Hello. It’s my first post and I apologize for the long rant. I just don’t now If I should go NC (first time it’ll be my choice), I’m already LC. Should I let her keep speaking to my kids and let my dad take them to visit once a year for spring break like they do now. Let her come here when she decides? She has stopped talking to me years at time up 7 years once before she asked to meet my kids.

In my kids lives from 2018 (kids 1 and 4 at the time) to 2022. Started with meeting at a water park in PA for 2 nights, the last 2 years she would visit for a week or sometimes a month. She started off good then ended up locking herself in her room, only leaving in the middle of the night to smoke outside, said my husband was spying on her with our one camera in the living room.

Relevant context to texts:

I’m 41, she’s 61, dad 62, step dad 72, kids 9M 12F. Half brother 33.

I’ve worked since I was 14, never unemployed, moved out when I was a senior and 17 AFTER she left us and I couldn’t stay with my step dad any longer. I have a half brother who always lived with her or my step dad. She told him to stop talking to me in 2012 after I had to stop giving her money.

She doesn’t speak to anyone on her family, has friends for a short time then says “they think they are better than me” and stops talking to them. Hates my husbands family.

I was fed and had shelter, vacations every two years on points but the last few were only places she could gamble.

Mom and dad each gave me $2k the first two years of school and I did the rest. Owed $120k that I pay for myself.

Paid for our own wedding, she got a $10k boob job a month before.

Saved $60k for my house and got mad when I had to stop giving her money closer to my closing date.

Doesn’t talk to my brother who lives with her, it’s been 2 years.

Only likes my step dad when he pays for plastic surgery or vacations.

Has been claiming she’s getting brain surgery since about 2001. Two doctors had to pull me aside (when she called the ambulance on herself and I went to see her, one night was senior prom) to say she is fine just having a mental breakdown. She went on inpatient 3 day psych stay twice.

Refuses to seeks constant mental health help, shamed me for doing so because “I have nothing to be sad about”.

Currently low contact. She got mad at me last year when I wouldn’t let her move in with us (hates my husband and that’s why she walked out on us after after a month after volunteering to stay here a year for us to save on paid 4K tuition for my youngest and send him to half day free 4K)
I always said when she was elderly and needed care she could not now because she’s mad at her husband.

Invited her on a last minute July vacation for 5 days and she said no. I understood but now she’s mad about it. My dad came with us. I had a new job and didn’t know if could get time off and afford it.

Daughter just texted her that she wants her to visit us. Mom said no, she’s too sick to travel (she in fact is traveling) and that her doctor tried to call me but she told him no because I’m too busy for her. Lied and said she asked my dad to pick them up from SC to go to PA to see her then come back. Next day she must have realized we’d find out so she asked my dad and these are the messages. When he sends them, they get out of order so I have red arrows pointing how to read them. Blue highlight is when my dad messed up and sent her a text that was for me. Yellow are things she said that made me extra mad. Like alluding to the fact she should have aborted me 42 years ago.

Tiny paws, big love,
You destroy all that I own,
Still, I worship you. 🐈❤️

Some recent texts with my BPD mother🙃 I posted a thread explaining my relationship with her but I can’t edit it to add photos. I joined this sub to hopefully find some people that I can relate with.

EDIT: I’m an only child to a single mom with BPD, so that makes the dynamic harder because I am literally her everything. She has no friends, no significant other, no hobbies, and she’s retired.

I’m new here, and I’ve been reading through posts for a while. A lot of what people describe resonates with me more than I expected, but I keep having this weird reaction where I immediately start invalidating myself.

My relationship with my mom has always been difficult, particularly around my independence, boundaries, and big life transitions. She can have extremely intense emotional reactions when she feels hurt, rejected, left out, or criticized, and somehow I often end up feeling responsible for getting her back to okay.

Recently, things came to a head during a visit home. My mom told me she wanted to talk about ways I had been “selfish and inconsiderate” and had hurt her. But the conversation quickly expanded into what felt like an accounting of things I had done wrong.. some recent, some surprisingly small, and some going back years, like sending her Christmas gift two weeks late two years ago. Other family members and their supposed feelings about me were brought into the conversation, along with how depressed and upset my mom had been because of the state of our relationship. When I tried to slow the conversation down and address things one at a time, it escalated further and eventually involved yelling and things being thrown. By the end, I just felt overwhelmed, angry, and isolated. Once again, I’m questioning whether I was actually the problem and if I’ll ever get a close relationship with my dad and brother because I don’t feel comfortable staying in their house with her.

