A Perfect Life

Imagine this:

In a suburban, wooded neighborhood with low crime and good schools, a beautiful, 2-story home houses a family of eight. The house is adorable with siding and brick and a front porch, and a climbing tree in the decent sized front yard. The back yard boasts a gas grill, a picnic table, a swingset, and a storage shed, not to mention its perfect size surrounded by a chain-link fence. The fence is important to keep the family dog, a sweet cock-a-poo (half cocker spaniel, half poodle) that thinks everyone has come specifically to play with her. It also provides a barrier for the good sized, above ground, 4 foot deep pool appropriately locked and secured for safety. The back fence has a gate going directly to the neighbor's yard. This is because the family is such close friends with the neighbors. Two of the family's children are best friends with two of the neighbor's kids and the father is best friends with the family neighbor family.

In the garage, the motorcycle waits for spring as do six bicycles. The full-sized freezer blocks access to the back yard, which is fine by the family who lives here. Toys are gathered here and there throughout the garage, except for the workbench area which the father has placed off-limits. (It does have toys strewn about it but they are "big boy toys" like drills and saws and things.)

Inside the house, the playroom at the front of the house creates envy in the kids' guests. It has not one, not two, but three televisions, and an unbelievable two of them are big screens. There are bins full of toys, a computer specifically for the kids' use, a handmade, hand-painted play table, a Playstation 2 with plenty of games.

The dining room seems small because the table seats ten when fully extended and currently seats eight. The kitchen seems messy mostly because there isn't enough space to put all the gadgets and food that is bought in bulk. But the stove and dishwasher are less than ten years old, the microwave is mostly functional and of a size appropriate for feeding eight people, the cookware is good quality and there are enough dishes for everyone and then some.

The living room practically screams sit down and relax with the large couch and love seat, the big screen television, the fireplace and the family pictures covering the walls. Kids books overflow one large bookshelf. A matching bookshelf holds precious mementos and a complete Stephen King library. Movies fill six shelves of a third tall bookcase with audio visual components on one shelf and the bottom shelf having more kids books. Beside the couch, the end table has another bookshelf full of writing and psychology reference books. Typically there are 3 laptops somewhere in use around the room though one is distinctly absent along with its owner.

Over by the half-bathroom, which is incredibly small but fully functional, the brand new, very large washer and dryer sit on wood pedestals to make them easier to use.

The upstairs is rather unremarkable. All four bedrooms are of a decent size though not huge by any measure. One of the children has her own room. The parents room has a television and a king sized bed. Typically, a cat lounges on the bed and looks at intruders as if they had disrupted his royal empress from the very important business of sleeping. Three of the kids share a room with a playful, three-tiered bunkbed setup. The other cat finds this arrangement quite to her liking and may be found on any of the beds or just sleeping in the window. The aunt and her baby daughter sleep in the fourth bedroom. The bathroom doesn't really have a story to tell - it's a full bathroom with everything a simple bathroom needs.

This is a house out of a magazine. (Or would be if it were clean and decorated.) It has a Stepford quality when describing it. But this perfect life doesn't stop there.

Eight people live in this house. The traditional mother and father are still deeply in love - high school sweethearts married fresh out of school. The mother stays home with the kids and cooks and takes people to and from their activities. She keeps track of everyone's schedules and mostly makes sure people have what they need when they need it.

The father recently changed jobs, not because he was fired or bored or laid off but because the family needed better benefits and a job more stable in the shaky economy. In addition to giving his all for his job, he is quite the handyman. Anything that goes wrong in the house, he can fix, from fuses to replacing plumbing to installing security to drywall repair. At one point he replaced the roof, tearing it down to the sheeting and replacing even that. He can do the same for cars though not quite as much because he doesn't have the tools for a lot of it.

Their four children are attractive and intelligent. They all bring home A's and B's with a spattering of C's. In public they are generally polite and well-behaved and the parents often receive compliments about them. Their teachers are happy to have them in class. They help out in the neighborhood when it is needed. They are active and playful and love to have fun. They are involved in things like Cub Scouts and Spell Bowl and gymnastics and music. The oldest child does formal volunteer work because he wants to, not because he felt pressured into it in any way.

The other two members of the household are the mother's best friend who is so close as to be a sister in all but DNA and her very young daughter. Having fallen on hard times and suffering under the strain of the economy, she lost her apartment and came to this house to live, along with her adorable daughter. The baby is now a toddler and showing much of the toddler behaviors but overall is a good baby, well-behaved and happy and tolerant of most things. The mother watches and loves the baby as if she were one of her own. The four children also adore the baby and treat her as a sibling though perhaps with a little more grace and patience than if she shared the same blood.

