A Fine Example
Sep. 11th, 2012 10:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
celeste_noelaniI posted another post to Runningnekkid.com for suicide prevention week. I am going to try to post one thing each night this week. (I write at night while Ian is on baby duty.) Full post behind the cut.
"I'm going to drive off a cliff."
I can't tell you how many times I've thought about those words. Not because I've wanted to drive myself off a cliff, but because growing up, it was just another one of those things that my mother said.
It used to scare me so bad, thinking about my mother plummeting off a Pali Highway lookout. But none of the things my mother ever said frightened me half as much as all of the things she didn't.
My mother's primary weapon in her arsenal of discipline was a many barbed silence that could last for days. Days of knowing that I had done something terrible enough to turn her away. Nights of trying to figure out what it could have been. Each misdeed that I would come to her with in apology would only prolong her angry silence, exacerbating the icy abandonment that was my childhood's greatest fear. Eventually she would reappear, all at once, as if she had all along been behind a curtain that had finally been lifted. And then it was like nothing had ever happened.
This is how it was, month after month, year after year as my mother vacillated between ignoring my sister and ignoring me. We'd witness the escalation of our mother's disapproval and know it was coming. We saw it in the language she used, the way that she dropped her keys on the counter, opened the refrigerator, closed the cupboard, looked, or didn't look, in our general direction.
You kids are driving me bananas.
I'm going to drive off a cliff.
Maybe it'd be better if I just didn't talk at all.
Everything, her every movement was a clue, and we scrambled desperately to collect and decipher before her silence erupted. We alternated between trying and not trying to fall into the invisible lines that she had drawn for each of us, but no matter what we did, we always failed to keep her from retreating behind her curtain of quiet. And always, always we knew it was all our fault.
Recently I read this advice column that actually made my heart race in remembrance. All of a sudden I was terrified and guilty and trying to remember everything I had done wrong that week. And being a human being, there was a lot to add to that list. I was nine, eleven, thirteen all over again, desperately wanting to confess my armada of sins, knowing that there was no hope of absolution.
Maybe I'll drive off a cliff.
Maybe I should.
A lifetime of flippant suicide banter caught up with me before I even graduated high school, and it has followed me around relentlessly ever since. I'm not writing this tonight in order to say that I blame my mother for my suicide ideation. Clearly, she had her own lying demons that hounded her like the fucking bastards they are. I am writing this tonight because I think of the life I could have had, the childhood my mother could have provided, had her demons not been so quietly accepted. Had my sister and I understood that we weren't evil and terrible and fundamentally disappointing human beings, and that our mother didn't even think we were, no matter how she was behaving.
I think of the anxious, frightening childhood that I lived, the questions I still have of whether my mother really did love me, and I want better. I want better for my kids; I want better for their kids.
This is why I talk about my mental illness. This is why I talk about suicide. This is why I'm in therapy and why I do everything I do to manage my mental illness. It's because I love my mom, so fucking much, and I wish she had been able to not be a mom who retreated so completely from her children and talked about driving off of cliffs. And not only for my sake, or my brother's or my sister's. But for her own. Because when her demons weren't hounding her, she was a wonderful mother. What a shame it was that she was so trapped behind her curtain. It couldn't have been a very pleasant view.
"I'm going to drive off a cliff."
I can't tell you how many times I've thought about those words. Not because I've wanted to drive myself off a cliff, but because growing up, it was just another one of those things that my mother said.
It used to scare me so bad, thinking about my mother plummeting off a Pali Highway lookout. But none of the things my mother ever said frightened me half as much as all of the things she didn't.
My mother's primary weapon in her arsenal of discipline was a many barbed silence that could last for days. Days of knowing that I had done something terrible enough to turn her away. Nights of trying to figure out what it could have been. Each misdeed that I would come to her with in apology would only prolong her angry silence, exacerbating the icy abandonment that was my childhood's greatest fear. Eventually she would reappear, all at once, as if she had all along been behind a curtain that had finally been lifted. And then it was like nothing had ever happened.
This is how it was, month after month, year after year as my mother vacillated between ignoring my sister and ignoring me. We'd witness the escalation of our mother's disapproval and know it was coming. We saw it in the language she used, the way that she dropped her keys on the counter, opened the refrigerator, closed the cupboard, looked, or didn't look, in our general direction.
You kids are driving me bananas.
I'm going to drive off a cliff.
Maybe it'd be better if I just didn't talk at all.
Everything, her every movement was a clue, and we scrambled desperately to collect and decipher before her silence erupted. We alternated between trying and not trying to fall into the invisible lines that she had drawn for each of us, but no matter what we did, we always failed to keep her from retreating behind her curtain of quiet. And always, always we knew it was all our fault.
Recently I read this advice column that actually made my heart race in remembrance. All of a sudden I was terrified and guilty and trying to remember everything I had done wrong that week. And being a human being, there was a lot to add to that list. I was nine, eleven, thirteen all over again, desperately wanting to confess my armada of sins, knowing that there was no hope of absolution.
Maybe I'll drive off a cliff.
Maybe I should.
A lifetime of flippant suicide banter caught up with me before I even graduated high school, and it has followed me around relentlessly ever since. I'm not writing this tonight in order to say that I blame my mother for my suicide ideation. Clearly, she had her own lying demons that hounded her like the fucking bastards they are. I am writing this tonight because I think of the life I could have had, the childhood my mother could have provided, had her demons not been so quietly accepted. Had my sister and I understood that we weren't evil and terrible and fundamentally disappointing human beings, and that our mother didn't even think we were, no matter how she was behaving.
I think of the anxious, frightening childhood that I lived, the questions I still have of whether my mother really did love me, and I want better. I want better for my kids; I want better for their kids.
This is why I talk about my mental illness. This is why I talk about suicide. This is why I'm in therapy and why I do everything I do to manage my mental illness. It's because I love my mom, so fucking much, and I wish she had been able to not be a mom who retreated so completely from her children and talked about driving off of cliffs. And not only for my sake, or my brother's or my sister's. But for her own. Because when her demons weren't hounding her, she was a wonderful mother. What a shame it was that she was so trapped behind her curtain. It couldn't have been a very pleasant view.
