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

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

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.

[ailbhe]

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.

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

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

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

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

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.

[therealocelot.livejournal.com]

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.

[ailbhe]

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.