As a self proclaimed super mom, there are days/weeks/months/years that I feel like a complete and total failure. I am not looking for a pat on the back or a “but you’re doing great” comment. I’m being honest. I can’t imagine anyone that is a parent/guardian/caregiver/whatever hasn’t felt like a failure at some point. And it’s not so much an outward failure where my kid showed up at soccer practice with no cleats, shin guards, water bottle or ball; more of an inner failure. The struggles we feel daily. The times when we question our decisions and the answers we gave to important questions. The times when I say to myself – I have no fucking idea what I am doing.
As horrid and awful as it sounds, I am having a moral and inner fight about suicide. I feel an overwhelming sadness washed over me the last few years. I have a nagging voice in the back of my mind that keeps saying “what if”. What if I am wrong to try to convince my daughter to stay in this world? How can I tell her over and over again that things will get better, but they haven’t? How can I know what she feels? When she tells me she doesn’t feel connected to anything in this world or she finds it impossible to feel any amount of happiness. Who am I to tell her she has to stay and fight? Am I being selfish in keeping her in my world? Am I being selfish to allow her to continue to feel the daily pain of her life? This feels so wrong to put into words, but I question my decisions daily.
I sob when I have dreams that she is gone, that I can never see her smile or smell her hair when I hug her. But what about her? Is she holding on because she feels guilty? Have I made her feel guilty? She finally has an actual diagnosis of what she has been fighting, but I keep telling her the diagnosis doesn’t define her. I am begging her to get the therapy. I am asking her to give her life one more year to see the change the right therapy can make. But she has to want it, she has to accept it, she has to embrace it. Can she? Will she?
How do I...life? 