Borderline Personality Disorder is Making Me Crazy!

Dear Reader,

I didn’t write yesterday. I needed to keep myself distracted from the situation at hand, so I did some spring gardening. Tidied up the roses (so Alice of me, don’t you think?). That, plus a glass of wine, and watching the stars on the red carpet last evening, served as a suitable outlet.

So, let’s get on with the discussion at hand. Anyone ever dealt with borderline personality disorder? This is the most recent psychiatric diagnosis attached to my stepdaughter. A label she wears proudly (and no longer takes medication for), as she now can say that I have been wrong all these years when I suggested she may be bipolar. I guess she believes the “borderline” portion of the illness implies it is a minor mental disorder. It doesn’t feel minor to those of us that must deal with her.

If you haven’t guessed by now, I am writing this blog anonymously, and no one except my husband even knows about the site. Although, I suspect that any friend or family member who knows me well, will know who AliceB is, I felt the need to keep things anonymous to protect the innocent, and in my stepdaughter’s case, the not so innocent.

For nearly 25 years she has put a strain on my relationship with her father and has never shown any sign of concern for any member of her family, including me. Now, if I were the evil stepmother portrayed in so many fairytales, this would be understandable. However, dear reader, while I have not been the perfect parent, I was a very good stepmom to her. The biggest mistake I made was to believe the various counselors we took her to when they said she had worked through her issues and recognized that her behaviors were inappropriate. I guess I wanted to believe she was just having adjustment issues and not a true mental illness. That was much easier to deal with, so I never took her to a shrink. Had I had the courage to do so, she and all those around her might be in a better place.

Tweedle Dee (as I will refer to her in this blog) will not make a good first impression upon you if you meet her in person. She is grossly overweight, although she had gastric bypass surgery about ten years ago. She managed to lose over 200 pounds of the 400 she weighed, but then gained back half of that as she prefers fast food to cooking. She rarely showers, so she usually smells. Her teeth are rotting and often coated with the remnants of the last chili dog she consumed, because she cannot find her toothbrush in the chaos she calls her apartment. The place is always dirty, and often the halls are impassible with clutter, stacks of dirty dishes with rotting food caked upon them (often with critters scurring about), and piles of clothing strewn across the place, clean and filthy interspersed, all wreaking of urine and sweat.

Now, if you were to speak with Dee on the phone, you might get a totally different picture of what she is like. She can be very charming and funny, and knows all the right things to say to make you believe she is a very normal person and mother to her two adorable children, who I will call Bug and Button. They say kids are very resilient, and these two need to be to deal with Dee and her husband Tweedle Dum. Dum just volunteered to be severed from his job (yes, I said volunteered), because he and Dee decided that getting a sure eight weeks of severance and the subsequent unemployment was too sweet a deal to pass up. Never mind that he has never held a job for more than two or three years, has no degree or certification to qualify him for most positions, and that the unemployment rate is at an all-time high. They can always go on welfare when the unemployment runs out.

I could write so much more, but I want to get to the current crisis we face with them. Last Thursday, Dee sent us an email (or as my husband calls it, a manifesto) of everything we do that is wrong when we have our grandchildren over. Things like take them to a Disney movie. Why how dare we do so without a prior discussion with her. And when the children get home they don’t want do anything for themselves, and it takes poor Dee days to get them straightened out. They ask Dee to make them lunch and dinner at scheduled times and to help them keep their room clean. We spoil them by having scheduled mealtimes for them and helping them make their beds. Did I mention that Bug is 7 and Button is 6?

In the email, she went on to chastise me for expressing concern over their unemployment. She said it allowed them to be free to do whatever they wanted and I was jealous of their freedom and it was none of my business anyway. We frequently catch her in lies, and while she admitted to these lies in the email, she said the lies were necessary to keep us at a distance. Us and the bill collectors.

The saga becomes even richer, in that last weekend they traveled out of state to see Dum's first child from an earlier marriage, a boy he had not had contact with for over eight years. Dee and Dum could not understand why we did not see such a trip as a priority. This boy needed his father! Was it because that child was not a blood relative (gee, last time I looked, neither Bug or Button are related to me by blood, but I love them unconditionally)? All we had tried to express to them was that they were unemployed, Bug needed to see the eye doctor for new glasses, and Button needed to see urologist, and that spending any extra money for a trip at this time might need to wait (afterall, it had waited this long). We also mentioned that the state had been looking for Dum for years about child support for Dum Jr., and they might need to be prepared to fork over a lot of back payments. No, that was not a concern for them. The lawyer who handled the divorce from Dum's first wife two years ago (yes, that means he was married to someone else when Bug and Button were born)said if they asked then they should demand a DNA test to put off the payments for as long as possible. Sure sounds like a good plan. Introduce yourself to a young, insecure boy as his father, and if asked for money then deny paternity. Dum and Dee have such wonderful parenting skills.

So, no they didn't wait. They bought a new car, because their old car couldn't make the trip. That actually made sense, as they truly needed a new car, but maybe not the expensive alarm system they decided to install to make sure no one tried to steal anything from the car.

As it stands, Dee stated she will contact us when she is ready to discuss if we will ever get to see the children again, and we are not to contact her. This is not the first time we have had to deal with her using her children as pawns in a game to try to manipulate and control us. While it hurts us, it hurts the children more. They truly love being with us, and I am certain they cannot understand why their parents are isolating them. For now, we are just waiting.

If you are reading this and have experience in dealing with someone with borderline personality disorder, please give me some advice. Should I just give up and walk away or is there a way we can have a decent relationship despite the illness? And more importantly, what should we do about the grandchildren? Dr. Phil, if you happen to read this, HELP!