harm

I have a daughter who cuts herself. She’s been doing it on and off for years. We thought it was over, but she recently started again. We discovered what she uses. The little razors from pencil sharpeners. We had a guest coming and I cleaned up her room and I was hanging up the guitar cover and this little metal piece fell to the carpet. Lately there’s been blood drops on her jeans. Drops of blood on the toilet paper. She’s wearing long sleeves. She flinches if you touch her wrist. She hides it and doesn’t hide it. When asked, she lies. I find it all very confusing. When small children lie—when they say they didn’t eat the chocolate even though there’s chocolate all over their face—we think they just can’t understand evidence. But when an older child or adult lies, it’s a bit dumbfounding because they do understand evidence. I am left wondering. She wants me to know but she doesn’t want me to do anything about knowing. So I ask and she lies. I say look at this and she lies.

She used to search the internet for ways to hang herself. There’s very detailed information out there about weight and counterbalance, length of rope.

You might think that over time, since we can become desensitized to so much, that over the years, your child’s suicide attempts or acts of self-harm might desensitize you, but that’s not what happens. There’s always more of you to be crushed.

The terror that seizes you when you go to pick your child up and she isn’t where she’s supposed to be. You wait. You text. She doesn’t respond to texts. You call. She doesn’t answer her phone. Eventually, she shows up. She’s forgetful. She was chatting with a friend. She didn’t realize what time it was. The fear when the school calls. The one trip to the ER which was like going back in time to the mid 1980s when my sister had to have her stomach pumped after overdosing on Quaaludes and how incredibly rude everyone was—that underlining tone of I really don’t have time for your stupid bullshit right now. Even though their job is to save lives this isn’t the sort of life saving that concerns them.

One morning last year when I went to wake my daughter up for school, she’d worn just a t-shirt and underwear to bed and had kicked the covers off in her sleep, I saw for the first time all the slashes that she’d made on her thighs. Huge scars. Welts. Cut after cut. I don’t understand how she could have hidden such large wounds. I don’t understand how there wasn’t blood all over our house. I couldn’t help but make a sound and move to touch them and I woke her and she was angry. Everything’s fine, she said. I don’t do that anymore. Please, mom, don’t worry.

I remember being in 11th grade and this feeling came over me. It had been coming at me for sometime, almost as if it were stalking me, as if it had been watching me from afar for years. It jumped me suddenly, so powerful. I swallowed a handful of my mother’s sleeping pills wanting to escape it. Distraught and hysterical, I threw them up as my mother in her maroon terrycloth robe, paced just outside the bathroom door. I cried myself to sleep that night, curled up, hair covering my face, my spit thick in my throat and mouth, hard to swallow, hard to breathe. Something infantile and soothing about those sensations.The next day, I was exhausted. I didn’t feel much. I was mostly nervous in this very thin way. The night before everything had been so fat and heavy. But as the day went on the thin became wider and by the time I put my light out for the night I was pacing my room, fraught, unable to rest, the light of the moon coming through my bedroom window illuminating the parts of darkness: my twin bed, my dresser, my built-in desk, my chair, my  closet, my dirty laundry spread across the carpet. I waited until I thought my mom was asleep and then slipped out of my room to go downstairs and get more sleeping pills and be done with this feeling. But my mom was at the foot of the stairs struggling to get into a sleeping bag. I went back to my room as I watched her place her pillow just so and shimmy the zipped bag to just under her arms. I was so pissed. I paced my room, pulled my hair. Hit my own face. I eventually fell asleep and the next morning everything was thin again and in the evening everything was heavy but not as heavy. My mother was at the foot of the stairs each night for a week. And each night the feeling weakened until it broke like a fever and I was left with this constant but manageable dread. After that, whenever I felt highly agitated, what would be in my mind was the image of my mother sleeping at the foot of our stairs at an odd angle. Her feet on the floor, her bottom on the second step, her shoulders on the third and her head against the wall with a pillow there to give some comfort. Wherever I was, I would pace. Listen to loud music. Rock back and forth. Wait it out. For my mother, I would suffer my feelings. And they would always pass.

I tell my daughter every day, many times, how much I love her. How dear she is to me. I burden her with my affection. It’s like my love is a weight that I ask her to hold. Each time I tell her, I am giving her more of it, weighing her down. I don’t understand what compels her to harm herself. She’s a wonderful person. She’s magical. I don’t know where these feelings come from or where they go. I don’t know how to help her. I just keep giving her my love. I hold her hand. I cuddle her at night. I tell her I love her. I am silently asking her to stay. Please stay with me. Please.