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By Root 531 0

day. Not that I needed any new excuses to feel bad about myself. My relationships with any new friends I made were all going wrong and the pressures were building up. On top of that we had terrible money problems. Steve’s salary only just covered the mortgage repayments and there was the cost of the petrol needed to get him to and from work. When Sophie was born, she had to be dressed and equipped completely from car-boot sales or with hand-me-downs from friends and Steve’s family. We could hardly afford to feed ourselves properly. For Christmas we were only able to give Emma six Caspar videos, which we’d been able to get for a pound each. She was so excited about them that it was one of the best Christmases she ever had, but we felt terrible. ‘Another Caspar video!’ she exclaimed in wonder as she unwrapped each one.

As soon as Sophie was sleeping through the night I took a job as a cleaner to try to help with the money. I would work from seven in the evening to three in the morning, scrubbing toilets and everything else, but the strain, along with everything else, was too much. I had to give it up after a few weeks.

One of the things I was fed up with was all of us having different names. If we were going to be a family, then we should do it properly.

‘Let’s get married,’ I said to Steve one evening and he happily agreed. ‘The girls can be our bridesmaids.’

I always found life easier to cope with when I was busy and had things to plan. A wedding was a great distraction from the clouds forming in my brain, even if we couldn’t invite most of the people who were important to us, but once it was all over I was back in the same life, with the same problems.

Once Sophie was old enough to start going to playgroup, there were a few hours a day when I had nothing else to do other than brood. Although the house we had moved into was nice enough, it was almost exactly the same layout as every council house I had ever had to live in with Silly Git, and when I was inside it I still didn’t feel I had really escaped. So many things could trigger a bad memory or a panic attack – something the kids might say or a smell I recognized from my childhood – and pictures would come flooding back, reminding me of the things I’d fought so hard to forget.

Over the next couple of years my drinking grew worse whenever I felt low. Every morning after dropping Emma at school and Sophie at playgroup, I would buy a couple of bottles of wine and another packet of paracetamols, some from this shop, some from that shop, and would spend the morning drinking and staring at the tablets, trying to pluck up the courage to take them and end it all. Every day I would bottle out and just get drunk instead.

I found the drink allowed me to have a cry and feel sorry for myself. When I was stone cold sober I would tell myself that there were plenty of people in the world who were worse off than me and I would force myself to get a grip. Once the wine had taken a hold, however, my grip would loosen, the tears would flow and I would weep for everything that had been taken away from me. I would become convinced that I was ruining everyone’s lives, including Steve’s and the girls’, and that they would all be better off without me.

I regularly considered all the possible methods of suicide and on more than one occasion crossed a busy road with my eyes closed. It seemed as if I had a guardian angel, however, because not only did the traffic miss me, but the various implements I used to try to slash my wrists never seemed to hit the right spot. Sooner or later, though, I was in danger of succeeding and Emma and Sophie would be without a mum.

One day I had all my hair cut off. When Steve left the house in the morning I looked as I always had, with long hair, when he came back in the evening it was all gone and I had shorter hair than him.

‘Yeah,’ he said, swallowing back his urge to say what he really thought, ‘no, I like it. Yeah, it looks great. No, really.’ It was a long time before he plucked up the courage to tell me just how shocked he had been by the