Your divorce lawyer ought to be able to provide some ideas?

If your daughter is in counseling, she might share that with the counselor.  No idea if another's child is put at risk makes an enforceable difference.

My SUV is a few years old and if I'm using cruise control it will do some limited level of lane assist but if my hands leave the steering wheel for more than about 10 seconds it alerts and stops the lane assist.

We're all getting up in years, so we feel for you.  My retirement income doesn't even pay for all my home expenses, so my son helps out.  The reality is that inflation and bills are going up faster than the COLA adjustments.

Hopefully you're aware that Social Security allows widows who reach retirement age to choose whether to file under their own work history or their spouse's work history, or - in the past - even a combination of starting with one and then continuing with the other.  That last option may not be offered any more.

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.

Hi everyone,

I recently got some news of an incident that occurred while my D was with her mom.  My D told me about it, although she was worried about telling me because she said her mom angrily demanded she promise NOT to tell me, and didn't want to suffer any blowback if she learned she told me (I said I would be discreet). 

The incident involved a drunk driving accident BPDxw caused.  Basically, they were returned from an event, and her mom had been drinking (daughter said the adults in the group had "a bunch of bottles of champaign").  In one car was BPDxw, her friend, and her friend's kids, and D was in the car behind watching this happen.

I guess, BPDxw tried putting her car in some kind of auto-pilot mode (this was not a Tesla, but an SUV with lane following assist), so she could stand in the sunroof while the car was driving. 

YES, with kids in the car, WHILE she was driving, she wanted to stand up in the sunroof, and feel the wind in her hair or whatever.  The car swerved dangerously the first time she tried it, and then she incredibly tried it again, and on the second attempt, the car veered off the road and hit a mailbox before coming to a stop in someone's yard.  A child in the car was apparently injured in the accident. 

I guess the car was still driveable, and they were able to get it home without getting caught, or anyone filing a police report, as far as I know. 

So my question:  How can I obtain evidence of this incident that would hold up in court? 

I'm thinking of calling the local PD, and asking if anyone reported any property damage like this, or the incident itself.  I think all the adults involved in the incident would deny it - even the parents of the child injured (they're that kind of people). 

According to my daughter, her step dad also drinks while driving... I don't know if her mom does, but I do know when her mom drinks, any self control goes out the window completely. 

Don't want to start an incident if it leads to nothing, but I also don't want to do nothing if it leads to my daughter being harmed if/when they do something like this again.  Also don't know if this is enough to go to court over...   Daughter mentioned living with me again, but said she was afraid of them being angry and abusive toward her during the time she would be at her mom's home if we flipped custody.

Thank you for responding. We are definitely among those parents who are just trying to walk the line between being supportive and enabling her. After we refused to let her come back home, she finally agreed to go to job corp, so we paid for her to camp at state parks and took her food until  there was an opening. She finally got a CNA license through job corp which also housed and fed her for 9 months. She had a job and apartment, with us unwisely subsidizing her. Then she moved to Colorado with a friend, and refused to work.  It came to head about five years ago when we first cut her off completely financially, because I finally said I was not working so she didn't have to.  She ended up on the streets, and even then, I was making calls trying find homeless shelters and mental health resources. She had a complete downward spiral which of course she blames me for because I wouldn't let her come home.
She ultimately did go back to work and find housing of sorts, and we started occasionally help8ng her out again. Of course, give her an inch and she takes a mile, and gradually we found ourselves enabling her again. Once again, she lost a job, only this time she had a boyfriend to support her. After realizing she was not putting in any effort to find a job, we cut her off again financially, except phone plan, car insurance, and copays for medical so she would start getting therapy for her bpd. We have refused to give her money for food or living expenses. The condition with the copays is she sends us photos of the receipts, so there is some accountability.
Then with the engagement, I did offer to pay for a wedding (my mom paid for mine, so it seemed the right thing to do.) It's ample, but not ridiculous, $10,000 from a very small retirement fund. I won't just give her the money, because she would spend it with nothing to show for it, and to be fair, she doesn't have many friends, and it will mostly be her sibings and my large extended family who would come, a total of about 50 people.
We ended up spending about that much for her brother's wedding, and will probably pay for her other brother, too, so I don't really think of it as enabling her, but with the wedding in November, and a couple of deposits made, not sure how to proceed.
It just seems like we're walking a tight rope. We are not sure yet what the prognosis for her dad is. They may decide surgery is too risky, or he may have the surgery (scheduled for mid September) and not make it. At this point, I don't have a lot of energy to deal with her. What she may not realize is that when her dad dies (whether this year or 10 years from now), my income will be be almost half what it is now, and I may not be able to continue paying out the $600-800 a month in copays, or pay for a phone or car stuff.
Thanks for listening. It is helpful to know there are others who have gone through this, and understand.

