Everything you say will be taken down and used in evidence against me

As a mother of a woman who suicided, I cannot hear anything you say to relieve me of responsibility for her demise. Or at the very least I will most likely mis-interpret it, in a not good way. Particularly if you blame my daughter. I accept the reality that she was the one who took the action to do herself in, but this is tricky terrain. I cannot bear to hear you blame her.  Understand I have to protect her now, more than ever.

I was a single mother. A young, single mother. I know my fails. When it is your own kid there is always the twist. Whatever the offspring did, good or bad, is down to the parenting. Right?

The nature of the role holds mothers accountable for how our children turn out. Parents are casually and simplistically blamed for so much, and yet there is no harder job. There is nothing we want to get right more, and nothing we would want to put more effort into if we could. Doesn’t mean we get it right, try as we may, but the feeling that we had to get it right never lets up.

Please be gentle. Particularly now. I am hyperaware of your opinion. You have the right to remain silent but if you do want to talk, be careful. I scour your tone, your grimace, your inflection, your gaze. Who are you blaming for this? I am listening out for it because it all means a terrible lot. And I do mean terrible. The implications of your perceived partioning of blame are purely terrifying.

A mothers first job is to keep the child alive. Craft mastery, prosperity, joy only exists if the offspring stays alive. When they are dead by suicide, it cannot, not feel like your personal failure as a mother. You may have a reasoning but I can’t hear it. Literally can not hear it. And wonder also if you really believe the platitudes you are offering? Your sub-text tells me otherwise.

Don’t correct me. Don’t advise me. Don’t know more than I do about my relationship with her.

Thinking you know better, diminishes the sacred mother daughter relationship. Even if you don’t understand, please respect the female bond. The continued invalidation of female relationships is the structure of our lives, whether we agree with it or not. Our minds are biased from literally centuries of female oppression and male domination.

It doesn’t help. Only her and I know what ‘we’ were. And now only I know what that was as she is gone. Do not presume to take my perspective away for that great love and truth is all that remains.

In my own mind, I doubt I am ever going to be fully clear of the responsibility of her death. And I will likely hear it in every word you say to me.

The day she died I commenced construction on a mental model of reasons for my daughter’s suicide. Everyday I run simulations by varying the proportion of blame. Here are some of the variables:

Everyone has a mental model and I am sure you are chalking things up too. Us survivors are desperate to answer the equation so we can put it to bed and think of something else instead.

I remember her many times a day. I still expect to hear, to memorise, something to tell her, to wait for her call, her text.

I feel a hollow vacuum – less than half of myself. Every day I ask the questions.

Was her suicide a vicious leaving of her loved ones? Or maybe an apologetic type departure?

How do I even ask the question of how? All or nothing of this can be true.

Gabs is now lost to me. The life I fought for one way or another for 42 years completely obliterated, extinguished in the most inexplicable way.

My mind is tormented by the unpicking and reworking of reality. One more time and I maybe I might get it right.

I can fix it. It is not rational. I know I can’t. It is grief.

Life is now punctuated by the before Gabs death, and the after. I cannot explain this profound loss of connectedness, at the core. My whole adult life I was Gabs’ mum. I still have so many little things to tell her.  The stories and jokes to share. The argument half finished that will never be.

The blog is but a one way conversation, only half the story. Unfulfilling, unanswered, half mast, unsatisfying, and not even very funny.

Until Gabs death, 71.6% of my life Gabs was on the planet earth. That percentage shortens by the minute.

She will exist in that time forever. Gabrielle Marie you can never be undone between 17 March 1976 and 8 May 2018, you were here.

What would the guilty mother not do, to go back in time and prevent that suicide?

I tweak the model every day to find the right fit. Understand it fully. Represent the reality of her life. If I lift the first three days out of the equation, would that shift the balance from now dead to still alive? If I could just not be drunk that day you sought my care, would that give you another few years? If I had just read you more stories, better stories or sent you to school earlier? Or held your father to account? Or if I could only retrospectively put proper parental boundaries in place, then maybe you would still be here and even flourishing.

Honestly, starting from birth what would I do different? That is not an easy honest answer. What could I have done different? When everything is considered, maybe nothing. Maybe if I lived it all out again the identical things would happen. But I will never know.

If you blame her then you blame me. Know that.

I wake at five am and within ten minutes I wish it was night so I could go back to sleep. The days exist of this futile search. Night is escape, via sleep. Just too much to think about, to handle. I am tired out. Done in.

I miss my daughter. Just miss her to pieces.

Did I give up? Never. I respected the wrong boundaries. And how I wish I had swooped in. Is that shortcoming a fault?

Every suicide is an accident of sorts. It is a sucking vortex that would drag us all in if we look at it for too long in the wrong moment, without a strong hand hold.

Because I knew her, and had her, and once she arrived she stayed forever. Even though she is gone. I will never be alone. Now is the time for living, and I am not dead yet.

The simulation model is a pseudo reality – it sends fault lines back to me as I tweak the variables, hoping for reprieve from the smashing responsibility of blame. Even though I know I can never change the outcome now. It doesn’t stop me from trying. Maybe I can warn others and change another’s outcome, somewhere, someone. It is the best I can do.

So please go gently, gently, gently with me.