Any advice I can get about how best to protect my son from any damage his mother could do would be much appreciated. I'd also love any advice about how I should deal with her, but my son's well-being is my focus.
It's a great question, and you are so fortunate to be asking this when your son is still so young.
One thing that happens with a BPD parent is that the normal roles are reversed. Instead of validating your son's feelings, she will likely expect him to validate her's. That can be developmentally difficult for a child who needs a parent to help him regulate difficult emotions like frustration, disappointment, sadness, anger, etc. He is looking to her to help him regulate and instead she is expecting him to do it for her. He'll turn himself into a pretzel trying to figure out what she needs and won't develop his own identity. Or, he'll become frustrated, too, and the two of them will be stuck in a cycle of conflict and frustration that is overwhelming for both.
Read everything you can about validation. I Don't Have to Make Everything All Better by the Lundstroms is helpful for multiple stages of development and different kinds of relationships (child, teen, partner, etc.). Another one is Power of Validation (for parenting). I can't remember the authors but I believe they are listed in the site's book section.
Bill Eddy's book Don't Alienate the Kids! Raising Emotionally Resilient Children When One Parent has BPD is also excellent.
Instead of focusing on what you can't control (her behavior), you essentially learn to change what you can control, which is you and how you model healthy emotion regulation, which is no small thing. It's powerful. I believe it helped my son get past suicidal ideation when I discovered validation and began to transfer healthy emotion regulation skills to him through modeling and communication.
Another thing we tend to worry about here is parental alienation. You are a ways off from the psychological bits because your son is so young but it may also manifest in her behaviors during your son's infancy, it's hard to say. Divorce Poison by Richard Warshak is excellent, and so is anything by Dr. Craig Childress, including youtube videos online. A lot will seem like it's a long ways off but I believe knowledge is power. You can learn these skills and then practice them with other people so that they are more second nature in habit as your son begins to grow.
And the last piece is to document your involvement, everything you do for your son, just in case she responds to your closeness with your son as a reason to pull him away (requiring legal action).
Our battles are for the hearts and minds of our kids just as much as they are for equal (or more) parenting time.
Stay super involved in his life and you will offset a lot of the problems that come with BPD parenting shortcomings. And keep posting here This site and friends here were a game changer for me.
