My daughter tried to kill herself the first day of 2020.
She is 14.
Without going into everything here about it - because so much of it is her story to tell someday, not mine, and I’m still trying to parse out what part of this is a mother’s experience versus a daughter’s - suffice it to say that for her mental health and wellbeing, I had to get her out of our house.
Our house isn’t terrible, but it isn’t “ours,” really. It is his. He is a good person, a good man, but he carries tremendous hurt inside and has many ways of protecting his vulnerable self. Having a child, a daughter, who is suffering and in pain from trauma is triggering for him.
Being a mother and a wife in a home where your husband and child are constantly triggering one another is exhausting. Debilitating. I didn’t realize that at first. I only knew I had to find a quiet place, a calm space where my daughter didn’t have to deal with grown ups who couldn’t cope and be able to process trauma and, in time, heal.
So we moved out. I was not thinking divorce with this move. I was thinking “keep my daughter alive."
She is angry with me, or that’s what it feels like when she snarls, “We didn’t move because of me!”
I didn’t want to hear it, but I am learning to listen more.
“Mom, we moved because of YOU.”
I take this as an accusation, that I’m bad or wrong somehow. But I remain quiet, and I listen.
“YOU needed to get away from that house and from him,” she said.
She’s a teenager. She’s seeing things through the lens of a traumatized child. I didn’t want to believe her because I’m the adult in the room. Wouldn’t I know the reasons why I moved us out?
It took me a month to realize that, yes, I also moved out for myself. She wants me to say it is all for me, but that is another way she deflects from her own mental health struggles and what happened to her.
“I moved out for BOTH of us,” I say to her, and she seems slightly annoyed but satisfied enough with that statement.
Will we move back? I can’t say for sure right now. Partly because that house has never felt like “ours” even though it is a lovely house on an acre of land surrounded by trees with a mountain view. I wish it felt like ours, but part of his self-protection is wrapping up his identity in tangible things like a big, fancy truck and a big fancy house.
Everything visible in the house is mostly his. You can walk through the entryway and into the dining area, and the only things that are mine are a piano from when I was a teenager and an antique Spanish armada ship on the mantle from when I lived in Spain. All the furniture and everything on the walls are his, placed and arranged by him. It is his house. We are all guests in it, and things are good as long as we are respectful and well-behaved.
Living in a tiny apartment with my daughter for all these months reminds me of what it was like to live alone in my 20s and most of my 30s. I know where everything is. I look around and everything, the clutter, the mismatched furniture, the makeshift desk, the colorful lights - they are mine. They are not perfect, they are not beautiful, but I can change them around any time I want.
We’re carving out this space for our mental health, for our wellbeing. We’re a team, my daughter and I, focused on getting better. In learning about trauma and how it changes your brain, I realize that trauma takes many different shapes, sizes and colors, and the brain changes can be slow and insidious.
We all have trauma, most of it unprocessed and subverted. Realizing it, and having the courage to surface it and face it, is a step toward healing.
I’m learning to not only keep my daughter alive but to care for myself as well. I’m learning about things in my past that bubbled to the surface when I saw my daughter suffering. I’m dealing with them, little by little.
This is not a perfect situation. There is a deep sadness, genuine grief, that it had to come to this. But there is also a tremendous sense of relief that I had the courage to do this.
I don’t want us to simply survive. I want us all to thrive.
Tall order. Working on it.