From your posts, you seem to feel invested in your GF's work on recovery and continued contact with her. There is nothing you have done wrong. This is just feedback for you that you are invested in her in the form of supporting her emotionally and financially through therapy if she chooses it.

I think, considering that the two of you are still trying to work things out in some way, protecting the kids would mean protecting them from this "up in the air" state. You may be feeling back and forth, as she may be too, but they are too young to comprehend this or to be involved with this. IMHO, keeping things as stable and unchanging for them for now is a way to protect them. Don't make large decisions, like having her move in, or getting married. Don't tell them it's over as emotionally, it's not.

There's no "wrong" section on this board- many posters post in different ones. However, it seems you are still wanting to see if there is a path to improvement in the relationship,  you may find more advice on the "improvement" section.  Or if you are trying to decide which way to go with this, where both options are discussed, the "conflicted" section.

I've experienced this but for me it was a little different, maybe because this was a 25+ year relationship across dating and marriage.  There was so much trauma that I simply forgot about...erased from my mind entirely...that came back maybe 2 years post-breakup.  One was being screamed at while I was having a panic attack.  She was so mad at me over whatever, she couldn't even recognize that I was about to pass out from hyperventilating.  How does someone forget that?!?  But i did for almost two decades.

The good memories stung at first and made me question if there's still hope, still reason to hold on a little longer.  Those lasted for almost two years and I second-guessed so much.  But in time, I gained clarity that the abuse, inability to communicate, and her constant absence in my life far outweighed any of the positive memories.

Today, I can remember something positive and smile.  My mind has figured out how to separate the memory from my ex though, and I can clearly see that it would have been a great memory regardless who I was with.  In other words, it wasn't so special because my ex went out of her way for me in some super-meaningful way.

Maybe that helps?  I still don't understand so much of how the mind works with memories.

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.  And I'm thinking, "It's a cartoon for kids from 40 years ago....spoiler alert....it's not for adults to contemplate."  Of course I didn't say that, but often I'm left scratching my head what we're actually doing on the phone.

Like you said, we rarely talk about real life stuff.  If I bring up something I'm doing or going through, the topic is quickly changed to something meaningless.  My guess would be that it still feels like a connection even though everything being said is superficial.  And if that helps her, I guess I'll talk about the smurfs sometimes.

Oh, this one hit home particularly.

Great job!  While I get the sense you'd want to have "normal," two-sided conversations with your son, it seems to me he is being fairly direct by saying, "I can't handle talking about my life because I'm feeling overwhelmed, and I don't want to hear about any of your problems right now, because that will stress me out even more, and I'm liable to explode."  Basically he's asking you to avoid any triggering topics when he's feeling overwhelmed.  That to me seems like some emotional control, because he resisted the temptation to lash out or dredge up some unrelated grievance and make you his punching bag, and yet, he stayed in the conversation.  Would you agree?  Even better, it seems to me that he recognized that he was a bit rude to you, and he tried to make it up to you by calling you back and wishing you a good evening!

Now, I understand that this might feel less than optimal for you, because YOU desire some closeness and communication, and you don't want to be constantly walking on eggshells, worrying that if you ask your son something as simple as, "How are you?", that he'll go down a negative conversation spiral.  Trust me, I've been exactly where you are right now with the pwBPD in my life, thinking that if a "How are you?" is triggering, it's extremely difficult to have a conversation at all.  There were many times I'd say something like, "You look nice, how was your day?", and all I got was a glare from my pwBPD as she escaped to her bedroom.  My interpretation?  She felt like a question about her day was an inquisition, tinged with thinly veiled harsh judgment, because she knew she wasn't doing what she was supposed to be doing during her day.  Her coping technique was avoidance--escaping the conversation to her room.  This was probably better than self-destructing into an angry, petulant mess.  And in all the years I've lived with her (more than a decade), she's asked me about my life only once or twice.  In fact, I think that's a hint for some of her issues relating to other people:  she shows practically zero interest in anyone else, because all her mental bandwidth is occupied with thinking about herself and her ongoing "traumas".  When I witness her converse with other people, the conversations seem to fizzle out quickly, because she answers questions with one-word answers, and she doesn't throw the "conversation ball" back.  And then she wonders why she can't seem to connect with other people.  Trust me, I've tried to engage with her, and it's like pulling teeth.  The only "safe" topic is basically TV, and that's a tough one because I don't really watch much TV and don't have the same streaming services she has.

I guess that's why the general advice here would be to keep things light and superficial, and let your son take the conversation lead.  Also, remember that this is probably temporary.  If your son is feeling overwhelmed right now but actually holds things together and pushes through, he might eventually discover he can handle more than he thought he could, and he'd bolster his confidence and identity as a competent, independent dad/son.  Then a greater percentage of conversations might feel "normal."