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.

[rosefox]

I'm glad you're alive.

[ex-serenejo.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you're alive.

[barakta]

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

[griffen.livejournal.com]

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

[gloriap.livejournal.com]

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.

[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.

[sidheag.livejournal.com]

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.

[(Anonymous)]

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.

[radegund.livejournal.com]

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.

[baratron.livejournal.com]

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

[perceval.livejournal.com]

Glad to see you're still here.