Saturday, again

I can’t bear this. Can’t bear myself. Just so totally overwhelmed with guilt and hopelessness and pure anger at myself for being like this. One of my birthday presents from my mum yesterday: a little angel trinket bearing the word ‘hope.’ I honestly can’t put into words how bad I feel for doing this to her, not to mention Ian and the kids. No matter how much my rational side knows that this is not a lifestyle choice, I hate myself for it and for the impact on everyone I love. Today’s trip to the zoo was supposed to be fun time, family time. I spent every minute wishing I could just get out, go home, hide. I’m regretting the £300 we spent on Merlin passes and dreading the days out that we will have to do with them over the next 12 months.

I’m completely out of my depth, so tired, ruining everybody’s lives. My children are on a list because of me. I love them more than anything on this earth but I am failing them so badly. It’s getting on for a month since hospital and I don’t feel any better. Ian is doing his best to keep me safe, has removed all dangerous objects from the house, and I should be thankful for that, but how do I shake the feeling of wanting to go to bed and not get up again?

Tuesday

I look at myself and I don’t know what has happened to me.

Functioning normally, pretending that everything is okay, is so exhausting.

What is wrong with me, that ordinary life feels so hard?

Work, the school run, keeping the house clean, thinking of what to cook, bathing the kids, playground smalltalk.

Hardly rocket science.

So why does it all leave me wanting to curl up in a ball?

It’s not right to be in bed before my son.

Or to work myself up into a panic about trying to find a party venue that I haven’t been to before.

Or to be dreading my own birthday.

It’s almost three weeks now since I was in hospital. The expectation is that I should be feeling better.

The fact that I don’t makes me feel like such a failure.

A failure and a burden who shouldn’t be here.

I wanted to go to bed and not wake up.

I’m finding it hard to be happy that I did.

Saturday

This all feels so, so difficult.

I get the impression that to other people, this suicide attempt was less of a big deal than the previous one.

To me, it feels bigger.

It should have been enough, the dose I took. I shouldn’t still be here. But I am.

My head is a complete mess.

I’m trying really hard to be normal. Perhaps I’ve tried too hard, too soon. Whereas last time, I disappeared from the world for over a week, this time, I was back on the school run the morning after getting out of hospital. I’ve worked and cleaned and done my Tesco shopping and tried my very best to get back into real life.

I’m not sure how it looks from the outside, but inside, it’s breaking me.

It’s the first day of half-term and I’ve spent most of the day in bed.

I am so full of self-doubt and self-hatred. Such a big, guilty failure in every sense.

I’ve been relieved of Sunday school duty tomorrow, which is a relief as I really don’t think I could have done it this week, but I also know that I’m probably the worst possible person to be trying to teach children about the Lord in the light of my enormous sin.

For all that I trust, it’s hard to believe I can be forgiven.

I feel hypocritical when I read the Bible with my own children, when I pray with them before bed. How is it right that they hear this from me, when I’m struggling every single minute with the weight of what I’ve done, and the fact that it wasn’t a stupid, rash mistake – I really meant it.

I couldn’t face Bible study yesterday. I’m seriously worked up about church tomorrow. It has been my safe place throughout me being ill, but I feel so vulnerable now. There’s a group of people who know exactly what happened, and I feel so, so guilty about it, not to mention ashamed. There’s a bigger group that doesn’t know anything, or at least nothing specific, and I feel that I need to be Normal Lucy, put my brave face on and chat and laugh as I usually would. I don’t know if I can.

I spoke to my mum on the phone. I know she is consciously avoiding pressurising me to talk, but it left me wanting to scream. I know what happened; she knows what happened; how long are we going to pretend that nothing has happened and talk about the weather in Australia and Nick’s cats?

Then later, a Facebook message from her. ‘Hi darling, hope you’re okay and feeling better.’

Feeling better? A week after going to bed with the intention of not waking up again?

No. I’m not feeling better.

I feel so bad about what I’ve done to my children. Yesterday morning, I was coughing, and Tom said, ‘I don’t like it when you cough. It makes me think you’re getting poorly again.’ This afternoon, I popped out to the shop, and when I got home, Tom told me that Katie had been saying that I was never coming back.

