The Beautiful Kind

All the drugs my mom took while I was growing up made her unstable, so she was constantly falling down, out in the yard, and in stores. She had huge bruises that would extend all the way up her arm, or cover half her face. They would swell up and turn black, and make her look positively deformed. She broke a couple of bones here and there, too.

She’d overdose and attempt suicide so often it became a joke in the family. When someone would ask, “Where’s Mom?” we’d say dismissively, “Oh, she’s locked herself in the closet. She’s trying to kill herself again.” Sometimes she would take the dog out to the garage with her for company as she attempted to succumb to carbon monoxide poisoning. She has ugly thick scars on her neck from other occasions when she’s cut it, and one time in the hospital after a drug overdose, her heart stopped, but they got it going again.

One of the worst times happened at 5am one morning. I was awoken to my dad shouting, “Call 911!” Half asleep but heart pounding, I ran into the bedroom, and discovered my mom lying in bed, glassy-eyed, arms outstretched, mumbling about wanting to die. At the inner elbows of each arm, she had cut several deep gashes from which blood issued freely. They looked like open, screaming mouths.

Blood was all over the bed, and my two year old sister, who had been sleeping with my parents, slept on, her nightie drenched in blood. My other sister and I each clamped down on an arm with towels as we waited for the paramedics to arrive. When they got there, I remember one of them say, his voice amazingly neutral, “Would someone please remove the baby from the bed?”

Once they got her loaded into the ambulance and were on their way to the hospital (several neighbors came out in their robes to gawk), she took out the knife concealed in her bra, and starting sawing away at her neck. Once they realized what was going on, then they tied her arms to the stretcher. My dad went off to work that day, and I stayed home from school to clean up all the blood and watch my sister.