Was this a Mrs. Robinson moment? Was my ex's Mom a pwBPD? WTF?

[Matrix96]

Here's a cognitive dissonance moment I have kept to myself for decades.  Only recently did I learn about BPD.  I even took some therapy sessions where I told this particular story for the first time.

Before I tell it, ask yourself this question:  when someone "invades your space," do you just know it?  Or, do you have need to use a tape measure to determine if the person got too close or not?  In my experience, you just know it.  You can feel it.  The alarm bells go off.  Now, to my story . . .

It's many years ago and I'm 4 months into the honeymoon phase with my college girlfriend, who I only now realize displayed what is referred to on this forum as Quiet BPD traits.  Her parents divorced at the start of the school year (an incredibly traumatic event for my ex) and her mother moved into her own apartment during Christmas break.  It's now Spring break and I'm meeting her mother for the first time.  Given the traits my girlfriend exhibited and the unique relationship she had with her mother, it now has me wondering whether her mother also had BPD traits.

Her mother was at the gym, so we played a board game in the living room while we waited for her to return.  At one point, the game turned into a wrestling match on the ground, where I began tickling her.  It's at that exact moment that her mother opens the front door.

As I'm rolling on the ground with my girlfriend, I look up and see her mother standing at the doorway looking good in a skin-tight leotard, Jane Fonda-style since she just finished her jazzercise class, with her gym bag over her shoulder.  I say "hello Mrs. X," and try to stand up, but my girlfriend has her arms on my back and won't let me off the floor.  Her mother says something like, "don't worry," and takes several steps across the living room towards us.  At this moment, I am finally shaking off my girlfriend and just getting to my knees.  As I look up, I realize that her mother is now standing directly over me, with her crotch less than a foot from my face!  I remember the alarm bells going off in my head and a voice screaming "don't look down!  don't look down!"  From my knees, I looked straight up at her with my arm outreached and shook her hand.

As her mother walked away, my girlfriend tackled me again, but I quickly turned her over and started tickling her.  Her mother looked back over her shoulder and, with a passive-aggressive tone, said something like "give it to her, she deserves it."

I was totally discombobulated by all of this for about a minute before I finally got my bearings.  I kept saying to myself "that didn't just happen.  That was just 'one of those things,' right?"  Her mother changed clothes and came back downstairs and didn't say or do anything out of the ordinary after that.  Keep in mind that I was only a 19 year old college sophomore.

There's a lot more to the story of my ex-girlfriend and her mother.  But, before I cloud this tale with those details, I'm curious to know everyone's immediate reaction.  It was so weird, that I convinced myself for years that it was just nothing.  I was making something out of nothing.  Yet, I've never experienced an "invade my space" moment like that with anyone, ever.  Certainly not one where I kept second-guessing myself as to whether it really happened at all.

I've read that if you are trying to unravel an event that seems disordered and illogical, that it often means you have entered the Cluster B zone, meaning it's never going to make sense because it was perpetrated by a disordered person.  The therapist I visited did have an opinion on this tale.  I'll mention it at some point.  Until then, what do you think?  I could be mistaken, but I do not believe that she was trying to seduce me.  However, does this sound like some sort of BPD power play?  Or, am I making a mountain out of a molehill?

[BigOof]

How enmeshed were your girlfriend and her mother?

[Matrix96]

Damn good question.  How enmeshed?  VERY enmeshed.  When I first met her, she told me she was so close to her mother that they could "finish each other's sentences."  I remember a tiny little red flag being waved in the back of my mind when I heard that one.  Her mother went back to school and became a MFT therapist, then divorced her father.  Her mother seemed to act like her therapist (another red flag, right?) since she discussed absolutely everything with her.

I never did that with my parents.  They respected our relationship and stayed out of it.  In fact, my parents were unbelievably cool about it all (allowing us to sleep in the same room when we visited, allowing us to use their bedroom when they were traveling all summer, my Mom even gave her three drawers in her dresser to use when they were gone because she knew we were going to be in there anyways).

When my girlfriend would get off the phone with her father, the response was always the same:  sad for him because he was now alone, dealing with whatever typical father-like pressure he put on her for various things.  However, when she got off the phone with her mother, I would hold my breath.  Half the time she would be totally elated, the other half she would be in tears because her mother would say things to her that upset her.  She would never say specifically what her mother said, but she would seem almost mortally wounded sometimes.  She could spend 30 minutes on the phone with her mother, but then I would spend 60 minutes afterwards trying to get her to snap out of it and cheer up.

At the end of our relationship, her mother seemed to be a wedge in our relationship.  My gut feeling at the time was that she was showing her daughter how to devalue me.  Helping her justify what I would later learn was a secret relationship with some guy she met while working a summer temp job while living with me at my parent's house.  At the very start of the school year, just as we were about to move in together after a 1 year relationship, she brutally dumped me, telling me that she "felt nothing for me, never really loved me, never really wanted to be my girlfriend, and that I had pressured her the entire time and things had just gone too far."

At the end of summer, after my girlfriend had started giving me the silent treatment and acting distant (lots of crying, lots of "I wish you could understand me" garbage), I tried to fly across state to see her.  That particular day, I couldn't get an airline ticket on short notice.  My mom told me to calm down and she would take me to the airport the next day.  After I flew up, my girlfriend told me that her mom said "if I really loved her, I would have flown up the day before."  I remember telling me mom that line afterwards and she got incredibly angry.  It was the first time I had every heard her swear.  My mom said "that's an incredibly PLEASE READty thing for a parent to say.  It makes me wonder what other PLEASE READty things she's telling her daughter about you."

[Matrix96]

I noticed they censored my colorful language.  Here it is again:  "that's an incredibly sh!$$y thing to say.  It makes me wonder what other sh!$$y things she's telling her daughter about you."

[Riv3rW0lf]

My uBPDmother would do those kind of things. I would sit at the table and the way she would talk to my boyfriend (current husband excluded), I got the sense she was somehow trying to seduce them.

Once, she even called one of them up to berate him because he wasn't helping me clean the new apartment we were renting together before we moved in. He could come to where I was, and I was doing two classes of physics back to back. I was very tired, and I told to my mother how tired I was and she called him. I felt so invaded and so ashamed. I was never truly really enmeshed with my mother though. Not that she didn't tried. The closest we got to : I was the therapist, not her. This was a huge breach of trust for me.

But still, the trying to seduce my boyfriends did happen, some weird sexual powerplay sometimes.

The only one she didn't do that to is my current husband and I suspect it has to do with his overall demeaner : he does not take kindly to sh*tty people and reactions and he will call them out... For some reasons she does seem a bit scared of him and always act very calmly when he is around, keeling her worst reactions for when he is outside the house and cannot hear her.

I hadn't really realized before writing this down...

So yep, could have been a powerplay, using sexual energy. Might also have been some kind of weird jealousy. Wanting to break your fun by making you uncomfortable. My mother, when jealous, would do that. Intervene, trying to make it all about her again. She needs to steal the focus, to be the center of attention all the  and she is more BPD than BPD, abandon is her main fear and trigger.