10 years : Love Vs everything else

[JoeBPD81]

It's been a long time since I posted.

For 10 years we've had a hard life. My SO, her 2 kids and myself.

1st year she said she was well with me, and thought about marrying me. I felt she avoided me and we had next to none intimacy, never spend a night together (since we moved in together) and sex was mostly gone frome the picture. So I felt we weren't doing great.

After that year, things turned worse. We had to move to another apartment that made her sick, literally. I got news that she was leaving me very often. I didn't do what I should have to move to a better apartment because it felt so difficult seeing our days were number, by her. She felt I didn't love her because I forced her to live there. I didn't see her looking for another apartment either, and I asked her to.

After some time like that. I said I couldn't stand it anymore. We made plans to go our separate ways. I felt like sh... But in the time we gave us, to let the kids end the school year. She started talking to me with more respect, and showing some affection. And love rekindled a little. She found a job, and things started looking up.

And then her 1st son broke. Some of the reason was to see us kissing after wraping his mind about not living with me anymore. He felt betrayed. But he was also going into his teens, and many mental problems came to surface. He's diagnosed now with a cluster of things, big things, that made him drop hightschool and barely leave the bed. He's in treatment and in suicide watch. He's 17 now, waiting for a place at a part time hospital.

This changed everything, and he's our main focus and worry. Also, it hurt his brother (12) a lot, and he's also in treatment, and acts out everyday. We get a lot of anger from both of them.

My SO, their mother, has another diagnosis that explains other things that BPD alone didn't. She's in the autistic spectrum, as both kids are.

We were more a united front to help the kid. No longer showing affection on her part. But we also break and have some huge crysis. After his 3rd visit to the ER, while he was being well attended, she told me "maybe we should go our separate ways". And I said, in a low moment, "maybe we should". This translated into Me wanted to break up just when S17 needed us most showing that I have no heart.

She hurt me so bad the next days that I thought we really would be better of appart. And then she asked me for a meeting, and told me it would be better for S17 to have his home when he came back. I told her if we came back it had to be like a couple, not a friend or a friendly uncle for the kids. That we would work at being a couple. She agreed.

She agreed, and now more than a year has past, and we are not a couple. She told me the 1st moths that the deal was still on, and that she was working towards it. We had good times and bad times. But I feel so alone. She's not even comfortable watching tv in the same couch as me. I lost hope on we ever having a "romantic" RS. I don't work too much on that because I'm mostly asked to leave her alone. But I've been trying to take care of myself and be as happy as I can be in this situation.

I try not to talk about my situation with anyone. But sometimes I have to say why I'm crying or moping. And people tell me to run away.

3 days ago, she read a text from my sister talking about this. My sister told me that my family loves me and hates to see me like this. And that seeing that I don't make their situation better, I have to think about my own survival.

SHE understands my family thinks that. But it kills her. She feels humiliated, and betrayed, and made fun of... So she says she's gonna find a way to live some place else. And that she doesn't need or want my help. (She's unemployed with these two kids).

Maybe I should feel relieved, but I feel like crap. Because I do love her and I hate causing her any harm. And I care about the kids. She has no reliable family nor friends. The kids need her help 24/07, so she can't hold a job.

Of course, I feel like crap also because she's digging dirt from all the years we've known each other. Alternating with apologizing for making my life so sad (sincerelly). She also says she's not a bad person, nor a moster as I describe her. Alternating also with blocking me on her phone.

I'm a mess.

[Turkish]

I remember you Joe, and I'm sorry that you seem to feel trapped in a treadmill, yes?

After our S13 was diagnosed with ASD1 in 1st grade, my uBPDx told me she thought that she might also be autistic. It clickec to me (masking, more commonsense in women, and a marked inability to read emotions). Being BPD-ish, I think that she thought it was her fault. 

Do you have any kind of plan, or feel that there's anything you can do on your side to escape the status quo?

[JoeBPD81]

I don't have any plan. I'm more lost than ever.

I was managing our day to day life. I started exercising and it made me feel better, and cope better with everything else. But these talks about ending it, really break my compass. I can't focus at job, I don't sleep well...

In the past I had to think about living plans if/when they left me. But it's been a while since I thought about that.

I don't have any dreams/ambition that I'm not fulfilling because I'm in this RS. I don't know what I'd do, where I'd live or what changes I'd make, living alone.

