It’s nice to know you’re not the only one going through hell.


You could be at the supermarket with your crying new-born baby, idly wondering if you brushed your teeth that morning, while you hurriedly load tomatoes into a plastic bag.
You could be at work, stressed, focused, and in the middle of the ‘meeting of the month’, something you’ve prepared for, for weeks.
Or even in the throes of passion with someone you definitely don’t want coitus-interruptus with.
When the phone rings.
And you know, because of the horrendous timing or the way the hairs on your arms have risen as if you’re a neanderthal sensing a hungry saber tooth tiger close by, that the one person you really don’t want to talk to right now is calling you.
They’re the person in your life that makes your stomach clench tighter than if you’d eaten way too many gluten-free-vegan-sugar-free-organic-free-trade ‘brownies’ at your very good friends house while you pretend to be absolutely okay with gluten free, vegan, and sugar free at the same time (yes, delicious, of course I’ll have another one!).

Back to the phone - it’s ringing and you really, really, really don’t want to answer.
You know the reason for the call will either be something you’ve done irrevocably wrong, or someone else has. Someone else being wrong is still bad… even though a tiny part of you will feel glad it’s not you who has wronged the caller. But if you don’t listen to the tirade of blame and manipulation coming at you on the other end of the phone then you’ll be guilty by proxy. Or maybe they need money again… and you think of all the scenarios available to you right now that mean you get to keep your pocketbook closed. Lack of generosity is also a sin, though.
We’ll somehow be guilty and blamed - we’re good at guilt and shame.

What if you don’t answer it?, you feebly wonder. Could you stomach the message left for you, and the numerous times they push that blasted ‘redial’ button to make absolutely sure you are actually avoiding them?

Of course you’re avoiding them - what sane person wouldn’t?
You fear that person ringing you. You don’t want to talk to them.
Couldn’t they just quietly not phone you, and wait for you to phone them? And then you’d have a little more power than the zero amount you’re stuck with now. You could actually choose when to talk to them, on your own terms.
Great idea, right?
We won’t acknowledge that the psychologically optimal number of phone calls to this particular thorn in your side would be 0.001 per year.

The call might be important, you consider. Maybe your favorite Aunt died and the call actually isn’t a complaint, or a request for money, or a bitch about a sister. It might be that lovely Aunt, the one who defended you and the other cousins when you were all caught ‘reading’ uncle’s badly hidden pile of playboys. Oh no! Was I just wishing death on an Aunt who never wronged me?

Best answer the phone...

Of course you got trapped again. There they go, bitching and complaining. And when you tried to ask so sweetly if you can please hang up because this isn’t a good time; the child is trying to steal a supermarket cookie, the boss is looking daggers at you and your department is due for restructuring, or the mailman is ringing your doorbell and sounds rather excited (and is he ever!), your request is offensive and shows a lack of love, and therefore your abandonment of them at their time of need.

That’s why I get it. Been there, done that, and not only got the t’shirt, but thrown the t’shirt away in a fit of rage when the t’shirt wearing became too difficult.

I wrote this because, like you, I’ve tried to love a family member with Borderline Personality Disorder. After enduring years and years of a crappy childhood, haunting memories and their affects on me, I found out what my mother’s diagnosis was and read all about it.

Books showed me how she managed to develop the disorder. The books told me I should feel sorry for her. I was told that I should empathise with this poor woman.

And so I did empathise. I dutifully phoned her regularly. Visiting was more difficult seeing I’d moved so far away from her that phoning was the only way to make a 9,000 mile distance workable. I listened to her. I empathized and empathized and empathized until I felt so guilty for feeling periodic hatred for her that I could have happily joined a convent… so long as I got visiting rights & college funds for my sons, conjugal visits with my husband, and reliable wifi.

But that didn’t stop my mother from having Borderline Personality Disorder.

Therapy would work for a while. My therapist even congratulated me on being a functional mother who had an ability to feel..., you guessed it, empathy.

But bugger empathy.

Empathy doesn’t apologize for its mistreatment of others, or buy anti-depressants, or pay the therapists bills, or stop me from cracking up during puberty (not my own), or emptying the bathroom trash of its copious wet tissues (my own), or any of the other million little and big and medium sized things that happen when you try to live the functional life of a, what am I, survivor? Victim? Nutjob?

