This Post is Ugly

Content warning: suicidal thoughts, self harm, depression, PPD

So, this post is kind of... ugly.

Last fall, I tried to hurt myself.

I've been wanting to write about this for a long time, but I haven't known what to say. Do I say anything at all? I feel ashamed, I feel like a failure, I feel like the worst Mom in the world. And not in a cute or funny or even a relatable way. I feel set apart, unworthy of having a voice at all. Certainly unworthy of talking to any of you about what my life has been like. 

All of this started in the spring of last year, 2018. I was 7 months pregnant with Goopy, my second child. Actually, for this post, I'm not going to use cute nicknames. I'm not going to downplay anything. I'm going to be really, brutally, honest, about this thing that's so painful and personal. Why? I don't know. Maybe I'm a masochist. Maybe I'm just tired of hiding. Tired of being afraid of what people would think of me if they really knew who I was.

So last spring, when I was 7 months pregnant with Lily, somebody called CPS on us. I don't know who it was, and I don't know why they called. We requested the original report but it was never sent. All the social worker would say was that they'd had a report of a child being neglected and endangered.

We were shocked. I am and was a stay-at-home Mom. I was with Maisy all day, every day. Neglected? More like bored to tears with the same thing every day, maybe!

At the same time, we were not shocked. Our neighbors have been calling the county on us for months, over everything from leaves in the gutter to the placement of our goat. Of course, they came after our kid next.

But. The day the social worker came to our door? It was a bad day for us. Everyone in our house had spent the last week with the flu. I was still recuperating, very pregnant, and exhausted. I was also suffering from post-and-pre-partum-depression. All of these excuses are leading up to the fact that our house was not clean. There were dirty clothes and trash. There were dirty dishes and dirty diapers. It wasn't great. I knew it wasn't great, I was just building up steam to tackle it.

So the social worker decided she would need to come back.

Her first visit was on Friday. She said she would be back on Monday to "re-evaluate."

My world felt like it was crashing down. I had been exposed. I had been found out. Ever since Maisy was born, I had felt like I didn't deserve her, and here it was: proof. I didn't deserve my baby. Somebody in my life had looked at me, looked at my life, and made the decision that I was an unsafe person to parent my baby. And a government official checked up on that decision and agreed. A social worker entered my home and took pictures, gathered evidence, that I was an unfit parent. 

Maybe I never had been depressed. Maybe my crushing sadness was just the natural emotion to accompany the accurate observation that I was a garbage person and unworthy of my child, my husband, my life. 

And at the same time as I blamed myself, I was filled with burning fury at the person who had called CPS. I scrutinized every interaction I'd had with everyone in my life over the past months. Who had been faking their approval? Who had been close enough to know I sometimes left the trash can full for two days? Who in my life knew enough about me to know I was barely keeping it together? 

I was imploding, collapsing in on myself. My toddler, my baby, my precious girl who I had fought so hard to bond with through the fog of PPD-- what would I do without her? My mind leapt to all the worst-case scenarios. Would they let her live with my mother, or would they insist she be placed with strangers to keep her in the county? What about this baby inside me, would they take her as soon as she was born? Would I have visitation? Could we hire a lawyer? I spiraled, sobbing as I jerked from one mess to another, cleaning sporadically and inefficiently, feeling like a red-hot pipe had been jammed down my throat.

I called people. I asked advice. I ranted, blindly searching for some kind of validation that this was somehow a big misunderstanding, a giant mistake. All the while, I listened hard to the tones of the few people I let in to my private Hell-- did they sound surprised? Did they sound relieved-- or worse, vindicated? Who called?

Mess that I was, I had to call in reinforcements to help me clean my house. My husband, my sister who lived with us, and my best friend, took the brunt of the cleaning, while I handled the majority of the hysterical sobbing (although we took turns on that job, too.) I felt a wild, feral gratitude to these three people, the only people who reacted to the news the way I needed-- utter shock, complete lack of comprehension, total outrage, unconditional help. We cried together. We scrubbed grout together. They stopped me from wallowing in the inconceivable grief at what I perceived to be the impending end of my motherhood.

