Normality is elastic. One-off situations, they can sit beyond the edge of it. Once they repeat themselves, normality expands to encompass them – however extreme they might be.
The first time my daughter tried to commit suicide, the world turned upside down. When she tried it again last weekend, it was shocking, terrifying, devastating. But this time it still felt like a part of my life – a horrible, dreadful part, but a part of my life just the same. I knew this wasn’t happening to someone else. It was happening to me, to her, to us. Again.
This time, she took an enormous overdose. She was very fortunate to survive. She could not explain why she did it, or why she later decided to call an ambulance. At the hospital, they said they have a dozen girls a week admitted like this. A dozen a week.
The adolescent psychiatric ward is a very frightening place to spend the night. It scared the hell out of me, and I was already pretty scared when I got there, what with my panicked journey back from London and not knowing whether our daughter would still be alive when arrived. Fortunately it seemed to scare the hell out of her too, so perhaps it will deter her for a while.
And she won’t be on her own for a while, although in the end we will have to go about our family business, and in the end she will be left alone again, first for ten minutes at a time and eventually for longer. We can’t do anything else but try to go back to normal, and that is the advice we have been given to help her with her recovery. She was already back at school today.
We will try to go back to normal, but normal has changed for us. Living with this level of fear is now becoming the new normal, and I guess in the end it will feel like normal too, and I will stop having to hold myself in at every moment so I don’t scream and howl and claw my own face to shreds wondering where I went wrong as a mother.
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