Decision

Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do. - Jose Ortega

I once made the decision to kill my daughter. Not abort her you understand, but to actually kill her. Years later, in a counselling session in rehab, a do-gooder counsellor tried to convince me that I'd never really meant to harm her, or that if I had it was under extreme pressure with some sense of diminished responsibility but I don't buy it. I was there. He wasn't.

She was 3 months old when it happened. Up to that point we'd still been in the honeymoon phase, or whatever you're meant to call the glowing and happy sense of wellbeing and love you have for a newborn, and to be honest, that might have carried on a little while longer were it not for the timing.

The timing, I would imagine, isn't hard for you to figure out. It just a case of doing the math. 3 month old baby, 9 months of pregnancy equals…

9 + 3 = 12.

Yeah, that's right. The one year anniversary of my rape. In hindsight maybe I should have seen it coming but like I said, I had my cute little bundle of joy. I thought things were good. Didn't see anything as simple as 'just another day' coming between us. Sure, I knew it was coming up but I didn't anticipate how bad it would be.

It wasn't helped by the fact that Olivia was sick. Colic. She kept me up all the night before, pacing the apartment as she shrieked and wailed. I didn't get a minutes sleep and so by the 'big day' itself I was already tired and running low on energy.

All the same, we coasted the daytime. Olivia settled, got some sleep and I relaxed, or at least tried to but… at the same time, I couldn't switch off from it. Every time I went into the kitchen and saw the date on the calendar it was just there, in my head, not letting go.

Then night came, and I started making times checks. A year ago today I was in class…. In the library… deciding to take the short cut home. That kind of thing.

Then two things happened. Olivia woke, colicky again, and I poured myself a drink. A near lethal combination as it happened. But I wasn't to know that at the time. And as I said, it was A drink, a quick and easy way to take the edge off of the day.

But, as is often the way with me, one glass led to two, and two to four, four to six. And with each glass I drank, I forgot a little bit more how much I loved my daughter and remember how much I'd been scarred by the act that made her.

And all the while she screamed.

And screamed.

And screamed.

I tried everything. Walking her up and down the room until I was too unstable to do so, leaving her screaming in her cot and hiding in my study with all the doors closed to block out of the noise, I even - once I was really drunk - called my parents and sobbed into their answer phone, begging them to come and take the little spawn of Satan away.

To this day I don't know if they were home, but if they were, the ignored my calls, just as I'd ignored theirs in recent months. They didn't want to know me, any more than I wanted to know them.

Eventually, I was as hysterical as she was. Drunk out of my mind, and hysterical. I stormed to her nursery and grabbed her fiercely from the cot and held her up in front of me, screaming at her to shut up.

She didn't. She got louder.

I took her to my own room, as good as threw her on the bed. I'd lost it by that point. I felt like crap, my life was in pieces, I'd got this stupid pathetic howling little person in front of me and it was all HIS fault. The bastard who had raped me a year earlier.

I hated him, for all the pain I was in, and for her pain too actually; it was his fault she existed after all. Everything about that night was his fault.

But he wasn't there. I couldn't take my hatred out on him. I couldn't tell him how much he'd hurt me and messed up my life.

So I told her. Took my hate out on her.

Mothers are meant to tell their children of the pretty, lovely, fluffy things in life. But that night, I told my three month old baby how it felt to be raped. How it felt to be violated. And about the intense crippling pain of having someone you don't want inside you. And when I was done with all that, I told her how those things had happened to me and now she was nothing but a reminder of it. Of them.

And that I hated her for it.

You can tell me she was a baby. You can tell me that she didn't understand. But I was there, drunk or not. I heard her wailing get more desperate, more heart rendering and believe me, she knew, and I knew, and the worst thing was, I couldn't have cared a less. I just wanted her to stop being so pathetic and shut the hell up.

Which was when I did it. I reached for the pillow and I brought it down over her and then brought my body down on top of it. Then I left it there, until the screams became cries and the cries became whimpers and the whimpers became silence.

Until I thought she was dead.

And then, let me tell you, that silence sobered me up more quickly than anything ever had in my life. And with the sobriety, came regret and feelings of disgust and horror and fear. I pulled myself up, did likewise with the pillow then leant over the edge of my bed and vomited before I'd even had chance to check she was ok.

Which she was of course. Because Olivia was strong and brave and a fighter who when I eventually found the courage to look back at her, just stared at me defiantly before letting out yet another bloodcurdling scream.

I didn't care anymore though. At that moment, noisy, screaming little madam or not, she was alive, and in spite of all the hatred, all the bile I'd spat at her that evening, I was glad of it. For both our sakes.

I bundled her in my arms trying to comfort her, trying to take her pain away, and as I did so I made a different decision, the decision that was that I was never, ever going to hurt her again.

I swore I wouldn't.

If only, quite frankly, if only.