I’m in a very dark place right now. I feel as though I can’t possibly handle anything more. I was already contemplating that very thing yesterday but there was an incident that just made everything so much worse.

My son and I got into a fight because he was being disrespectful by looking at his computer instead of responding to us when we were trying to tell him about his mess. When I asked him to repeat back to me what I said, he mimicked me in a demeaning tone. I was calm, I just told him for that he’d lost all his electronics and the right to watch Amazon TV. He could watch regular tv if he wanted but RS and I were going into our room until he could talk to us respectfully. He became hysterical, screaming that he was going to write me a nasty note and that he was NOT going to leave our room. I contemplated our next move, knowing I just could not sit there and allow him to engage and rage at me as it would just let him get his way. But then...then he PUSHED me. Like reached out, watching my face, and pushed me. Not hard, and not necessarily in anger. The look on his face suggested he wanted to see what would happen. Like if he would get his way if he did that. I jumped up and yelled at him to get out, go to his room, and DO NOT COME BACK. I grabbed his shoulders and told him I had never put my hands on him and I never would and it was unacceptable that he had put his hands on me. Utterly unacceptable. He started crying and darted to his room while I went to mine. And I just sat down and cried.

It just hit me how much I’ve failed him. All I’ve done since he was born was ruin his life. I had stupidly thought I could do better than my mom and I can’t. He’s like this now because I never put boundaries and discipline in place when he was younger. How could I? I was sick. I was in and out of the hospital. Then suddenly I was a single mom. Still suffering from bouts of debilitating depression. It was all I could do to make him food.

I just never should have had him. I did it for selfish reasons, and he didn’t deserve the treatment he got. I don’t know how to fix it.

I had this fantasy when I was 15 stuck in a group home. I was so horrified with myself because of how I had failed my family. I felt like the worst person in the world. I felt like I didn’t even deserve to die, because I view death as the ultimate peace and it wouldn’t be fair to give myself peace. I thought I should run away to New York City and throw myself into the streets. Let them swallow me. Let anyone do whatever they wanted to me because that’s what I deserved for being such a horrible person. I deserved a lifetime of misery.

That’s the way I feel now. I don’t even want to die because that would be too good for me. There’s still a brain cell that knows that running away would really be no better than dying for my son because I’d still be gone. So obviously I’m not going to do it. But that’s what I feel I deserve at this point.

I wanted to tell RS the whole sorry tale of the time my son was a newborn, what happened to me directly after, and how I just fell down this path of self destruction ever since. But I couldn’t.