It took us from Friday night until Monday morning to get the house clean. Not because of the mess in the house, but because of the mess inside me. I was fixated on every detail. Every project, every childproofing measure, every little fix and adjustment, had to happen now. I was so filled with panic, believing any flaw would leave me open to having my baby taken away. My frantic internet searches confirmed that children were sometimes taken away over nothing-- a dirty dish in the sink, one too many flies in the windowsill. If a social worker decided they didn't like you, the forums said, they had absolute power to do whatever they wanted.

I had once had dreams of becoming a foster parent, of helping kids whose parents couldn't or wouldn't take care of them. And now I was on the other side of that picture. I was the bad parent. I was the problem.

Monday arrived. We finished cleaning and everyone showered. I held Maisy as much as she would let me, active toddler that she is, breathing in her copper curls, trying to memorize everything about her. 

The social worker's visit lasted about ten minutes. I had been prepared for grilling, for interviews, for packing a bag for my baby. Instead, she asked us a few questions, marked down a few things, and then chatted a bit with a friendly smile. I asked if the case was considered closed and she waved me off. "Oh, yeah. We just have to follow up on every call. No, if we thought there had been a problem, we would have had more of a conversation last time."

My relief was there. Objectively, I understood that she was saying I was never in danger of having Maisy taken away, that they hadn't taken any of this very seriously, and the whole thing was a formality. But it didn't relieve my anxiety. I had been irrevocably changed. Everyone in my world, every neighbor, every family member, was an enemy. They were judging me, and what they judged was that I was inadequate, dangerous, and undeserving of my daughter. And if they called again, I would get another visit. And another. And every time I got a visit, if things weren't perfect-- if the cracks were showing-- if I wasn't the embodiment of functionality-- there would be a follow up. There would be a report. There would be, somewhere, a growing file of evidence, confirming what I had feared since Maisy was born.

I stopped going outside if I could help it. I avoided neighborhood interactions and retreated further and further inside myself. Even people in the community I had formerly admired and genuinely liked, I found myself unable to be friendly with. I didn't trust anyone to see good things when they looked at me, and I couldn't stand it. It wasn't that I thought they were wrong in seeing me as a failure; I just... didn't want anyone else confirming it.

Summer passed. Lily was born, a birth as gentle and easy as she has been so far (which is to say, sort of.) I had good days. I had bad days.

The good days got more frequent, so I decided to stop taking my antidepressants. I wasn't raised to be dependent on pills. I was raised to believe in the power of prayer, positive thinking, and cold water. I felt ashamed of needing medication to function. A small, horrible part of myself also didn't believe I deserved to be happy or functional.

The days abruptly began to get much, much worse.

It was a really bad day that fall. Mike had been at work all day. Taking care of a 23-month-old and a 3-month-old alone was a lot of stress. Staying on top of all the cleaning was a lot of stress. Being me was a lot of stress. Plus tensions were high with Mike's family. It was a bad day. And then, all of a sudden, it was like a black cloud rolled over the already-grey sky. Everything felt weighted down, slower, grayer. Suddenly, everything just hurt so much.

I was washing dishes. The warm soapy water was running over my wrists and I thought about the nurse I had seen to confirm my pregnancy with Lily. She warned Mike that pregnant women make extra blood, and that makes it harder to control our emotions. "She can't help it, you know." She'd informed him. "It's all that blood!"
We had laughed about it on the drive home. What a weird thing to say!

But now, standing over the sink, washing a kitchen knife, I became convinced that she was right. It was all the extra blood from being pregnant, and something had gone wrong and I hadn't lost enough blood when I had Lily. That was why I felt like this. What I needed was to open a vein and bleed a little, and then everything would get better.

I stood at the sink, shaking, for twenty minutes. Part of my brain was rational, and was freaked out that I was thinking this crazy junk. But the overwhelming majority of my brain was enticing me to dig the knife into my arm and watch my blood run down the drain.

The kitchen knife ended up being too dull. My pulse raced as adrenaline flooded my system, my animal side desperate to escape the predator of my depression. Mechanically, I put Maisy in her high chair and gave her a snack. Lily was asleep in her swing. I locked myself in the bathroom and tore apart a replacement razor head. Razor blades, I thought. Classic.

I went into the bathroom still partially thinking this would make me feel better. As I struggled and sweated over the sink, desperately trying to override my brain's self-protection mechanisms, that hope drained away. I felt trapped. I was losing my mind. I was now, truly, inarguably, being a bad mother. A selfish mother. A crazy mother. This was it-- I was unfit to parent my children. I was unfit to exist.

