A heavy post about trauma and the time of reckoning

Maybe don't read it if you need something more cheerful...

I remember reading somewhere that menopause is a time of reckoning. If you look up ‘day of reckoning’ then you will see it described thus: ‘a day or time in the future when people will be forced to deal with an unpleasant situation which they have avoided until now.’

For many of us we beaver along, staying in our lane, people overtaking, some crashing, others smoothly motoring along, others zig zagging chaotically and we might not look back very much.

The emphasis is on forward momentum. Then you get to your late forties, and early fifties, and you start to feel this slowing down- some of this is physical- your body literally won’t keep up the same pace, and some of it is brought about by losing people and going through the grieving process. It just feels like you start to pull that car into the hard shoulder and you get out. You look back.

‘How did I even get here?’ you think.

I have written about losing my sister and step mum through suicide and some of the impact it had on me. The horror of it. The fact that I tried just about everything I could to escape it - hedonism, exercise, over eating, work, shopping. Then this reckoning came and I realised that I had to look at that time again, and stop running. I had to face up to something painful that happened soon afterwards. I may have even written about this day here before but I find that I am compelled to write about it again- it is part of a healing process.

It is 1989 and I am 17. I am standing in a newsagent, the one at the end of our road and buying painkillers. They come in cylindrical little white bottles, and I ask if I can have 7 of them. The woman doesn’t think this is odd- perhaps she doesn’t care. I've calculated that is how much I need to end my life. I am not even unhappy at this point but have this strange feeling of calm. I feel like this is what my step mum would have wanted, that there is a bad spirit that lives in the walls of the house and that the natural thing is for our entire family to be eradicated. Only then will the spirit be happy.

I go home and I blast classical music very loudly from my dad’s expensive stereo. He is often not at home and leaves for work early and returns late at night, sometimes when I’m pretending to be asleep upstairs. I hear the roar of his motorbike as it turns into our road, and I usually just nod off in that moment- up until that point I am terrified. The kitchen has no blinds and when I switch the light on, I am confronted by my own white, ghostly reflection. I feel this constant bad presence, and whilst I know that my stepmum loved me, I can’t help feeling that she wants us to be reunited in some way. I am also dropping all the balls at school and failing. I have stopped going in most mornings and instead watch TV or sit in my room staring at the wall.

I find it hard to take all the tablets because they’re hard and round and stick in my throat. I sip water and then take one, then another and another. I realise that I’m crying, and can’t help thinking that this is a supremely shitty thing to put my dad through. I keep going and manage to take about 30 or so, the taste is awful and the mush is caught in my throat. I lie on the bed and arrange myself in a way that I think won’t be too upsetting for dad to discover. Almost immediately I rush downstairs and call him at work. I’m gasping on the phone and he has to ask me several times to slow down.

‘I have taken lots of paracetamol,’ I say and he hangs up almost immediately and luckily I have to be sick and I hang over the toilet bowl with this white, bitter paste coming out of my mouth.

I must lie there for a while because I hear his motorbike and it feels like he’s only been a couple of minutes. He doesn’t speak when he comes into the bathroom and is still wearing all his motorcycle gear. He lifts me up under my arms, and then puts a coat on me, then my trainers and then he puts the crash helmet on my head and I hang onto him as we zoom off to the hospital. Sick is coming up in the helmet and I think about how funny this is and how my friends would laugh at the idea that I am effectively incased in sick, almost drowning in the stuff.

It is the same hospital that my dad came to to view my sister and step mum’s bodies. I get my stomach pumped. I don’t remember much but it does the job and I keep vomiting, and drinking this orange liquid that comes in a glass jug. Dad doesn’t say anything. He just sits with this stony expression that I’ve seen before. He has switched himself off.

He has developed this skill to survive the unsurvivable.

We never speak about this day again. And a few weeks later, when I try and take tablets again, we don’t speak about that time either. I have to fill in a questionnaire and they ask my dad whether I should be sectioned. The weird thing about is that I am completely sane. It feels odd that anyone would want to live in the way that we are living right. Two silent people and bad spirits that want to harm us.

Why do I write about this now? Well this is the reckoning. This incident (s) is one of many that I never thought about, in fact had completely forgotten, was too painful to think about and was one of the many reasons I continued to drive the car too fast. Now I’ve stopped (a little, arguably I am still addicted to being busy) I can see it all clearly. I can imagine what dad would have said if he were sitting with me as I write this: ‘Why did you want to leave me?’ he'd have said, ‘Don’t you realise how much it hurt me?’

And in my mind I lean my head on his shoulder, smell the combination of talc and Coal Tar soap and say: ‘I’m sorry but you shut yourself away. I am old enough now to see you had to do that to survive.’

Dad would cock his head, the way he always did when he was thinking something over.

‘It’s a shame we never talked about this when I was alive,’ he would say.

I would look at him, his outline slowly shimmering as he disappeared into the yellow curtains, the ones that let the sun come through in the morning.

‘I love you,’ I’d whisper and these three words would keep echoing around and around, spinning up and into the clouds, cancelling out all the blunt force of the bad stuff.

In my mind he is embracing a golden orb and is flying. The orb is my sister. She is pure light. We are always more than the stuff that tries to finish us off you see.

We always trump it with love in the end.