With my BPD daughter, most of the time when she calls it's two specific reasons:
1) To ask for help or money
2) To talk about anything random
I get why she'd call for #1 if she can't pay a bill or whatever. But the random, senseless talk leaves me perplexed as well. Recently it was about how the smurfs could have a whole villiage of smurfs but only one girl.
Hi Pook,
I agree, that the overwhelming majority of conversations with my pwBPD are to ask for help or money.
I suspect I can translate the Smurfs conversation for you. My guess is your daughter is expressing some unresolved grievances and maybe feelings of rejection and self-doubt, possibly because she feels ongoing "rejection" by a society which used to have one-dimensional expectations for women, and she feels she doesn't fulfill those expectations, so she never really "fit in." I can say that I felt angered by the Smurfs when I was growing up, because the fact there was only one female in the village, who was portrayed as pretty and in need of rescue, was a message that girls are mostly unimportant and valued mainly for their looks. It wasn't just the Smurfs, but also the muppets (Miss Piggy was the only female puppet that I can recall, and surely the only one who primped in front of a mirror), the original Sesame Street--with ZERO female puppets that I can recall--plus Bugs Bunny and even the Superfriends, where Wonder Woman was the sole heroine. This trend continued into high school, when we read tons of classic books, but the only interesting female character who wasn't a passing date, prostitite or barely-mentioned mother was Lady Macbeth, and she plotted murder! Many classics have zero female characters: Lord of the Flies, Old Man and the Sea, The Red Badge of Courage, The Hobbit, Treasure Island, Moby Dick. I personally found it frustrating to write umpteen essays about "coming of age" books with no meaningful female characters I could remotely identify with. The unspoken message was that my gender (and by extension, I myself) was uninteresting and unimportant, especially if we did not fulfill conventional expectations of being pretty, meek and/or motherly. I recognize that things have changed massively in this millennium, and that scholastic reading lists have evolved, but there's still that lingering sting of growing up in a sexist environment. It might mean that your daughter thinks that she's not conventionally pretty, and couldn't fulfill society's expectations for women that were subliminally messaged to her when she was growing up through media and education. She might feel she has work extra hard to get attention and/or feel accepted. Maybe she still feels invisible, rejected or alienated--by society, by her friends, maybe by her family.
Maybe I can translate it like this: Traditional kids' media reinforce the notion that if you're not a pretty girl, then you're invisible in society. Girls and women in classic cartoons and books generally weren't featured for their character, their abilities, their good deeds, their clevernes, their humor, their friendships, whatever. They were the token, pretty love interests and one-dimensional. Thus it felt to me like I was expected to be a cookie-cutter girl. One response to that was to break the mold entirely. I feel like I did that, to some extent in my life, and it was liberating. But not "conforming" can come at a cost, because parents and some others close to me generally don't accept it, as my existence didn't meet their 1950s-style expectations.
Just my two cents.