Mother's Day is my least favorite holiday since my mother died 53 years ago, when I was 10. She committed suicide one weekend when I went to Brownie Scout camp in Michigan. It was a Sunday afternoon. All the mothers who were supposed to come and pick us up were there. Except mine.

When I got home, to our small Tudor house in Detroit, I ran inside looking for my mother. Carrie, our housekeeper, told me," Your mother is upstairs in her room and she said not to disturb her." I didn't care. I ran upstairs and knocked on her door. "Mommy, I'm home," I called. But there was no answer. I banged on her door. No answer. "You don't love me. I hate you. I wish you were dead," I shouted. But there was still no answer. I turned the doorknob since the door was unlocked, and walked in. My mother was in bed, like she was sleeping. But she didn't look right. She was lying on her side, facing away from me. I touched her face, turning it toward me. It was all blue. I don't know how I knew she was dead since I'd never seen a dead person, but I knew.

I ran downstairs, out the door, down the block and around the corner to a doctor's house whose family were friends with my mother. They must have called the police or fire department. Then they walked me back home. By now my dad and my brother, Tom, were there, home from spending the afternoon together. My parents divorced when I was one year old but Tom and I spent a lot of time with our dad.
Firemen were carrying my mother down the stairs and out on a stretcher, but she was all covered up. I stood there next to my dad. My brother, who was eleven, went into the backyard to shoot baskets.

Most people treated us then as if nothing big had happened. But, in school, everyone looked at me differently. It was like the way my father taught me to regard people he knew who had a number tattooed on their arm, people that had been in a war. They were fragile. I was told not to "bother" them.

Fifty-three years ago, people didn't think kids should talk about death. They went out of their way to avoid it. So nobody talked to us about her death. We were told simply that she died in her sleep, but at some level I knew that was not true. Neither my brother nor I went to my mother's funeral. Someone said it was better for us to remember her as she had been. That our last memory of her shouldn't be in a coffin. My last memory of her was worse than anything I would see at any funeral.

For years I asked my dad if it was true that my mother just died in her sleep. I told him that I thought that she had killed herself. "What would make you think a thing like that?" he asked. Finally, when I was 28, my mother's closest friend, Irma, told me what I already knew. My mother had killed herself. She had taken pills and left a note. It said," Take good care of Jane, she's just like me." It was a relief to hear it. Whatever else, I didn't kill her.

In my thirties, I had a daughter of my own, but my husband left when she was fourteen months old. He never said why he didn't want to stay married. He just wanted to be with a woman he worked with instead of me. And he didn't want to pay child support. Our divorce was prolonged and acrimonious. It took years. It was a terrible time.

I began seeing a therapist and taking Parnate, a MAO inhibitor-an old fashioned anti-depressant, but it didn't seem to help. I was haunted by fears when I was alone with my daughter Katherine, anxious about how I would make it alone. When I wasn't working I would often lie in bed and cry. I was not equipped to be a single mother. I didn't know what normal behavior for a mother was. Sometimes Katherine would try and cheer me up, and often she was successful. Other times she would just stay in her room and play, having a tea party for her bears and using the little Peter Rabbit Wedgwood tea set I had bought for her and which she still has. I felt better when I saw her playing and having fun with her bears, Goldie, Teddy and Valentine. I felt guilty that I had turned into the same depressed mother I had. I loved her but when I became really depressed I was inaccessible.

I had promised Katherine that I would never leave her, as my mother left me. Yet one afternoon, when she was 12, after I had a fight with the man I had been dating, I went home, feeling despondent, alone, and abandoned. I just wanted the pain to end and I took Dalmane, Halcion and whatever other pills were in the house. Apparently Katherine came home from school and found me as I had found my mother, except that I was still alive. She called our neighbor, a doctor, who got me to Lenox Hill Hospital. They pumped my stomach and admitted me to the psychiatric ward where all the exit doors were locked. I stayed there for a week.

I know now that suicide is devastating to the people you love most in the world. You'd think I, of all people would have known that. Yet I had never dared to feel the horror, terror and anger of my own mother's death. If you don't succeed, then the people you love most will be angry with you. I was surprised at that. I expected my friends would understand the pain I was in. Katherine was the angriest person of all.

When she was 15, in a fit of anger, she told me that she hated me and wished I were dead, I almost laughed. I couldn't believe how easy it was for her to spit that out. Unlike her, I was never able to be a teenager who thought my mother was a jerk and a source of embarrassment. I never got to outgrow my need for my mother.

For years Katherine didn't forgive me. She saw my depression and my attempt to kill myself as grievous character flaws, as if I didn't try hard enough to be happier. She didn't accept the mental health school of behavior. Her memory was of her having to mother me. When she had asked me what was bothering me, I told her that I was missing my own mother. She is angry now that she had to even know about my mother. Maybe I should have kept it all to myself. She feels that I betrayed and abandoned her. What she doesn't yet understand, is that my act had nothing to do with her, as my mother's act was not because she didn't love me. A depressed person is consumed by their unhappiness. I have worked hard to get better. But the image of me as the sad mother seemed firmly burned into Katherine's brain. I wish she remembered all the "My Little Pony" movies I sat through with her, or that summer I drove seven hours every weekend to visit her at a horse camp in New Hampshire and do her laundry. What she remembers is how I tried to kill myself when I had promised her I wouldn't do what my mother did. She still doesn't think it's safe to love me again.

Katherine hates Mother's Day as much as I do. It reminds her of her own mother's failures. Still, in my family if you don't kill yourself, you live a long time. I used to wonder if I'd live long enough to win her back.

The other day she sent me an email. It said, "I don't always tell you I love you because I assume you know... So read between the lines, when I'm screaming bloody murder, what I'm really saying is I love you and appreciate you very much."

There's nothing I could get for Mother's Day that'll be better than that. I only wish could have said the same to my mother.

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