Oh yes, one more thing...... there is a white picket fence out front. It is small, about 12 inches square and 6 inches high. It encircles the front light post and marks off a small area where bright red flowers grow and bloom during the summer.

Sound fictional? Sound like the kind of ideal that a kid would hold for what they want when they grow up? Sound like the end result of the classic "American Dream"? Sound perfect?

This is me. This is my house, my neighborhood, my family, my sister, my pets, my life. There are people who would literally kill to have what I have, to live like I live. I have it all. I am living the fairy-tale.

SO WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH ME???

I know how lucky I am. I am so profoundly grateful for it. I don't take it for granted and I thank God every day for this multitude of blessings. I know I've got it good. For all the shit we have in our lives with money and health insurance and mental illness and normal growing pains, I still know that I am living a charmed life. And I AM grateful.

This was not intended to be boastful or prideful or to show off. I need to explain the backstory in order to make the contrast between my life and myself even a fraction of the strength it actually is.

Because the truth of the matter is, I want out. I hate my life. I hate myself. I hate hurting. I especially hate hurting when I have no reason to hurt. My children keep me going. I don't want to destroy them and I am fully aware that the suicide of a parent causes irreparable damage to a kid. But believe me, that is the only reason I am still here.

All I want is to go to sleep and never wake up. And I have the means. And I have the motive. And I have the opportunity. But I have my beautiful 4.5 children. And of all the screw ups I do every day, I couldn't fix that one.

But oh how I want to.

I came so close last night after I went to bed that I got up and stood in the bathroom with my pill bottle in one hand and a glass of water in the other, staring at the horrible bitch looking back at me. She told me to do it, take the whole damned bottle and go chase it with something else to seal the deal. She told me that nothing really matters anyway. She told me the kids are already permanently fucked up and getting worse every minute that I am around them.

I came close to calling someone, anyone, to see if they could help me make this shame and despair and hatred go away. I know that I could have called. There are several people that have told me to call if I need them. But I couldn't make myself do it. I couldn't explain how someone with such a wonderful life as I have could want so desperately to throw it away.

I didn't want to wake someone at one in the morning. I didn't want to worry anyone. I didn't want them to panic and call the cops on me. I didn't want them to think it necessary for me to have a babysitter. And, to be flat-out honest, I didn't want to be talked down. I wanted to be left alone to die.

So I stared at the person in the mirror and listened to the taunting and prompting and goading. I dumped out a handful of pills into my hand, probably 40 or 50 of them. I weighed them in my hand. I felt the texture of them - powdery and rough like overused sandpaper. I pictured dumping them into my mouth, shoving them down with a swig of water and then repeating it with another handful and another and another and another until they were all gone.

I remembered the sensation of laying on the bed and forgetting to breathe, inhaling slowly and deeply because my head wanted air not because my chest told me to. I remembered how clear and soft and comfortable everything felt right as I slipped into sleep, how peaceful and unhurried everything became. I remembered the overwhelming relief I felt.

Then I remembered the strangest thing. I remembered the taste. The pills have this hideous aftertaste. It's worse than chewing aspirin. And it can't be washed away with water. It takes something with a much stronger flavor to get rid of that bitter grit that clings to the back of the throat and becomes like a smell when I breathe. It's nasty.

And all I had was water. Then it occurred to me that I hate water. Tap water grosses me out. Even filtered water makes me cringe. So I'd have to drink nasty water to swallow nasty pills that I then wouldn't be able to get the nasty taste to go away. And that would royally suck. It would be, well, nasty.

The thing in the mirror called me a coward. She called me stupid and a loser and wimp and all sorts of other things. She repeated all the reasons that I wanted to swallow them in the first place and all the things that are wrong with me. And I still wanted to die. But not then, not like that.

I put the pills back in the bottle. I put the bottle back in my pocket. And I went back to bed, putting the pills in their "safe spot" before turning on some music to distract me, slipping under the covers and trying to go to sleep.

So here I am, living my perfect life in my perfect home with my perfect everything all around me, hating every breath I take but unable to do what I so desperately crave.

Please God, make a bird so I can fly far, far away. -Forrest Gump
Preferably a duck or goose or something so someone will shoot me. - Me