Mother with BPD, first child on the way

Apologies that this is pretty long.

I'm the oldest of 5 children. I have a younger sister and 3 younger brothers and we currently range in age from 30 to 22. My mom is in her mid-50s and my parents divorced when I was 13 and have both remarried. Prior to the divorce their relationship was very bad and honestly the divorce came as a relief in many ways. But my mother became a master of putting us in the middle. She got extremely hung up on my father, to a degree that even as kids we were able to tell was not normal or healthy. She would tell us he was narcissistic (he is to a degree, but not NPD) and a sociopath, she trained us to manipulate him for money, etc. But she was also high functioning in general and we always just assumed that the inappropriate behaviors were related to her admitted history of depression. She regularly saw a therapist, but in retrospect there were a number of clues to indicate she wasn't being upfront with him about her behavior at home.

As we got older, she remarried, and she got some distance from my dad and the divorce things mostly got better. Until she decided to move halfway across the country when my youngest brother was 16 and about to enter his junior year of high school. He asked to stay in our hometown and live with my dad for the last two years and my mother absolutely lost it. She forced a long, drawn out custody battle that was largely pointless because the judge (quite rightly) decided that my brother was old enough to make the choice and awarded custody to my dad. To this day my mother still threatens to disown my brother over it whenever she gets on a rant.

Again, after the custody battle and move, things settled down. Then a few years ago she had a cancer scare. While the initial diagnosis was quite scary, once the diagnostics were done it was clear she was extremely lucky. This cancer will not kill her, it is highly unlikely it will ever even make her sick (it was found during a routine procedure done for other reasons). She underwent an additional surgery (one unlikely to affect her prognosis but that she insisted on). She will not need chemo or radiation and will almost certainly die of something completely unrelated many years down the road. She did not take this well. She continued to focus on related forms of cancer with far worse prognoses, including telling relatives that she was facing that prognosis. And her mental health issues completely spiraled out of control.

She began calling all of us for long, scary phone calls in which she obsessed about the cancer. She got into huge fights with most of her siblings (whom she was formerly close to) and cut them out of her life. She began obsessing about my dad again, going so far as to tell us horrible things she claimed he had done that we are pretty certain had never happened. And even if they had were inappropriate to be telling us. She also started doing something I now recognize as "splitting", where she attempted to turn the 5 of us against each other by telling us about made up or exaggerated things our siblings had said. This is something she had done to a lesser degree when we were younger, but now she had started doing it constantly. Most ominously, she began making suicide threats (and even once a murder-suicide threat). It got to the point where none of us wanted to pick up the phone when she called because the phone calls were so upsetting to us and we only seemed to be able to make things worse. She also moved to the city my sister lives in and began to be extremely erratic and verbally abusive toward her.

That was last summer. At that point the oldest three of us all began going to therapists to try to figure out how to deal with the phone calls. And all three of our therapists independently suggested that our mother had BPD. This was quite a breakthrough for us. The more we read, the more everything seemed to make sense. We also started making a concerted effort among the siblings for all of us to communicate with each other. We read Understanding the Borderline Mother and as the abusive behavior towards my sister and my less-liked brothers escalated we made the decision that it was time for us to take drastic action. As a group, we wrote her a letter outlining things we felt were important if we were going to be able to continue to have relationships with her. More or less we took an all-for-one and one-for-all approach and told her she had to stop being verbally and emotionally abusive towards us (any of us) or we would be cutting off contact with her. We also placed several topics on the "will-not-discuss" list (especially anything to do with our dad), with the caveat that we might be willing to discuss them within a therapy session.

She initially reacted better than we expected to the letter, in that she did not immediately go on a rage. But then the first therapy session that one of us attended did not go the way she expected (which was for the therapist to side with her and tell us we were horrible children) and that evening she got drunk and took some pills and started calling all of us. Repeatedly. When I answered the first call it was clear she was intoxicated and I told her I couldn't talk then (truthful) and would call her back the next day. I warned my siblings about the condition she was in and they reported back that she was chain calling them as well. We picked a person to call and talk to her briefly with some specific talking points (mostly just to tell her we would talk to her later). She lost it. She sent us some of the most hateful text messages and voicemails we had ever received. She called one of her best friends and made suicide threats and ranted about us and my dad. She sent text messages to my dad in the middle of the night, berating him for an affair that occurred decades ago.

By and large, we've stuck to not communicating with her since that point, with the exception of my sister who has occasional contact but reports that my mother has not attempted any further abusive behavior. When my mother demanded to know why I had not seen her over Christmas I told her that she could not expect to have a relationship with me if she would not apologize for her outburst (which was shortly after Thanksgiving) and remain respectful in our communications with each other.

We are all still feeling out how to handle our relationships with our father in light of the new things we've learned about our mother. We've realized (to varying degrees) that she very purposefully poisoned us against him and that many of the things she told us about him were untrue. We're still trying to figure out how to work past that. It's hard to get past all the bad things that have been forced into our heads. I will say that my relationship with my dad is now better than it has ever been (at Christmas we explained BPD to him and that we were pretty sure she had it, it led to a lot of good discussions with him). But it's still an evolving thing.

Individually, I'm trying to cope with the fact that I'm about to be a mother myself, and about to have my mother's first grandchild, at a time when I can barely even exchange a text message with her. My pregnancy began around the time we were figuring out that my mother had BPD. There were a lot of complications at the beginning and we didn't know how it would go (there was a high risk of miscarriage but also a not-insignificant risk to my own health) but now things are going well and I'm almost full term. My mom has barely asked about either my health or the baby since November. Part of me is glad because it's easier to not talk to her. But part of me is sad, because in spite of everything we were close for a long time and I miss being able to talk to her and want the normal mother-daughter stuff where I could call her and talk about the ups and downs of pregnancy and my excitement and fears about becoming a new mom.

I know I don't have BPD. But I still worry about whether I will fall back to bad behaviors I learned from my mother when my daughter is born. I also worry about how to handle it when she wants to come see the baby and my husband and I don't want to let her. I worry about the fallout from us refusing to let her come.

I'm grateful that my siblings and I have managed to maintain strong relationships with each other in spite of her attempts at splitting and I'm hoping that being able to read the experiences of others dealing with parents with BPD will help me navigate through my relationship with my mother. Ultimately, I would like to avoid having to stop all communication with her but I've also accepted that it may be necessary to do so, at least for long stretches of time.

I'll also add that my stepfather has not been very helpful in any of this. He fits the description of the Huntsman in UTBM to a T. He thinks that we are all being bad children and that if we would just do our duty and walk on eggshells there would not be anything wrong with my mother. He believes her stories about her family and my father (and probably stories about us children as well). He's also recently demonstrated that he holds on to some stunningly ridiculous grudges over things we apparently did to him when we were children, despite the fact that we have always maintained a good relationship with him in the past. He is enabling her abuse of alcohol and prescription medication and frequently lies about how much she has had to drink. He seems to have taken being on her "side" so seriously that now he cannot see how terrible and destructive her behavior is. The only glimmer of hope in that regard is that some recent communications from him seem to suggest that her new therapist has at least been successful in convincing him that she *does* have some mental health issues and that they do need treatment.



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