My mother tried

a bottle of gin, 'falling' down the stairs
(and maybe worse)
and finally, suicide
by swimming out to sea,
when she found that she was pregnant with me -
her life's trial, her life's curse.
She was a strong swimmer.
She then failed to have me adopted,
which brought her many years of woe,
because her left-handed, probably-cissy little boy
needed toughening up, her doctor-brother said,
her GP and various other pea-brains said.  Her own mother
hated left-handedness.  So I was corrected, then
sent at considerable financial cost
to an athletic school with incompetent teachers,
became a problem child
and teenager who stayed at home and read
Zola, Kafka and Dostoyevsky,
then a drop-out adult, an unemployable
lover of stones.
I shall honour my put-upon but valiant mother by succeeding
only in a quiet suicide -
the only noble death
- and (of course) no mourners at my graveside.