My First Time

The first time I wanted to kill myself, I was about 12 years old. It was the middle of the night when my mother burst into my room yelling at me. Half asleep and frightened, I tried to make sense of what she was saying.

Apparently, I was the last one to let the dogs outside and they had tracked mud on the carpet. With her twisted reasoning, this was not something that could wait until morning. By that point in my life, events like this were not uncommon. I had unknowingly learned to dissociate and turn her screams into background noise. In the foreground were my own racing thoughts.

When she was in this state, there was no fighting back. There was no reasoning with her. She had made it very clear to me, many times, that as her daughter I had to obey. I was a piece of property, not an individual. I made my way to the kitchen, trying my best to ignore the insults being hurled at me. Now out of her view, I sat down, trembling and sobbing into my hands. I opened the cabinet under the sink and looked for something to clean the carpet.

Then I found the bleach. Time stood still as I sat on the kitchen floor, contemplating chugging this entire bottle of bleach while my mother yelled and screamed at me from the other room. What would happen? Would I die or just get sick? If I didn't die, the punishment would be severe. Not because I attempted suicide, but because that would poke a hole in the façade that she was the perfect mother.

It was always about keeping up appearances. She never dared to behave like this around other people. She saved all of her anger for me, apparently. When I had friends over, she was the cool mom, making snacks and renting movies. Even if I tried to tell someone what was happening, no one would believe me. She was that good, like Jekyll and Hyde. We lived in a good neighborhood in a nice house, but she was never home. She taught me how to forge her signature and write a check so I could order pizza for myself while she and her boyfriend went out to dinner almost every night. I was an afterthought, an inconvenience, just something in the way.

My mother continued to rage and yell, completely unaware that her only child was ready to commit suicide in the other room. I lifted the bottle to my lips, ready to silence the screaming. Anything seemed better than this. At that point, I wanted to hurt her like she had been hurting me for all of my life.

Then I had the realization that this wouldn't just hurt her. I thought of my best friend and my dogs. The only good things in my life. My mom, along with her boyfriend, were abusive towards the dogs and did not take good care of them. I couldn't leave them. What would my best friend do? We did everything together. She would be so hurt and confused. I could never do that to her. My heart ached at the thought of leaving them. "Not right now," I thought, "not right now."

Even though I had decided against it, I did feel some satisfaction in the fact that I could end it. That was something that I could control. My mother may be able to control everything else, but I could end my own life and there was nothing she could do to stop me.

I pulled the bottle of bleach from my lips, stood up, and slowly walked back to the living room, not daring to make eye contact with her. I got down on my hands and knees and scrubbed the carpet with my mother looming over me, screaming. The faster I scrubbed, the faster I could cry myself back to sleep.