Dear Mom,

I’ve spent about seven years now watching you in that bed. Sometimes I pretend to myself that you really can’t get out of it, and that makes me feel a little bit better for a while.

But those times I can’t fool myself, those times when I know that its all in your head, those are the times I can’t handle anymore. You smothered me for too long and then just stopped. I was only 11, the time when I needed a mom the most, the the time when I needed to be a kid the most, and you took that from me. While other girls my age where hanging out and having fun, I was home, playing little mommy to the family. I like to think you would have done a better job of raising T than I would have, but that’s here and there. But I do know, you would have done a better job of raising me.

I made myself into a tiny adult when I should have just been a kid. And now that I’m an adult, I spend every day wishing I could be seven years old again. And when things get too hard, I get scared and stop everything rather than trying to push through it. And my biggest fear in the world is that I’m going to be like you, and my kids are going to have to watch me kill myself slowly from my bed.

Your 21 year old child,
me