Flashbacks

It has been over forty years and there are still triggers to the time when I was a young child. My mother has outlived all but one child and though at 91 years of age I gave her credit at times for her survival beyond the normal. I have come to look at suicide a little differently over the years. I don't think it Is normally a cry for help but a manipulative and selfish move. My mother asked recently why am I still here. I wanted to shout " because you are being punished for what you did to six children." She has been using threats of suicide as means of manipulation . If I don't take her in she will kill herself etc. Her behavior has brought to surface the many bad memories but one in particular.
I was ten years old. My age of awakening. Though I have seen my mother extremely violent situations from breaking objects, throwing things to threatening with a gun and knife, this one moment haunts me. Mother wasn't your typical loving parent even when we were ill it was my father who paced the floor holding us and trying to calm us down. He has this hum sound ahhh haa ahhh haa in a slow way to try to calm. One night my mother and father were arguing and my mother came into my bedroom she laid a butcher knife and she slid it under my bed pillow and than got up without removing the knife. I got up for school the next morning and as I began to make my bed I peaked under the pillow to find the butcher knife still there. I was afraid to touch it or move It in anyway. I put the pillow back over it and went off to school. Wondering as I had many times whether my mother would succeed in killing my father or herself.  I couldn't help but look under the pillow when I got home to find out that the knife had been removed.
With my mothers current threats of suicide I find myself caught fresh in the  memory of the butcher knife under my pillow and standing behind her as she shot through the doorway of the bedroom at my father. There were so many bad memories but these two haunt me more than even some of the worst ones. I want them to go away but they are with me day and night. I want to be free of them but they repeat themselves over and over in my head.