Growing up with a mother who had BPD was a baffling experience. For as long as I can remember there has always been something "wrong" with our relationship but it was only when I discovered BPD that I found out the problem was not all me. Up until then I had been told repeatedly, through words and through actions, that I was not good enough. Not a good enough daughter. Not a good enough student. Not a good enough human being. No matter what I did, it was never right. And it was never enough.
A BPD parent changes the rules from day to day. What was right yesterday is wrong today. For the child it’s sort of like being told the sky is blue one day and then yellow the next. My whole childhood was like that. I grew up thinking I was crazy.
My Nada is a high functioning BP. To my friends and much of the outside world, she seemed like a candidate for Mother Of The Year. My friends who slept over loved the special dinners she cooked for us and thought she was the greatest. They didn’t see the other side of her. Only I did. And that made me feel all the crazier. My friends would leave, my Nada would drink. Or she would rage. Or do the silent treatment and retreat to her room away from my brother and I, not speaking to me for days sometimes. One year I quit dance lessons because I couldn’t stand the pain in my knees anymore. Nada didn’t speak to me for a week. It didn’t matter that I quit because of pain, it mattered that Nada couldn’t live through me anymore. She liked having the "best" dancer as her daughter, liked the role she got to play with the other mothers and my instructor. It was all about Nada. My entire life was always about Nada. To this day, she is still bitter about my decision to quit dancing, to her it was a personal affront.
Growing up with Nada was like growing up as a non-person, I had no identity. If something happened to me, then my Nada "took" it from me and made it hers. She did this both with the good and the bad somehow. This is what it was like. I got raped. Nada raged at me for "making my father do this to her." (I was four) A friend of the family was sexually abusing me, she didn’t believe me. Later, when he went to jail for raping another girl, Nada said "when I think what he could have done to ME all those years I let him in our house." (He was strictly a pedophile and not interested in her 50 year old body) After she and my Fada split and I would cry and ask her why he didn’t want to see me and why his family treated me so badly, she would talk endlessly about all the terrible things they had done to her and how it felt to have them treat her own daughter this way etc. When I was stalked, (that’s a whole OTHER story) my Nada said, "well, think about how it feels for me to have MY daughter being stalked."
I didn’t grow up with any real sense of self. I was simply an extension of my Nada. She projected her feelings and beliefs onto me and I grew up thinking that was normal. I was not allowed to be a separate person. If I thought, said, or did anything different from my Nada then I’d get split as all bad and there would be hell to pay. I never really understood what I’d done wrong, I just knew that in my Nada’s eyes-- I WAS WRONG. And, to her, I was doing this on purpose. Everything about me was picked at, my clothes, my looks, my friends, nothing was immune.
And what Nada said--went. No arguing. I was scared to death to disagree with her. I thought I’d be nobody if she didn’t love me. I mean, whose mother doesn’t love them? Think of all the stereotypes there are about mothers. So, I bought huge birthday presents for her and did a Mother’s Day extravaganza every year. I played along with the "best friend mother/daughter" image she wanted portrayed to her friends and family. I sacrificed my childhood, friends, identity, you name it. And I didn’t even really know I was doing it. There was nobody around me growing up who told me that this wasn’t normal. My family talked about how lucky I was and how grateful I should be. For a kid of a BP we grow up in Oz. We don’t even know Kansas exists. There are no other options. We learn to think everyone lives this way. Or else we secretly know that something is wrong and we work all the harder to hide what is going on in our house. But usually that’s not because we’re ashamed of our Nada/Fada, it’s because we think WE’RE the one causing the problems and if people saw what we were really like, we’d be left with no one.
Like many BP’s, my Nada would drink. She would pass out on the dining room floor. It took a year of therapy for me to finally understand that she was an alcoholic. Here I thought she just liked to nap on the floor. That’s what kind of denial I was raised with. If Nada said she didn’t have a problem, then that was it. She was middle class and drank wine spritzers, in Nada’s world that makes her a social drinker. And what Nada said went. My ability to see reality was virtually non-existent back then.
What BP parents do to their kids is hard to put into words. Everything gets distorted and twisted. My experience of growing up with a Nada left me thinking I was crazy. Nada would do or say things and then rewrite history and deny them all. She would flip things onto me, say I said things I never said or did things I never did--then I would be punished for them. She’d phone and rage at me and then next time we spoke she’d pretend nothing happened. One time she kicked me out of the house and when I left, she wanted to know why I was leaving. That night I was doing an event for my work and she was there and pretended everything was fine. So long as someone else was within earshot, otherwise she wouldn’t even speak to me. Her favorite line is "I’ve lived my life for you" and up until now, I’ve been pre-programmed to respond to that kind of guilt.
With a BP parent the child often gets left wondering what they did wrong. They learn to take all of the problems of the relationship onto themselves. It can be crippling. Often a child of a BP parent doesn’t even know they are entitled to happiness or a life of their own, things that seem so basic. And then one day some of us discover that there IS a Kansas. Maybe we’re talking about our childhoods with someone and we start to notice the look of horror on the other person’s face as we describe what is "normal" to us. Or if not horror, sheer puzzlement or sometimes disbelief. And we start figuring out that maybe things in our family were not okay and maybe we’re not all bad. And that’s the start, our beginning to ask questions of ourselves. Realizing that we DO have separate selves apart from our families of origin, or at least that we should, that we are entitled to that. And as we make these discoveries and figure out who we are and what we want we begin the healing journey that takes us out of Oz and into Kansas one step at a time.
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