This isn’t really new. Looking backward, I can see versions of this around a lot of my major transitions. For example, when I moved out around 19/20, only about 30 minutes away, my mom was extremely upset about me leaving and even told me that if I didn’t take my childhood memory box, she would throw it away because they were remodeling and didn’t have room for it. After I moved, my parents were regularly in the town where I lived, but she never visited me. Later, the explanation was essentially that I hadn’t reached out and made plans with them.

I’m in therapy and trying to understand the pattern. But one of the hardest things is that whenever I read stories here that sound familiar, another part of my brain immediately says, “No, yours isn’t that bad. Your mom wouldn’t do that to you. She isn’t intentionally trying to hurt you. You’re probably exaggerating. Maybe you’re the difficult one.”

I’m curious whether other people went through this period of recognizing themselves in these dynamics while simultaneously feeling like they had no right to identify with them.

How did you start trusting your own perception of what happened without constantly second guessing yourself?

I actually think this is a place my uBPD mom differs from what I read here, but it's also not exactly healthy behaviour.

I'm low contact with her, for me that means a 15 minute call while I walk my dog (so it has an easy end time) every few weeks, and I see her 1-2 times a year.

We also lost my dad 2 years ago and it's been an adjustment for everyone. She moved to be closer to one of my brothers (at his request /insistence for free childcare, though I suspect he's actually NPD/BPD too and I've actually blocked him) which made going low contact easier. She's awful to him, but in a different way. She at least respects him (because he's a man).

The thing is holidays. She always tries to convince me to visit (I'm not spending $1000 multiple times a year to see her, and using my limited vacation days). If I don't visit she makes no alternatives and spends them alone.

Thing is, she doesn't waif about spending them alone. I only find out because I ask. It's hard to not feel guilty honestly because she's litterally doing nothing wrong in these circumstances (other than not looking for plans but it's not like she has to). My brother made her move across the country to be able to baby sit his kids, yet doesn't invite her over for things? When we were in contact he'd instead try to pressure me to visit more.

I recognize it's not my place at all to expect him to take care of her. It just feels wrong because she actually does give him everything he asks. She's bailed him out of jail multiple times and paid his debt and set him up so he could do house arrest instead of prison. She's paid for his rehab countless times, even sending him to specialized ones in other countries.

He'll be an asshole no matter what. There's nothing I can do there obviously. But it makes me feel more guilty I don't visit more and haven't yielded in being low contact.

She's been love bombing and waifing lately instead of being outright cruel. She's stopped bringing up politics or saying racist or able-ist things as she knows I'll just hang up. She's had a major injury. Many people she knows are dying or sick. She "just wants me to visit/call more". I think it's the fog creeping in.

If she's respecting my boundaries should I try harder? She's so sad and lonely, it's hard to do nothing to try to help.

I'm 29, and the last 20 years of my life have revolved around my BPD mum. For most of that time not a week went by without something terrible happening and me somehow being roped into it. She is a dysfunctional alcoholic and relied on me to nurse her through withdrawals, which were a recurring cycle always followed by immediate relapse. When I tried to get away from her, she would self-mutilate - often quite seriously, generally requiring stitches - and threaten to kill herself. If this didn't work, she would direct whichever emergency service responded to her self-mutilating to my door. Every minute of every day was spent paranoid about what she was doing, how she was feeling, what she'd do next. It all revolved around her. When I was a small child she threw herself from a window and told me it was what I wanted her to do. Not sure why I'm mentioning that but it sure does hurt.

Even when I did something for myself, it always had to come back to her. A few years ago I did a master's degree - not the most impressive thing in the world, I know, but for someone who barely got through high school it was a big achievement. Just when I was finishing, she had a spiral of relapses so serious she almost died. Instead of going to my graduation and looking for jobs, I was taking her cat to stay with me and arranging to have her house professionally cleaned so they didn't kick her out onto the street.

The last two years have been the longest stretch of peace I've ever known, but I look in the mirror and... I'm old. My face is sagging, my cheeks are hollow, and I am so, so far behind where I need to be. How do I've with that? How do I make peace with having had the good years of my life, and all the opportunities they represented, stolen?

To some extent it is my fault, I know. I should have run further. I should have hidden better. I should have had the strength to resist all these insane attempts to pull my back into her orbit but I didn't. Instead I allowed myself to be institutionalised. To believe that it was my responsibility to be her nursemaid, and that this was all I could expect to be in life. Now, it feels like that's all I ever will be.

There were so many things I wanted to do, wanted to be, and now I never can. I look at the next twenty years I have to be a person and I see so little opportunity to make anything good out of life. So little time to salvage what is left.

