Flood..

I don't know how it started - it was just words. Then the expression and venom in his face detonates in me and the world shatters with the taste of porridge and oranges (the breakfast I was eating on that day - when he smashed the kitchen and damaged my car and I couldn't run or not run, just scream and hide).

I hear and feel the terror I felt each time I didn't know...and it is here, right now. I'm not it. This is real. This thing that keeps on. The hatred and attack that happens in response to me asking for it not to be, asking for rage to be put aside. I speak because I can't take it...and not being able to take it always gets this response. More. And now my rising panic is magnified because I get exactly the same response from my husband when I ask him to disarm rage..until there is only staring straight ahead and silence. Like death in life, or a life in death. No life, no love. No joy. shut down. Lock out.

I lock myself into my bedroom and let my panic burn.

Then I access my anger. I go tell him that I am triggered and he says, 'I know, because of dad' and I say no, because of YOU, it was you...You are the cause, you.

And the start of this was food. I said that he ate all the peanut butter, I was putting away a new jar. He eats things that he hasn't bought and doesn't replace them unless I point it out. He was angry.The expression in his face? Then I was in full playback, the argument - but there was no argument just him berating me for telling him that he had done something wrong and me saying, 'but it is true, and please, please stop speaking at me like this!'

No one has ever suggested that we get family therapy, or offered it. I've suggested it and guess what...It is as if no one considers what the fall-out from the detonation of psychosis is like for the rest of the family. There is no safe way for me to tell him how I feel. No way for him to hear, in a safe, contained space that he made me feel so vulnerable...and bullied.

And right now, as we stand in the kitchen I am scared. I'm scared by all his talk about serial killers and the photo of him dressed as Joker. I'm scared.

I don't think he knows this until I say it. I shouldn't have said it, not here, not now...but then he meets me with anger again and I hear myself say, 'you should be living somewhere else...'

Why didn't he pause when the impact of my words hit home?

I will continue to be terrified until he steps into that space, that gap, that blown-wide-open hole where love should be and says, "Oh mom, I'm so sorry...I didn't realise. I never wanted to make you feel that way" But I think he did want to make me feel that way, and I can't know otherwise...

There is no space for all I've disconnected, pushed aside, ignored in order to prevent myself screaming and running. The amount of terror I pushed aside for love, to protect my son from himself, from sectioning, from his own fears. He is telling me how useless I am, how unloving, how...and my ears are ringing, I can't hear...I go behind the locked door of my room. Fill my ears with ear-buds and  music. I'm aware that he is shouting. All I see and feel and hear is memory. The smashing, the smearing and feeling that underneath it all a bottomless lake of hatred and resentment, aimed at me - evidenced by the way it stopped, how he was perfectly polite and rational when the police came in. And I can't think, I can't breath. Tears flood my world.

At dinner time I checked my phone. Usually there is a text from my husband, but I guess that's only because I text him. Nothing. I break apart. shatter like mercury, heavy, spinning...full of poison.

I unlocked the door and went back into the house. Silence. Another wave of playback. Like the night he tried to commit suicide. I want to call for help, I want to phone my husband. I can't, I hear his angry reply 'What do you want me to do!' I phone Josh. His phone is off. It takes me half an hour to compose an emotionless text to my husband.

"I shouted at Josh and he has gone. I'm in full flashback"

Right now, writing this; how much do I hate myself, blame myself...how to measure agony...