I CAN’T BREATHE

I was in my twenties, married with a few of my six children. My oldest was a preteen. I was not happy. I had married because I thought that was what I was supposed to do, and I was raising my oldest on my own. We got married when she was three and soon had our son and then another daughter. My life to that point had been pretty traumatic and I thought everything would be okay once we married. It was not. I was hiding from my trauma, hiding my authentic self and ill equipped to be a mother or wife. I had raised myself and had experienced great traumas prior to my marriage. I was struggling greatly with anxiety, depression, PTSD and self-loathing.

I began to think that there was no way I would ever feel better, and I began to believe I was a terrible mother. I tried so hard to be a good mom, but I really had no idea what that was supposed to look like. I knew I would never beat my children the way I was beat as a child. I knew I would never call them names the way I was called stupid and worthless. I put them in all the activities I could since I was never allowed to participate in anything as a child. I didn’t make them do chores since cooking and housekeeping became my responsibility starting at age eight or nine. I knew all the things I didn’t want to do or be as a mother. What I didn’t know was how to love. I didn’t know how to be affectionate or how to show emotion. I was struggling to be present to them from the heart.

I got to a point where I truly believed that my children would be better off without me. I felt this way for months and couldn’t shake the belief. I started to think about how I would end my life and how much better their life would be if I was gone. I didn’t think they really loved me. It seemed like they always gravitated to their father. He seemed to know how to love and comfort them. He would play with them for hours in a way I couldn’t. No one played with me EVER as a child. I could take them to activities and take care of their basic needs but anything beyond that was foreign to me. It pained me that I didn’t know how to be their mother.

One night the feeling overtook me. I could not breathe. I needed to leave them. I just knew they would be better off without me. I remember going to my room and thinking “I just have to do this.” I swallowed a bottle of pills and laid down. I felt so tired. It started to get hard to breathe and I started to go in and out of consciousness. I could feel my heart slowing down and myself slipping away. I woke up in an ICU bed with a breathing tube. I couldn’t speak. I didn’t understand how and why I was alive. I was so angry that I had lived but I was now trapped in a hospital bed hooked up to all kinds of machines.

I came to learn later that it was my oldest daughter who found me and called 911 and got her father. I was given Narcan multiple times, and my family was called to the hospital. I do remember my sister-in-law being there. I was told that I came awfully close to succeeding. I was in the ICU for a while before being transferred to step down and then the psychiatric floor for further evaluation. I spent some time there with staff trying to help me feel better. I was discharged home, but I do remember not really feeling better or thinking differently about how I felt as a mother.

This was to be the beginning of a very long battle I would have with myself as to whether or not I should continue to live and whether or not I could mother my children. Over the better part of their lives, I would do the things I thought made me a good mom, not realizing that my internal pain and struggle was causing them trauma. They would watch me fall into deep depression and alcoholism and addiction. I would grow emotionally distant and eventually put my addiction above them. It took the first year or two of my sobriety to rebuild my relationships with my children. Now, six years sober, my relationships with them are good. They’re not perfect because I’m not perfect and I am still working on healing. I sometimes find it hard to breathe when I realize how much I hurt them and the trauma they suffered when I was struggling. I’ll never be able to take away what I did to them, all I can do is work on loving myself so I can better love them. Sometimes I can’t believe what amazing adults they turned out to be despite me. They are smart, successful, kind humans and I feel so lucky.