The Lasting Impact of Growing Up With A Suicidal Parent
Where do you go when home isn’t safe anymore?
Trigger warning: This essay talks about suicide, attempted suicide, and self harm. Please honor your boundaries and proceed with caution.
There are things that you’re not supposed to talk about.
Things that under no circumstances leave this house, do you understand?
It never even needed to be said. You just knew, without needing to be told, that no one would love you if you told your shame-filled story. That your parents would feel betrayed because you don’t air your dirty laundry out in public. That there was no help for you, no matter how much pain you held unconsciously in your eyes.
This was just how life was, and someone always had it worse than you did anyway.
I remember trying to reach out for help just once, in a particularly desperate moment after my mother’s third (and most traumatic) wayward suicide attempt. I told my friend in hushed voices what had happened when we were alone in the computer lab, and this poor, overwhelmed, totally unprepared girl looked to the side…and she changed the subject.
And honestly, I can’t even blame her. This 16-year-old did not have the tools to handle what I was telling her or to help me in any meaningful way. But her reaction to my confession confirmed any reservations I had about sharing what happened at home.
There would be no help for me, and I was absolutely on my own.
Shame needs three things to grow exponentially in our lives: secrecy, silence, and judgment. (Brene Brown)
Trauma is a generational gift that runs through both sides of my family. My mother was specifically dealt a really shitty hand and survived an abominable childhood terrorized by her mother. She ran away at 16 and moved to the other side of the state, where she met and fell in love with my father. By 18, she was pregnant with me. By 19, she was married.
What followed could really be considered a utilitarian childhood. I’m sure there was love, but I don’t remember a lot of warmth in my home. Just like I know we were materially taken care of, but I remember feeling scarcity like a cold knife running down my back. We weren’t poor but we lived poor and made up for it with appearances — the perfect picture of a nice, normal middle-class family.
We stretched and strained to fit this illusion and it worked for a while. My father worked full time and my mother became the perfect housewife, the T-ball coach, the Girl Scout troop leader, the ideal 90s mother. But here’s the thing about buried trauma — just because you’ve put it in a box and packed it away in the back of your mind doesn’t mean it’s gone. It sits there, growing and rotting and leaking until it takes a header into your life and decides it won’t be ignored anymore.
My mother had no close friends or family, and my father had the emotional maturity of a heavily armed five year old. By the time she started seeing a psychiatrist, she’d been cutting for years to give an outlet to this intense emotional pain roaring inside her. She tried antidepressants for a while, but it didn’t take.
And pretty soon she started to drink heavily, and began fading away.
An unacknowledged trauma is like a wound that never heals over and may start bleeding again at any time. (Alice Miller)
The first time my mother tried to kill herself, I was half way through junior high school. The memory of that night is burned into my brain in technicolor, the tiniest details given intense attention.
The flashing police lights through my frilly, white curtains; seeing her passed out on the chair (again) but this time with police and EMTs around her; being taken to a friend’s house in the middle of the night to sleep on their couch, terrified of what happened but with no answers and no one to hold me and tell me that she’d be fine, everything would be fine, and it was okay to cry.
My father, who could not process or handle his own emotions, gave us a stilted explanation the next morning when he picked us up — took some pills, stomach pumped, staying overnight. I don’t remember talking about it after, and we certainly never discussed our emotions, goodness no. Best just to carry on as if it never happened. We welcomed her home later with open arms, happiness and fear closely intertwined.
The second time she tried to kill herself was two years later, after she’d moved to an apartment in town but before my parents were officially divorced. I was on the periphery of this one — that is, until my father took me to her apartment, where I got to see the scattered remains of the nights events and a front door with a missing doorknob.
He wasn’t shy about telling me what had happened, having mistook me for a fourteen-year-old therapist and co-conspirator instead of a daughter with mentally ill parents who was trying not to drown.
The third time, there was no sideline for me. I was sixteen, a junior in high school, on an every-other-weekend visit to my mother’s house with my younger sister. I remember the medical bill that kicked off the spiral and sent her to her bedroom crying.
I left my sister in front of the TV while I joined my mother, the smell of marijuana heavy as she told me she couldn’t do this anymore and didn’t want to live. She read me poetry that she had written when she was a teenager, quiet, romantic sonnets about love and hope and loss. She gave me her PIN number and told me how to access her funds at the bank.
She told me which rings she wanted which person to have after she was gone. I was locked in to this confusing, intimate moment with my mother, wanting to prolong it, unsure of how to stop it or what to say, afraid to move, afraid to breathe. Objections died on my lips before they even left my mouth, and I was left with confusing feelings of terror and apathy. And then she got into her car and drove away.
I don’t remember much about what happened after, only that I was on her bedroom floor sobbing with the door closed, not wanting to scare my little sister, and somehow managed to call my father to come pick us up, because our mother just drove away to kill herself.
When he pulled into her driveway an hour later, the phone rang. It was my mother — she was less than a mile down the road hanging out at her friend’s house, and was finally calling to let me know she was still alive.
And she always had a way with her brokenness. She would take her pieces and make them beautiful. (R.M. Drake)
I look back on these milestones of trauma now with a certain solemnity and a clearer understanding how each of them hammered me into a new shape — at first a harsher, more cynical version of myself and later, softened with time and reflection, someone who can find compassion and lessons in moments of breathtaking pain.
These weren’t the first events that robbed me of my childlike ideal of the world being a safe and welcoming place. But they did set off cycles of hypervigilance, distrust, and dysfunction where love and fear became so intertwined that for the longest time, I didn’t know how to have one without the other and still feel like I was on solid ground. It is with years of therapy and self-reflection that I have finally began to mend the broken pieces back together.
They also permanently damaged my relationship with my mother, something we only came close to recovering after she was diagnosed with small-cell lung cancer. She had stopped cutting and as far as I know, had never tried to commit suicide after those events, but she continued to self-medicate with alcohol, cigarettes, and other medicinal crutches until the very end of her life.
When my mother died of cancer in 2020, I received the most beautiful messages from family and friends, some of which had known her when we were growing up. They remembered her as a Girl Scout leader and a T-ball coach, someone who chaperoned school field trips and talked about there being a woman president someday. They honestly took me completely by surprise, both with their wholehearted compassion for my loss, and that they remembered someone who I’d honestly forgotten had ever existed.
I think that has been the most challenging part of recovery for me — seeing her as a whole person instead of hyperfocusing on the things she did that caused me pain. Because yes, she was self-destructive and narcissistic, but she was also someone who didn’t know how to handle the enormous amount of emotional pain she felt, and whose children got caught up in the fallout when she could no longer contain the madness inside her.
There is a dichotomy to these experiences that has become a cornerstone of understanding my trauma — that my mother did the best she could with the tools that she had available to her, and that her tools were not enough to protect her children from being traumatized.
It’s one of the reasons I’ve read intensively about trauma and have spent a good amount of time in therapy—I want to break this generational cycle so that my daughter and her children don’t have the same experiences as past generations. It has to start somewhere, and so it starts with me.
If you’ve lost a parent or someone you love to suicide, go here: https://save.org/what-we-do/grief-support/
If you know someone in crisis, go here: https://afsp.org
Please remember, you are never alone.
