When we were perfect

Dear Mom,

Do you remember the first time I tried to kill myself?  I was eight and had come back to your house from my father’s bleeding, blistered, and barely able to speak from both fear and the damage to my mouth.  You were angry because, from your perspective, he had chosen me over you.  You started to see me as one of the “other women” with whom he had been unfaithful, and this further damaged our already fraught relationship. The sense of betrayal and abandonment from you that I felt because of your reaction, combined with the terror of what he had done was so overwhelming I decided I wanted to die.  

A row of oleanders, a common, yet poisonous plant used for landscaping, especially in Mediterranean climates, stood between our house and that of the neighbor’s. Both the leaves and blossoms of this plant contain multiple chemicals that are problematic for humans and certain animals, the most powerful being the cardiac glycosides, oleandrin, and oleandrigenin, which interfere with the ability of the heart to function properly.  These details I learned in an advanced botany class in college; as an eight-year-old, I just knew they were poisonous, readily available, and were therefore my method of choice when it came to ending my life.

Wanting to be sure it would work, but not knowing if one was better for the task than the other, I picked and ate a leaf and a blossom.  Each was exceedingly bitter, yet I was undeterred. It was nothing compared to the pain I had felt during the previous few weeks and the pain I anticipated I would continue to experience if I stayed alive.   I sat under the trees until I started to feel sick.  Though I remain unsure of what provoked this choice, I decided to go back inside the house, to the bathroom near my bedroom.   

I started throwing up shortly upon my arrival and when you came to see what was happening, you saw the pieces of leaf and blossom on the floor.  You grabbed my shoulders and shook me, asking me what I had done.  I told you.  You screamed at me, asking me why, and I screamed back, “Because I want to die.”

Our eyes locked for a moment, and though you said nothing, over what was probably the next half an hour or so, you stuck your finger down my throat repeatedly until no more pieces of leaf or blossom appeared in my vomit.  After that, you got milk, made me drink it, and then again stuck your finger down my throat until the liquid I threw up was no longer tinged with green. Once you were satisfied everything was out, you left, and, like so many other things, we never spoke of it again.   

Eight years later, during the most intense period of grief I have ever experienced over the loss of Jake, you came into my room, handed me a package of razor blades, told me to put us all out of our misery, and advised that the fastest way to do that would be to cut vertically along the artery rather than horizontally across the vein.  You shut the door on your way out and left me alone again to consider your request, which I did by holding the point of one of the razors against my wrist, but eventually decided against implementing your suggestion, in large part because I was worried you would regret what you had said if I did.  The next morning our eyes would briefly meet and when they did, we would share a moment of mutual understanding that this time I was the one who prevented the tragedy. Once again, we would go about our lives without ever speaking of what had transpired the evening before.

Over the years, I have tried, mostly without success, to both understand and explain the nature of our relationship.  From the beginning, it was one filled almost exclusively with anger, pain, and disappointment.  I was never really the daughter you wanted, you were never really the mother I needed, and most of the time we seemed to be on a path of mutually assured destruction.  Yet somehow, a few times in our lives, we were exactly the one who the other needed.   It may be that in the end, these are the only two stories I have that can even partially illustrate the contradictions, the chaos, the silence, the noise, the heartbreak, and, however ephemeral, the moments of love I think we occasionally shared.   

This Sunday, like always, we will be among the mothers and daughters for whom the day is complex.  Although I don’t know what the day will be like for you, I know that I will miss and think of Jake like I always do, and I will miss and think of you, also like I always do.  I don’t know what I will think or feel when it comes to him and will simply take the day as it occurs in that regard, but when it comes to my thoughts of you, this year I will remember the tragic beauty of the two moments—the one in which you didn’t let me die and the one in which I didn’t let you kill me—when we were completely and brilliantly perfect together. 

My wish for you this Mother’s Day is the same wish I make for you every day—may your life be filled with peace, love, and joy, and may you be free of pain.  I hope on some level, in some way, you know that there are people all over the world, who are, and always will be, grateful for those two moments of brief, but luminous perfection between us.

Happy Mother’s Day.

Love always,

Elizabeth