At least one step toward the grave

First, the blah blah.  My mother wanted nothing to do with children, I was the only one she had that survived.  The rest were aborted, but by the time she was pregnant with me in the late 1960s, with her being 34, she disappeared for days looking for someone to terminate the pregnancy.  Finding no-one who would, and being a doctor herself, she tried various abortifacients (substances and treatments to induce abortion) on her own.  Today, you can even easily find such things, though not labeled as such, at health food stores.  That didn’t work, though I was sufficiently damaged at birth that I was given an emergency baptism because I wasn’t expected to survive, and spent 10 days in the NICU.  After coming home from the hospital I survived many “accidents”.  She gave me a coin to swallow but I didn’t choke on it.  I “fell” off the counter.  She tried coaxing me into sticking something metal into an electrical socket.  I “tripped” down the stairs.  She tried killing me, in ways that would look accidental, for a long, long time.  When information on Lyme disease was first published in the late 1970s, she sent me places where I could become infected with it.  I could go on and on about her various machinations, all the while to everyone else trying to look like a responsible, caring mother.

Fast forward 40 years and my health is an utter fricking mess and every doctor I’ve been to has been utterly clueless.  In the last 12 years I’ve easily seen 20 doctors about my various health problems and received treatments that were either ineffective or made my health worse.  You see, my mother was a leader in her field, a specialist in infectious disease.  She taught classes in medical school, she did original research and published in respected journals, she saw patients, she consulted in malpractice suits.  She knew things 40 years ago about infections that mainstream medicine today is just barely catching up to.

It wasn’t until after she died that I began to put together what had happened to me.  She was, after all, my mother, and most of the things she did to me were covert and in secret, while outwardly appearing to be a caring parent.  For the last few years I’ve been trying to undo and reverse the damage done by decades of her manipulation and I’ve tried nearly every therapy and treatment to get some semblance of a life back, to no avail.

Recently, though, a good friend of mine helped me out.  He’s my last friend after everyone else steered clear of my problems like rats deserting a sinking ship, he’s watched me struggle, he gave me a place to sleep when I lost my house because of not being able to work.  He gave me a lifeline when I needed it most.  And, best of all, after many discussions where he could see that I was suffering and needed a way out, a final exit, he got me something that I could use to do that, too.

But apparently I wasn’t ready to use it just yet.  For much of the last three days I sat in an abandoned house (a house which, upon reflection and consideration, probably has Sick Building Syndrome) with this wonderful gift, holding it in my hand, but couldn’t pull it off.  I was so close, so very close to finally shuffling off this painful mortal coil.

I still have it, and plan to use it somewhere else, but for now am just frustrated that I’m still here.  Because I tried, I really tried to have a life despite that pain and misery that got shoveled onto me, I tried for decades and now I’ve had enough.  But apparently not quite enough to pull the trigger and call it quits.

But having it means I am at least one step closer.