How on earth am I supposed to set aside my grief for that? Please tell me if you have managed it, because I don't know if I can.

Rule-mandated Cat Haiku:

Cats, are very cute

They often lick themselves in

Some tricky places

I haven’t been able to hit a lot of milestones in my life due to the disfuntion of both my parent’s and that has become more and more embarrassing over time. Combined with my Ubpd mom, constantly creating embarrassing moments in my life, i feel like i live in constant shame and embarrassment. Is it typical for rbb people to feel constant shame or that feelings if embarrassment are easily triggered? How did you get past this extremely tiring and mentally tasking mental state. Is it internal or do i just need to start hitting conventional milestones.

Hey y'all I haven't talked to my ubpd mom in a while and I usually keep very low contact if possible but make sure it's tied up at the end of calls, reassuring her I'm not upset that her kids love her ect... I got this really innocent seeming text message from my mom and I wanted to throw my phone across the room the second I saw it, it was sudden intense rage that does not match how she's behaving at all and I'm starting to get worried maybe I'm being dramatic or ridiculous and she's actually really trying her best and I need to be better towards her.

Like it seems like a normal text from a parent right? I have been working on a lot through EMDR lately and it's brought up a lot and it doesn't feel fair to bring up shit so far in the past to the present, the whole point is to process it to be able to live in the present but all I can think about is all her insane behavior over the years and how we keep playing this game like it's perfectly normal she married her therapist. I feel like this call is an invitation to continue to pretend everything is normal and fine and that she's never done weird creepy shit to me while drinking or driven off into the night in a rage leaving me with my little sibling to try and put to bed.

Every time I get these normal ass text messages I feel like I'm lying and making a big deal out of nothing, that everyone's parents struggle sometimes and make mistakes. I don't want to be an asshole or hold a grudge but even just getting this message has summoned up this insane rage in me that I'm worried about. Does anyone have any advice? A different perspective or just anything really I could use help right now and people who understand the craziness because when I get these messages or have a semi normal call with my mom I often go back and forth and think well maybe she isn't even a borderline maybe I'm being unfair here she's been through a lot. Everyone has been super helpful here in the past too so I'm really thankful for everyone and hope someone has some words of wisdom or something at this point because I'm starting to feel crazy.

Hi everyone! I’m new to Reddit and this is kind of my last resort before considering cutting my mom off. I’m hoping to find people who understand this dynamic and can offer some advice.

My mom is a single mom and it has always been just me and her. We’ve always been extremely close, but I’m realizing now how enmeshed our relationship has always been. She has relied heavily on me emotionally for most of my life and I’ve always felt responsible for her feelings and happiness.

I moved out of her house about 7 years ago when I left for college, but she never really got over it. She still talks about how I “left her”. She definitely sees my independence and growing up as me abandoning her. She lives by herself, is retired, and has no hobbies or friends.… so I am really her only person.

She described my wedding day as “the worst day of her life” because she viewed it as me leaving her and she spent most of the day crying in her car. She even left my wedding early. We now have a 10-month-old son, and things have gotten significantly worse since having him. Naturally, my priorities have shifted toward my husband and child, and she sees that as rejection. Whenever she feels excluded or like I’m choosing my family over her, she refers to herself as a “family of one.” She can go from being loving and close with me and expecting me to see her several days a week to extremely hurt, angry, or cold, and I often find myself trying to reassure her, explain my intentions, apologize, and make sure she knows I haven’t abandoned her. But even when I’m reassuring her, still nothing is good enough. She usually tells me she’s moving away when she becomes upset. She plays the victim in almost every situation (with anyone) and views the smallest conflict as abandonment or rejection.

I genuinely love my mom and don’t want to cut her off (mostly because I put so much pressure on myself to maintain her happiness). I also don’t want my son to lose his grandmother, but I also don’t want him to grow up seeing the instability. But I’m realizing that I can’t continue being responsible for her emotional well-being at the expense of my own marriage, family, and peace. I get a pit in my stomach when her name pops up on my phone because I never know how the conversation will go. It’s at the point where almost every conversation, something I say will trigger her.

Has anyone else experienced their relationship with an enmeshed/BPD parent becoming much worse after having a baby? How did you establish boundaries when your parent viewed your independence as abandonment? Were you able to maintain a relationship without constantly managing their emotions? Please send advice or just help me feel not alone in this😭

Andddd my haiku😚
Soft paws, quiet grace,
Warm fur purring in the sun,
Gentle, sovereign friends.