe | I am alive, I am alive...

I have just come in from hanging the laundry in the sunshine. It is strange, sometimes, to realise that I am alive and my children are alive and we are all well and happy. It's even stranger to realise that almost no-one around me had any idea how close I came to dying.

Rob didn't know I was "really" suicidal, whatever that "really" implies. His mother had no idea I was suicidal at all. My mother knew, and thankfully her long experience of mental illness and her previous experience of having suicidal offspring enabled her to respond usefully to my "cries for help" - though they were never cries, just fairly calm statements of fact.

Health professionals took me fairly seriously, which is, in large part, why I was alive today to hang my daughter's underwear on the line to dry in the sun, and alive to admire my other daughter's skin in dappled shade from the jasmine bush, and alive to hear the small black cat clawing the garden fence, and alive to wonder why my cousin didn't make it.

Tadhg would probably be almost a year old now if his mother's puerperal psychosis had been treated.

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I think our society is in denial about how motherhood takes you to bits and builds you up again.

It's not that I never found stories of mothers killing themselves and their children sad before, because I did. But now it hits somewhere so close to home and I would say I found the transition easy.

I'm glad you're still around. And that you are happy enough to spend less time online, even though it means 'seeing' less of you.

I also think that society seriously underestimates the bond between mother and child. Had I killed myself when L was under 6 months old, there's no way I'd have left her behind. The only reason I was alive to make that decision is that when my mother was suicidal she couldn't work out how to kill both her extremely young children, couldn't leave them behind, and so didn't kill herself, either. If there'd only been one of us she could have managed it.

And it's not much better for the women who *don't* feel that bond. If it's there, the bond is an inconvenience to the world which won't provide childcare while one has psychiatric treatment and frequently won't admit the danger to the baby, and if it's not one is some sort of unmother unwoman and depressed to boot.

I was going to rant about my experience of the denial of the bond. Instead I will stick to saying I'm glad you're still around. I will write about newborn bonding elsewhere, elsewhen.

I await your rant with eagerness.

I'm glad you're alive.

I'm glad you're alive, and able to talk a little about this for others to read and know they are not alone.

I'm glad you're alive, and that you were able to tell us.

I'm glad you're alive and I want you to know that many of us have been in the same position including me and both of my (grown) children.

Depression is an evil dark cloud that sits on your shoulder waiting to defeat you. I'm glad you won.

I'm glad you're alive.

I was never suicidal, but I do know how depression chips away at a person. I've lost friends to it -- two of them. I won't let it beat me.

You know, I just realised I wrote the whole post and never said "I was infanticidal."

I don't think I want to say that.

Yes. I can see a person not wanting to say that.

You know where I am, if you want to talk.

I've been both suicidal and infanticidal, but fortunately for all concerned, not at the same time. In the latter case, my logical faculties weren't working, so I couldn't make the connection between "pillow will stop crying" and "dead". Somehow, I managed to stop just in time.

I'm glad we're both still here, and that our children are, too. And I wish this subject were less taboo, so that people might be better prepared for it.

I thank you for saying it, and appreciate your bravery in discussing it at all so close to the fact. It's something I can barely talk about now, 4 years after my worst bout with PPD, because of the stigma.

You are strong, and I'm glad both you and yours are alive.

I didn't really talk about it at all until my cousin and her baby died. Except for the times I told people "Today I almost..." when I needed help.

My mother told me it was almost me, that baby, and that makes it much easier to talk about. If she can tell me that, I can... mention it in passing in LJ comments, at least in inverted commas.

I'm glad you're alive. And I know that feeling, that one really could have died, nearly did die (although from before I was a mother). For me too, it was borne in on me when someone in a similar situation to where I'd been did die. So fragile.

Pleased we are both still alive.
Oddly, it seems, I never wanted to take mine with me, just never trusted anyone else to take care of them, so I stayed alive.

You can add me to the list of People Who Are Glad Ailbhe And Her Children Are Alive.

I didn't nearly die, but for the first time in my life I nearly thought about it, which is scary enough. I didn't have the take-him-with-me thing, either - it was more "I'm so rotten and awful and harmful that it'd be better for him and everyone else if I weren't here". (It didn't really take hold until he was well into his first year, which I think made a difference.)

I'm also delighted to hear that life in the outernet is making you happy. Me, I can see light at the end of the tunnel (or is that a birth canal?). Any time you fancy catching up by phone or keyboard, I'd love to.

21:00weekdays?

Good. See you thenish.

Bah LJ. That were I.

Add me to the "glad you're alive" camp. Not sure what else I can usefully say :/

Glad to see you're still here.

I am alive, I am alive...

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