Today

I can’t stop crying.

Not that this is unusual. There have been months, perhaps years, when I have cried most days.

Bink has not returned to her treatment centre. Perhaps just as well: there was no guarantee they would have her back, and another failure, a rejection, was the last thing she needed.

Perhaps, indeed, that’s why she had to walk out. Ever since she was first there, in December, they kept saying they didn’t have the resources to cope with her. She was kicked out then, for having a panic attack, and it took her and her psychiatrist two months, and numerous exhortations from both him and me that she must never again use the word “suicidal” – not even in the context of “I feel...” – to persuade them to have her back.

(So perhaps the lesson is, don’t go where you aren’t really wanted.)

Since when – despite my spending an hour writing to them that the one thing she needed was security; that what she needed, above all, was to know she was there for the next two months and they wouldn’t suddenly show her the door, for something she couldn’t help – every other day or so one of them wrote to me that she would have to leave... and perhaps it was less damaging to her mental health to jump, rather than be pushed.

So what now?

I had put all my hope – all of it – in this last year’s treatment plan. Why all your eggs in one basket, fool?

Because, fool, there was no other basket.

No baskets available. Not for many years.

What I am hating myself for, most of all, is that several times, over the last few weeks, she has said to me, in tears, “I so want to come home!”

I don’t think Bink has ever said that before.

And – fool that I truly am – I didn’t say, stop right there: we are borrowing Ben’s car now this minute and coming to pick you up.

Because I thought it would be irresponsible. Because I thought, at last, after many, so many years, Bink is getting treatment.

Because I thought, we can’t help her: we can’t get her well. How long have we tried, and not been able to!

But that’s not true, is it? Often and often and at least twice, we have picked up the pieces from someone else making her a lot more ill, and got her quite a lot better.

Just not completely well.

And now she has gone somewhere else, and someone’s else’s mother is looking after her, and she’s not taking my calls.

And all I have left is my tears.