3 years ago my father started developing dementia. He's at a home now because he needs constant help and watch. He doesn't remember us. My social life these last years has been visiting him and my mother. I thought about moving closer to them. But it also kills me to see him like that, and I don't know what to do to make the situation better. At least for my mother.

I'm really tired of life.

[livednlearned]

It's hard to imagine someone in your position not feeling tired  

You have three very challenging personalities in your life, and two of them are kids. It's a high needs existence and they are not skilled in relationships or communication.

Your parents are also entering a period of high needs, with your dad 3 years into dementia.

It would be unusual to not feel depression if not cPTSD in these circumstances  (Cassandra syndrome). I'm glad you reached out, hopefully you feel some degree of relief knowing that people here understand.

When my stepdaughter was expressing suicidal ideation I had to make sense of it by talking about it with professionals. It didn't occur to me that her SI would have an impact on me but it did. Would you feel comfortable calling a hotline or talking to someone?

[JoeBPD81]

Thanks for understanding.

I didn't know about Cassandra sindrome. I've been reading about it. It's focused on women with ASD partners. But some of the traits apply to me as well.

I don't have the problem of people not believing me. Even telling 10% of what my life is, people understand I'm in pain and say I have to take care of myself.

My SO is the 1st close person in my life that doesn't believe what I say. And it drives me nuts. So it's true that people see HER as a very polite shy person, and she doesn't look like she's capable of anger. But they believe me, because they know I'm honest and because I gain nothing by lying.

We experience something similar with S17. It takes a lot of time for professionals to get that most of what he says are lies. He has no intention to keep his word (there is no meaning for him to give one's word), and he lies about what happens. In any conversation with a doctor, his only goal is to end the conversation and get them to leave him alone. So, for intance, he tells the doctors that he goes skating all the time, when he doesn't leave the house.

I do need to talk to someone, or get some treatment for myself. I've been postponing it, because SHE feels bad when I talk about them as a problem (understandable). But I can't deal with this alone anymore.

Before I said I had no plans for living alone. I didn't mean I'm afraid to live alone. I think it would be a blessing. What I mean is that I don't have any specific goals that I'd do if I was alone. I can't think past " I wouldn't have to argue or hear screams everyday".

[JoeBPD81]

Big argument yesterday by texts.

We were Ok and she texted me a long text saying she doesn't know how to move forward now that my family hates her (not true) and so and so. Suposedly she was trying to get closer to me, I read it as a reproach.

The big issue is that I didn't tell my sister "this is my family!" when my sister told me that they see me defeated and depressed all the time because of them. My sister said I had bad luck, and I said luck didn't have to do with this because I chose to help this people I love (knowing it wouldn't be easy). There lies the problem "family Vs people I help". And I get it.

But I've tried to be family for 9 years, and I got treated like... Well I don't have words, you treat the help with some respect, you pay the rent to a landlord, you try to reach compromisses with your house-mate. So I'm not any of those things. But less than that. And we moved together as a couple, I put everything I got on the table and I went to work to keep them fed everyday since. The moment we moved together I stopped having a girlfriend. I gave her space and time, but she never came closer, just the opposite.

So what was left? What was left was that I didn't want them to live on the streets, I care about them and did what I could so their lives were better. If I expected something in return, I got heartbreak. I wasn't the one who turned them into something different than familly.

For all these years I've been asking her. If she doesn't want to sleep with me, no sex, giving me a kiss is like ripping a band-aid, maybe on average once a month, we don't go anywhere because the kids refuse to move, we don't eat together (because she's anorexic) we don't cook together, and we barelly watch tv together because she says it's a waste of time, and a way to not talk. When we do watch tv, she doesn't share the couch with me. If we don't do any of that, what am I for her? What's my role? In angry times I said I'm only good to pay bills and drive the car. She told me "you're family" and on some other arguments I said "yeah family, I'm the dumb cousin".

What I want to know is what's my role in her life that for her justifies that I don't live alone and at peace, and instead I give everthing to them.  How is this fair in her mind. And how, not being fair, I deserve all the hate and hurt that I get. I'm, at 45, as alone as the teenager I was, thinking I would never had a girlfriend. The difference is that now I'm so worn out that I don't think I'll ever want one again.  But what I sure never wanted is to live with and for someone that didn't love me.