Glad to Have Found WTO & Coping with a Long Visit

[Guest guest]

So at nearly 50 years of age, after seeing a story in Time magazine, I

finally put a lifetime of baffling clues together, and suspecting BPD

was the unwelcome guest in my life, went into therapy to deal with my

mother's upcoming visit.

On the therapist's advice, I picked up Stop Walking on Eggshells, and

am pretty well convinced that my nearly 70 year old mother - who meets

9 of the 10 criterion - probably has BPD and all the weirdness of my

relationship with her has a framework, if not meaning. And then I

find there's this enormous online community of people who have similar

shared experiences and I'm just floored by the whole thing.

The anger I've felt, and the confusion, and the resentment have

meltedm for the time being, into enormous sorrow for all she and I

have lost in our lives; that all those doctors she's spent the last

ten years seeing for dozens of occasionally real but mostly imagined

ills never ever thought to send her for mental health evaluations --

even after I spoke to several of them myself, in the last couple of

years, urging them to help her get the right kind of help, and urging

her to get help.

I know she had a complicated and troubled childhood, and I'm so sorry

she's lived a lifetime of ruined relationships with this. And I'm so

incredibly grateful that somehow I overcame all the bizarre stuff of

my own childhood to have such a remarkable, close, healthy and

successful family of my own. I don't know how I've earned this, and I

don't know why my mother didn't.

And now things have come to a head, and I've managed to persuade her

to come up from Miami to Tampa, where I live, to visit several doctors

here to see what's really going on with her health. She's been oddly

agreeable about the whole thing, as opposed the daily incomprehensible

wailing on the telephone about how much pain she was in and how I just

didn't understand and how everyone else in my life came before her,

and if I loved her I'd come down to Miami, that precipitated all this

to begin with. (And there's been no wailing since!)

Does she really need that hip replacement that she got just a year ago

revised? (I doubt it.) Does she really need to have her shoulder

broken and reset to treat a torn rotator cuff? (I doubt it.) Does she

really need both knees replaced. (Again, I doubt it.) Will the

pyschiatrist I've set her an appointment with be able to see what

needs to be seen, or will she be in one of her remarkable charming and

lucid phases? (And for that matter, can anyone recommend an

appropriate mental health professional in the Tampa area?)

My oldest daughter, who's 20, has Asperger's Syndrome and still lives

at home. I'm sending her to stay with her grandfather for at least a

week of my mother's visit. My mother makes life difficult and

uncomfortable for my daughter, whom she keeps claiming to want to get

to know. My other daughter, who's 19, will be home briefly from

college while my mother's here, but she's pretty savy and will be

fiine. My 16 year old son is sweet and good natured, and we've been

talking about BPD.

I just started learning about boundaries and how to maintain them,

both at the therapist's and through SWoE. But this is such an open

ended visit -- I can't see where it might lead or how things might go.

I don't really want her in our home very long. My feelings for her

are so mixed.

She violates personal space and personal things, going through drawers

and cabinets, address books, letters, anything she can find. She

feigns falls, breaks into supposedly uncontrollable weeping and

demonstrations of love, brings up strange stories from our past, that

I can never remember whether they actually happened or whether she's

making them up, makes completely inappropriate jokes and innuendos.

I always feel like the rug's being ripped out from under my feet, or

like I'm a tilt-a-whirl ride, or the Mad Hatter's spinning tea cups.

I never feel safe with her, never happy, always cautious and

tentative, always waiting till the visit's over. She hasn't been over

since about a year and a half ago -- a visit that actually wasn't too

bad, but was only about three or four days in duration. This is the

longest visit we've had in probably 20 years.

How the heck am I going to get through this? I'll go back to reading.

Thanks for listening.

Terri