I kept trying to cut deeper, but veins are further in than I thought. I had this image, this beautiful image, of slicing open my wrists like silk and watching my blood pour out until everything got fuzzy and distant and then it wouldn't hurt any more, and I wouldn't hurt my kids any more by existing, and I wouldn't ever screw anything up again, ever. One last final screw up. That was all. Mike could marry a cheerful, athletic woman, who would be good at cleaning and could teach the girls how to do their makeup. They'd never even remember their psycho, broken, useless bio mom.

But my skin wouldn't cooperate. My fingers shook too much. Every tiny slice flooded me with more and more adrenaline. I sobbed with frustration and panic. I couldn't fail at this, too. I couldn't go back now. My babies were screaming outside this door. How could I ever go back and face them after this? There was no way out of this but forward. There was no way out of this but Out. And yet that tiny part of my brain was yelling for help, pleading with the universe for someone to find me, to stop me, to lock me up and keep me alive.

The first help arrived in the form of my best friend, who lived upstairs. She got home from work and stopped by to say hello. When she heard the girls crying, she stepped in. She calmed them down. She called my name and looked for me, but mostly she comforted the girls. I was so relieved. That felt like the biggest thing holding me back-- I didn't want to leave them. But they were ok. I doubled down on my wrist, determined to make this stick.

Mike got home a few minutes later. He was immediately panicked. I could hear him crashing from room to room, intense in a way my calm, levelheaded, peaceful husband was never intense. I felt so filled with shame at the fact that I hadn't been able to finish what I started before he got home. Insanely, I felt like he'd be disappointed that I wasn't strong enough.

He figured out I was in the bathroom because of the locked door, and started looking for a screwdriver to dismantle the door knob. When that was taking too long, he told Christi he was going to kick the door in. I knew he meant it. We'd just redecorated the bathroom and for some reason, that was a big deal to my insane mind in that moment. Yes, I wanted to die in peace, but I also didn't want him shattering the doorjam and messing up my new paint. So I unlocked the door.

I will never forgive myself for causing the look I saw on his face that day, when the door opened and he looked at me laying on the floor, clutching my bent razor blade and sobbing. I will never forgive myself for leaving my children alone to cry for I don't know how long. I will never be able to forgive myself for wanting to leave them, however briefly, or trying to leave them, however ineffectively. 

I know that this happened because of my depression, and because of my stupid decision to go cold-turkey off my antidepressants. I know that that's not me. That's not who I am. That day was a result of a seriously messed-up brain, not a fundamentally rotten soul. But no matter what the reasons, that day happened. I can avoid talking about it, bury it in my mind, hope it never comes up, but it happened. It's part of my story now. It will never not be a part of who I am. And I don't know how to live with it, but it's not like I have a choice.

So I moved. I left a beautiful three-bedroom house in the Napa valley and I moved in with my parents and Grandmother on a farm. Our car got totaled in that move, and we lost our healthcare coverage and a lot of important paperwork. I live in a garage now, because I can't take scrutiny. I avoid almost all social interaction because I don't trust myself to take criticism. And because I don't have any faith that people will look at me and see anything other than a broken, selfish, Bad Mother. The same thing I see, the thing I want to hide.

But I want to get better. I know I'm capable of it, even as I do dumb, potentially self-destructive things like staying up til 5:30 in the morning to write a way-too-personal essay about things I definitely need to keep to myself. The thing is, it doesn't feel self-destructive to me. It feels honest. I'm not proud of everything I've done, but I'm a little proud of who I am. Even if my best quality is that I'm laughably bad at killing myself, that's a pretty useful quality to have. This story is ugly. Depression is ugly. And on the inside, I'm ugly, too. But don't ugly people get to exist, anyway? Do we merit that? Do we deserve to tell our ugly stories, our grotesque truths, and maybe even find one another and compare deformities? 
 I've discovered that I have no talent for duplicitousness. If I'm ever going to let anyone in, it has to be all or nothing. This is who I am. Do with that what you will, I guess. 

But if you feel like you need to call CPS, can you give me a heads up? I should probably take the trash out before they get here.

P.S.
This is a picture of my girls from a couple of days ago. As you can see, they're totally scarred and *hate* living on a farm with their grandparents.