I'm not having kids and my mom has been actively trying to kill herself since I told her
My mom gave up everything to raise me and I'm not going to say I'm ungrateful. She was fifteen when I was born, and her parents tried to force her to abort and went so far as bringing her to a clinic, but she fought the orderlies and actually ended up in a juvenile detention for a chunk of her pregnancy, after which she was disowned by her family. Then, when the birth went badly, she ended up needing a hysterectomy, so I was her only kid, and basically ruined her dreams of having a big family and living the life she'd always been told she'd have.
She worked hard to give me the things that she had growing up. I got the bedroom in our apartment, and she had the couch. She got a job working at a daycare, and with some government assistance and a lot of struggle, she was able to give me the kind of life that she said I was owed by blood. My bedtime stories were always about our family history, and some great thing or other that my ancestors did. She says we could trace our family history to the Mayflower, and that made us the original American blood. Her stories would always end with a fantasy about how, when I had kids, everything would be okay again, and we would get to have a real family and live happily ever after.
I do not want kids. I don't like kids. I don't want to be pregnant. I don't want to go through all the shit my mom went through. I never saw her get anything for herself in my whole childhood unless it was free, like a library book or something, and when I asked about it she said "that's what a mother does," and I don't want to be that. She runs her own daycare now, and she's always surrounded by kids, anyway, so when I told her my husband and I weren't planning on having any kids when we visited in Easter, I kind of figured she would be an adult about it. I mean, we're all adults now. She's in her forties. This isn't the teenager who told me those fantasies, and I'm a person, I'm allowed to make my own decisions.
She laughed at first, and then suddenly she was just staring at me with this hatred. I'll never forget the look on her face. It was never something I'd seen from her before, and she just asked "What was it all for then?" and got up and walked out. We got a call an hour later that she'd jumped off a bridge and was in the hospital. As soon as she woke up, she started raging and screaming at everyone to let her die, and she was placed under psychiatric hold, where she's been the past month. Every time I visit her, she begs me to let her die, and so I stopped going. I just can't see her like that. She hates me now, and she hates everything, and even though this woman never so much as raised her voice to me, they're saying she's been violent with everyone she comes in contact with, and all she does is ask to die. It's all she says. She wouldn't eat or drink unless they forced her. She tries to hurt herself with everything she gets and actually succeeded in damaging an eye badly.
I can't sleep. I can't stop thinking about it. I thought she was happy. I thought she would be glad that I was happy. I have no idea how to cope with this, but I'm not going to have a baby just for her. It wouldn't be fair to me, and it wouldn't be fair to the baby. I just don't know how to stop feeling like I'm the one who did this to her. She did everything for me. She spent every moment from the time she was fifteen years old trying to make my life good. She managed to pay for a private high school and have a college fund working in day care, and I know how insane that is, and the toll it took on her. She's had a heart attack before, and I love her, I really do, but I don't know how to stop hating myself for something that I don't even think I did wrong.