So for those of you who haven't read the previous posts, this blog is essentially a journal that I'm using to record my progress dealing with my Borderline Personality Disorder, and also a way for me to obtain a deeper understanding of it. The last post, and this post, focus on my mother. This is because BPD forms roots when a child is developing, and my mother had custody of me for about the first eight years of my life. I also have a theory that she could have been or may be Borderline, as Borderline parents often pass on certain aspects of the disorder to their children. (I phrase my thoughts about her in both the past and present tense sometimes, as I have not heard from her in fourteen years and have no way to confirm that she is in fact alive or dead.)
In trying to understand my BPD, I've been trying to remember things from my childhood more clearly. I didn't necessarily have a horrible childhood- my parents never abused me or anything like that- but it wasn't exactly the easiest. My mom started drinking heavily when I was about four years old, in 1994. I don't remember a lot about that, to be honest, but there are a lot of theories that my dad's family has sort of come up with as to why she decided to search for peace at the bottom of a bottle.
Roughly around the time that she started drinking, maybe a little bit earlier, I remember my mother showing me a photograph. I don't really remember much about this photograph, other than it was a Polaroid of a man in a room, and Elmo from Sesame Street was somehow involved so I got really excited. I think the room either had a bunch of Elmo dolls in it, or the guy was holding an Elmo doll. I remember my mother telling me that the man in the photograph was a friend of hers from Korea. She told me that he'd sent the photograph to her for me, because she'd told him that I really liked Elmo.
When I was older, maybe about seventeen or eighteen, I was informed by a family member- either my dad or my aunt- that my mom had dated a Korean guy in high school, and according to whoever told me this story, she had even gone overseas for a while.
A few years after that, my aunt ran a theory by me that she'd had for a while. She thought that perhaps my mother had been having an affair with someone while my dad was away, as he'd been in the Army when I was small and hadn't been around a whole lot. She continued to theorize that perhaps the affair had fallen through somehow, and my mother had turned to alcohol for consolation.
Putting the pieces together in my head, I reasoned that, if my aunt was correct, perhaps my mother had attempted to get back together with her ex boyfriend, and when he hadn't returned her affection in the ways that she had hoped, gotten severely depressed.
Now, at first glance this is a fairly solid theory, and it also goes along nicely with my theory that perhaps my mother was Borderline. HOWEVER, I also learned from my grandmother that my mother had a nasty habit of lying about herself. She told my grandmother that she'd had a sister who died, and also told me that she'd been raised with several siblings. My grandmother informed me that she found a wedding invitation in the trash with the name of the woman my mother claimed was her dead sister. Later on, I discovered through a brief instance of contact with some of my mother's family in Elko, Nevada, that my mother had only had one brother, and had never had any sisters.
Add to that information, then, that my mother's brother had actually come to visit her when I was a baby, because he wanted to know his niece and see his sister, and my mother had turned him away. My dad spoke with him and never really understood why my mother kept him away from us. Apparently, he was just as confused.
The lying may or may not be a Borderline trait, I'm really unsure because I don't remember compulsive lying being in any descriptions of the disorder that I've read, but I could be wrong there. Either way, my mother's past is a mystery to me, and what little family I'd managed to contact in Elko told me that they hadn't heard from her or either of her parents in years. Nobody clued me in as to why, but I'm determined to get to the bottom of it somehow.
I've found random snippets of her family, and am fairly certain I've stumbled upon a business that they own. All I really know is that I've got this need to know WHY. I've got so many questions that need answers, and I don't really know where to begin.
I'm going to keep looking, though, and I'll post things here as I uncover them. Hopefully this investigation sheds some light on things, and helps me understand why my mother made the decisions that she did, and how I can keep from repeating her patterns.
Love and light, bitches,
Gwen Rose
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