Look at the inside of your right forearm. Put the palm of your left hand across your inner wrist, with the pinky edge lined up with the bottom of your right palm. See where your thumb’s width ends? That’s where my new tattoo will begin.
It’s going to be simple, the first initial of Isobel’s real name, in this font. It’ll be about an inch square, give or take. And it’s coming to live on me Saturday afternoon. Why there and that? That involves some way-back-in-the-old-days background.
Here goes. (Really, I suggest you just skip down to the comments and pretend that you read the following. It will save you five minutes you’re never going to get back. I’ll never know.)
The first time I planned to kill myself, I was around eight years old. A teacher at my elementary school found my suicide notes. Yes, I had multiple notes to friends, my grandparents, everyone but my father, it seems. He was informed shortly after I had a severe conversation with the school counselor (the third one I’d seen in two years, fyi) about the seriousness of scaring people like that.
Not about the seriousness of actually killing myself, keep in mind. It was about how it would scare people to read my notes, should I forget my knock-off-dollar-store trapper keeper with them in it in the computer lab.
My dad. This time wasn’t just the tirade of questions like, “why do you have to be such a little asshole?” and “why are you trying to hurt me? Why are you crying? You’re the one who’s being the asshole. I should be crying.” Asshole was a common word in our house.
It didn’t just include the usual routine called stand-in-the-corner until he fell asleep and forgot about me, so that I was terrified to come out, but knew that it was well past my bedtime because the colour bars were on the television.
Nope, not even the spankings with the stick (a 1 by 2 inches, two foot long piece of wood) got brought out in it’s usual performance. The stick came out, though, that’s for certain.
He found the stash of pills I’d slowly stolen from my grandparents over the past few months - asprins and valiums and beta blockers, oh my - and I slammed what I could grab, thinking, I don’t know. They’d work. Immediately?
I ended up bent over the bathtub, shaking, naked and with a fractured rib, with my hair covered in vomit. I had really long hair. And I couldn’t sit or breathe properly for days.
I didn’t learn my lesson.
A week before 8th grade ended was the second attempt. My boyfriend (sort of) had just ODed and died. And well. It was my fault. I’d carved his name into my arm and my father’d found it and scrubbed off the scab with steel wool and Vim (with bleach). That was to teach me not to cut. (Ha! That’s a whole ‘nuther post. Yes, you might just want to leave now. I understand.)
I went to school with a pocket of pills, figured I’d go slow and easy this time. I took a half of a pill every 15 minutes. After most of the day passed in a dull blur, I went home and took a nap. I didn’t leave a note. I woke up in the middle of the night, slammed a bunch of water and then slept again until morning. Nothing impressive there, no drama, just a hangover.
A year later.
This time, I authentically (intentionally) ODed on some authentic (pure) drugs and I was with my grandparents. My dad had just fractured my cheekbone via a kick to the face with steel toed shoes after he came home from work when I was grounded and found my boyfriend there. He kicked me out, sort of. I was staying with them, for a bit.
They had no idea that speedballs were rolling in my veins - all they knew was that I was foaming at the mouth and they thought maybe I’d ‘taken something.’ I was a morbid child, sometimes, so maybe…is what they thought.
I got my stomach pumped unnecessarily that day and GOD, you’d think I’dve learned that time. But no.
When I was just starting senior high school, my dad and I didn’t talk for a year. I’d moved out. We weren’t on speaking terms because I’d chosen a boyfriend instead of living with him and as I was packing my shit up, he told me about soup kitchens and places to live. I told him I had a place to go and I think that was a jolt to him - an insult even.
So because I didn’t talk to him, he didn’t talk to me. And then on Valentine’s day, he mailed me a card that expressed how depressed (as much as he could express anything) he was that the most important person in the world to him (me?) wanted nothing to do with him. But that I should applaud that he was trying - he’d remembered the holiday and mailed a card on time.
The guilt. It crumpled me. I took the stolen replacement razors (don’t ask why, right now, they were in my cabinet) from my dad’s old razor and I carved two thin pink lines up my arms about four inches. I followed the blue-ish purple blood vessels that are so glaringly obvious on me. I didn’t cut deeply - in fact, a second and third pass were needed to draw enough blood to forever stain a dishtowel.
I was concerned about making a mess, you see.
Then my boyfriend walked in the room because being in a trance, I’d not noticed that anyone was home, that they’d let him in, or that he’d been knocking louder and louder as concern ripped through him, before it occurred to him to turn the doorknob.
His eyes were full of tears when he picked me up and carried me to the car. He kept asking me why I was so broken. He alternated saying he couldn’t handle this (me) anymore, and telling me how in love with me he was and asking why that wasn’t enough?
I think I got few stitches. I know I got some drugs and a free stay over night in the psyche ward. That wasn’t my first psyche hold, I’ll tell you about that, at a later date, too ‘kay? (Run away, run away fast.) And I got some embarrassing, humbling scars.
Here’s the thing about being me, with my skin: it’s disruptive and sensitive as all fuck. But my scars fade and heal and become invisible. They melt, you could say. Mine, they’re gone. There’s no more boyfriend’s name carved on my elbow, there’s no branch-shaped lines up my forearms. Even the scar on my lip, from where he cut me? Gone.
Do you sense a theme? Okay.
So, when Isobel was born, it was rough. Colic, PPD, a very not functional relationship, plus pre-existing habit to FTFO…I kept expecting her to die and on one hand, I was looking forward to it.
Yes, I know. Close your mouth.
Not because I wanted her to be dead. Because I wanted to be. And all of the reading and my instincts had shown me that it was pretty inevitable that I would accidentally kill her by not tucking her crib sheets in tight enough or breastfeeding after drinking two cups of coffee in the same day. And once she died, I could be free to jump off the bridge, onto Granville Island.
See, I know I’ll make mistakes and taint her psyche emotionally and chemically in so many ways already. She’s kinda screwed right from the get-go, having me as a mom (sometimes, I think.). But I will never, ever attempt to take my life again while she’s in this world. I won’t put that on her - the guilt, fear, anger, hatred, shame…everything that comes with having to think or say the words, ‘My mom tried to kill herself.’
So, my right inner arm, in the spot where my cobweb of razoring ended, is where Isobel’s initial will remain forever - a reminder of everything right I have to live for.
Can you guess whose initial is going on the left, the more sinister side?
