I’ve just been watching one of those awful ‘Intervention’ programmes. This one was about heroin. Awful because of the damage done to the children and family members. Awful because they relapsed.
I struggle with the notion of giving in so easily to something that can destroy everything when you have children to think about. When you are their world
I’ve never been much of a suicide sympathiser. It was my Mother’s go to when she got drunk and fed up with life irrespective of her children being in the house. At least Sylvia Plath had the decency to tape the kitchen door so her children didn’t die in their beds. I suppose by our time we were on Natural Gas so it was going to take a bit longer before we all blew up.
It was generally tablets though. A combination of Valium, temazepam and whatever else she had. She had little kids in the house, pre teens and then teenagers. Her two children growing up with the constant validation that their mother doesn’t want to be around. That her children aren’t enough.
In the end an accidental fall saved her from doing it to herself. She was 53 and I wish she was still here to see her grandkids and even great grandkids now. I wish she’d been there for me and my sister but sooner or later she was leaving anyway. I think I got used to that idea in my teens. Possibly my sis did too. I think we could see something coming. It was somehow inevitable.
Forty years on I still feel the need to write about this stuff. A mother is the most important person in a child’s life. It make’s them into what they become. In one way or another.