Dear Javairia:

March 15 was your birthday. And “another fight of mum and dad began”. The next day, March 16,”the fight got worse”. She took you and your younger brother out of the home.. you went back home where your mother lived, he hit her real bad, dragged her by the hair to the master bedroom, she left the master bedroom to the laundry room. You alone followed her, “intuitively went along” after her. In the laundry room, she “picked up the bottle of Phenol liquid or something and drank it all up”.

You started “screaming for help the moment she went near the bottle area. Nobody was coming”, she went for the bottle of phenol, you tried to take the bottle away from her, she pushed you away and drank it. “No, mum.. No, please no.. pleased don’t do this” you begged her, “please someone come for help”, you cried out.

As you tried to save her life, she looked at you with “silent eye contacts… Those eye contacts were very cold and angry.. (eyes) full of anger/ coldness, and nothing else. Not even sadness”.

Your story, Javairia, is breaking my heart. As I read it at first I felt dizzy, I lay down but it didn’t help, so I walked around, did some chores.. I googled phenol, it reads that a small amount of it is very poisonous, so if she indeed drank phenol, it must have been a very, very small amount, diluted in water or the like, so overall it didn’t lead to seizures and symptoms that required hospitalization. If it was phenol at all. I don’t know if .. she did it to get attention only, knowing it wasn’t dangerous.

But you watching her, following her, begging her to not do it is breaking my heart. It is devastating. I have tears in my eyes. I am so  sorry this happened to you.

And I think that I feel so badly because I had similar experiences myself, as my mother too did similar things.

That coldness in her eyes, I know that look. I know those silent, cold, angry eyes. I remember them well.

I am so  sorry, Javairia. This kind of experience, it is a good thing that you shared about it, and it is a good thing for me to read it and to re-experience some of the horror of how it felt for me too. It feels badly but it’s good for me. So thank you for sharing this very, very private personal experience.

Next, I will go for my walk, I know that the chill air will help me feel better. When I return, I will write to you again.

anita