I am alive, I am alive...

[ailbhe]

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.

Comments

[hfnuala.livejournal.com]

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.

[ailbhe]

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.

[hfnuala.livejournal.com]

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.

[ailbhe]

I await your rant with eagerness.