I am kidding myself if I think they’re getting through this unscathed.

And Ian. He deserves so much more of a life than he has with me. Only a few days on from four days’ enforced single-parenting, yet again I have left him to deal with the children because I just can’t. Yesterday evening, he got home from football and I went straight to bed. He was hurt. I didn’t mean to hurt him, but I am so tired. I couldn’t face staying up for a deep and meaningful, even though I’m sure we need one.

Tonight, I’ll cook us a Valentine’s meal that I don’t feel like eating. I’ll go to bed, exhausted, and not sleep, again. I’ll send him to Willows with the children tomorrow afternoon and yet again feel the crushing guilt of being such an inadequate mother and wife.

This is such a lonely place to be.

Home again, home again

When I came home yesterday, I felt different.

Unlike after my previous overdose, which left me thinking, ‘Why am I still here?’ I felt very thankful to be alive and with – as far as we can tell so far – no permanent damage done, despite what was said in A&E about ‘very high paracetamol levels’ and ‘massive overdose’ and ‘long-term liver damage’ and ‘surgical support’ and ‘people have died from far less than you took.’

I had a few epiphanies while I was in hospital.

Firstly, Ian – despite me trying to make arrangements that didn’t involve him – didn’t take the children to church on Sunday. It suddenly struck me with full force that if I’m not around, the chances of Tom and Katie growing up to know the Lord will be slim, at best. Even if my only purpose in their lives is to give them the opportunity to learn about God and grow to love him, that’s a pretty convincing reason for me to stick around.

Then, I had an appointment with the hospital psychologist before coming home. She was rather hard-hitting and brutal, and a couple of the things she said gave me a huge wake-up call.

‘If you kill yourself, you give your children permission to kill themselves too, by lowering the bar.’

And,

‘You need to know that if you do this, they will never recover.’

It’s something that I hadn’t really thought about. Okay, of course I realised that it would be difficult for them to lose me, but long-term, I felt like I was doing more damage being in their lives than out of them. I hadn’t really considered what it would be like for them to grow up being the children whose mother killed herself when they were nine/three.

So, getting home yesterday afternoon, I felt different. Changed. Determined not to ever be in this position again. I cuddled Tom and Katie and read their bedtime stories with far more enthusiasm than usual. Ian and I had a good chat, and he agreed that things seemed different, to the point that I didn’t have to work too hard to convince him to go to work today (although he doesn’t think I should be writing any more). I woke up this morning thinking, ‘I cannot do the school run today,’ but I made myself do it, made myself start being a mummy again.

My goodness, though – it is so hard to be back here again.

I want to get better. I want to change this. I don’t want to end up in hospital again, or to actually do what I set out to do on Thursday night. I really don’t. But it is so hard.

It hasn’t helped that it has been a day of minor annoyances: a flat battery on the car, a glass jug dropped on the kitchen floor. But whereas yesterday I felt ready to take this illness on, today I feel like all the fight has gone out of me. I’m snappy and irritable, I cried when my car wouldn’t start, I yelled at Tom for wanting to know what I had smashed in the kitchen, I’m so tired and want to sleep and sleep and sleep.

Again, I’m countering it by trying to be normal, function like a proper human being. Three loads of laundry washed and dried and put away. Nursery pick-up done on foot in record time thanks to dead car. Dinner cooked for the kids. Work backlog sorted (ish). Hotshots craft planned. Muffins baked with the bananas that have been going squishy in the fruit bowl since last week. A productive day, from the outside, despite the broken jug. But every single moment of it has felt like swimming against the current.

I am thankful for the moments of realisation I had in hospital. I’m thankful for the reminder that God has a plan for my messed up little life. I’m thankful for the amazing friends who have stood by me where others have turned away, and for the cuddles I had in bed with the children this morning. I’m trying to hold onto all of those things, but I feel like I’m being sucked downwards, like I’m trying to walk the wrong way up an escalator but can’t go fast enough.

I know coming back from this is not going to be easy, I really do. But the effort feels enormous and I don’t know if I’m strong enough.