Sdmfoster
 Offline
Gender: 
What is your sexual orientation: Straight
Who in your life has "personality" issues: Parent
Relationship status: Married 20 years
Posts: 15
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« on: March 31, 2016, 10:52:17 AM » |
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So my daughter is in a spin right now. We have been trying to get her into a co-occurring disorder facility to treat both her addiction to MJ and hard drugs, and her BPD. She just turned 18. She had expressed to friends of hers that she was planning to skip the intake call so she would get kicked out of the admissions process. We intervened and made her be available to the call. I also, without letting her know that I knew she had a plan, told her that since I grew up with a BPD mother who refused treatment and made my life horrible (been NC with BPD mother for 25 years+) that her behavior was tripping my PTSD triggers, and if she refused treatment, I wasn't able to live with her any longer.
She has some basic financial support from being in the foster system, so living on her own isn't completely out of her reach, if she was able to hang onto a job. But she has built herself quite the reputation in a small town, and no one wants to hire her. I own a small takeout restaurant in a nearby smaller village, and even I don't want her working for me when she's doing poorly, which has been for the past year or so. But she's also profligate with her money and refuses to save and budget, even though I know she knows how (taught her myself and have witnessed her doing it when she wasn't spinning towards the drain.) So I'm not exactly sure how she would be able to live on her own either. But apparently, I am out of touch and don't validate her abilities, so I am at the point of letting her go, without a safety net, which she shreds whenever she can anyway.
I found out last night that she blames all of our current difficulties on me - I've been turned black It upset me mightily because she had just been so loving a couple of days earlier. But I know it's characteristic of the disorder, so I wrote this letter this morning:
Dear [daughter's name],
Thank you for everything you have been in my life – a teacher, a student, a daughter, a friend, a sad scared child in need of rescue and an emerging adult screaming and kicking her way free of the protective shell I’ve tried to build around you.
You have taught me many things in your time with me.
You’ve taught me how to see that although the real person under the mask is always there, sometimes the mask is so firmly attached that the wearer feels incredible pain when it is loosened even a bit. And that the pain is so frightening that the wearer will push the mask back on even harder than before, and the person who started to loosen the mask is identified as someone who causes you great pain, even though they meant to offer you freedom from the restrictions of the mask.
You have taught me that people who wear the mask are tantalized by the idea of freedom from it, but it is also so frightening for them that they prefer to retreat to the known discomforts of wearing the mask. And they are capable of dealing with the challenges those discomforts present – they have developed a full toolbox of coping mechanisms, that, even though they themselves are destructive, are familiar.
You have taught me that love as deep as the ocean can be as frightening as the real ocean – in both, drowning and storms both seem possible, no matter how well constructed your rescue ship may be. So diving in takes more than courage – it takes a little recklessness, which is something I’ve been trying to teach you not to have. I’m sure the mixed messages have been extremely confusing. With your coping mechanisms, confusion probably pushes you right to your limit, especially coming at the hands of someone like me, who holds herself out as an anchor for you in the storm.
You’ve taught me that, even while you’re scared of the ocean, you did have the courage to at least dip your toes in. You may someday decide to come swimming, and find out that the water is actually beautifully warm, comforting, eases pain, nourishes your soul and floats you to safety, but even if you stay in your little blowup raft with the leaky seams forever, I will hold the water there for you.
I have tried to teach you too, and at times I’ve thought you were learning. Of course, like any student, sometimes you just weren’t ready for the lesson, and you may never be able to absorb what I wanted to you know in your bones. I thought some of the seeds I tried to plant fell into some really good growing soil in your mind, while I knew some of the other seeds fell on top of stones and never took root. What I failed to recognize is that even the good soil had a rock-hard layer of habit underneath it, so anything I thought was growing may never have deep roots in your soul, and may never do very well in blooming into good things in your life. I thought if I plowed the soil enough, it would get deeper, but I have to accept that with the bedrock of your previous life underneath the soil, there is only so far I could ever hope to get. I will never stop trying to build up the good rich soil that can help you to grow, but the rock may never yield to cultivation, either. If I can accept that, then maybe I can be a little more philosophical about the ideas and values that never flourish even though I spent so much of myself trying to tend them.
I understand that with your disorder, people shift from white to black in a heartbeat, based on which of your needs they’re feeding at the moment. As your mom, as your family, I always wanted all of us to be white – a shining star with its stable solar system in the black universe that you can look to whenever you need. But even stars aren’t always visible, and so I have to accept that most of the time, we will be black to you, because we’re a fixed point in the sky, while your world is constantly spinning. That doesn’t change who we are, it is just the nature of the vision your mask allows you. As long as we keep shining, you will be able to see us as we truly are, at least sometimes. And one more universal truth is evident – stars cannot alter their orbits to go after a planet that has wobbled off course.
And so, my love, we will stay where we are in the sky. Loving you, wanting to shine on and sustain you, hoping to encourage those little seeds of good to grow where they can in you, and watering you with splashes of love, leaking in through the seams of your little raft, and sometimes making it over the side of the boat. But it looks like your planet is perhaps heading out of our orbit, and only you can reach out for sources of gravity to put you back on track, if you want to. The sources are there. We have done everything in our power to put them in your way when we saw where you were headed. But it may be that you are headed for another star that we don’t know is out there. So you may choose not to alter your path and instead, head out into deep space. If so, I want you to know that we are back where we came to rest, should you ever decide you would rather be in our orbit again. The orbit will have to be different – I’m sure by then other planets will be orbiting us, and you will not be able to force them out of your way to take up your old track. But there will always be an opening in the constellation for you.
Love always,
{my name], Momma or whatever label you’re applying to me today.
I may never give her this. I really don't know. But it helped me feel better this morning.
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