When I first started work my boss and mentor was wonderful. She advised me to get a blank business sized card and write on it, “Fuck the Lot of Them”, then leave it in my wallet. That way, when the job got too hard, when someone in a meeting was just plain wrong, or a client has been on your case and won’t listen to any version of reason, then “Fuck the Lot of Them” is all that you can think.

And now I pass this gift, this wordley advice to you. Get a business card for yourself.
I hope the card is a tiny little bit of support for when the guilt is too much and you think your mental backbone can’t take another whipping.
Yes, read the books about BPD and it’s definitely helpful to understand why the person in your life suffers from BPD.
Yes, empathize.
But don’t be afraid to feel the guilt and do it anyway. You have every right to a life free from fear when you see their number in your caller ID.

In her shadow

I have a brilliant ability.  I can forget my own phone number, forget what I went to the supermarket for, forget what time to pick my kids up after a class trip.  But I can remember excerpts from my very young life as clear as a festering boil that nags in an unwashed groin.   

Perhaps the first memory is waiting for my older brother to come home from his day at school.  Sitting on the warm wooden floor of the front porch with my doll, carefully poking tiny morsels of food into her open mouth even though it wasn’t designed for anything other than an empty plastic bottle.  She would later be unceremoniously cremated due to the stench that I couldn’t smell because I loved her.  

Waiting for my brother loathed me for being born the wrong sex.  He’d badly wanted a brother - a disappointment that worsened when two more sisters came after me.  It made him angry and quiet.  Later the guilt of his sisterly hate contributed to youthful drinking and drugs, then endless therapy sessions later in life.  

Although (at three), I knew he hated me, the lonely wait for his school bus was infinitely better than being inside my house.

Today was going to be worse.

I was in trouble.  I had hidden with Peter, the small ginger cat who was so apathetic and gentle it took no time at all for me cut his whiskers in an effort to begin my apprenticeship as a hairdresser.  

Oh, the glamour of being a hairdresser.  They wore earrings, ones that dangled.  And lipstick.  And they were beautiful - just like I wanted to be.  

But poor Peter.  When Mum found him whiskerless my stomach tightened with a pain worse than hunger.  She was too busy for punishment straight away, so I had to wait.  

I also remember the first time I ever saw a horse.  Right then I knew that no other animal would ever be as graceful or as enigmatic - even though I had no idea what those words meant.  Even with the horses enormous size making it bigger than a cow.  I was petrified of cows and routinely peed my undies whenever they got too close to me - which was often seeing as we lived on a dairy farm.  Still the horse was infinitely wonderful.  

Neighs and gallops and flying manes immensely preferable to bovine munching and staring and swishing muscular tails in my terrified direction.

I remember baby sister coming home too.  I remember Mum’s afternoon naps - where we had to be silent.  

Silent was a big word, and it meant more than shut-up, or be quiet, or don’t make a noise.  It meant still as a statue, stay away, do not exist for some period of time in the day so as to not have Mum know I was there, I existed.

One memory I keep in a little packet.  I have lots of these little packets.  Not pretty tissue wrapped ones - with 1960’s Polly Anna style bows mounted on top.  This one is a cardboard box, plain, inconspicuous and teeny tiny miniscule.  I try never to tell it.  It’s a conversation killer.

My hair used to be the sort of fluffy, snowy, fuzzy, immature stuff that had the misfortune of existing before the availability of hair conditioner; something to soften the tangles and knots and massive confusion of my pathetically fine blonde mess.  A morning ritual was for Mum to brush my hair.  A horror I anticipated daily.  

I recall Mum’s smell.  A mix of morning odor coming from her armpits.  And breast milk coming from her heavy bust.  I was much shorter than both, but the aroma meant Mother.

That morning I stood patiently, waiting as she brushed my hair.  In the kitchen, bare feet flat on the linoleum tiles.  My face nuzzled into her stomach.  A stomach soft from the now four births… a new baby had joined us.  

Mum was trying to brush the wispy white fluff, or at least to tame it into social acceptance.  

And I felt, even at my young age, that her frustration was growing.  The strokes became less delicate and less languorous, not that they had been so before.  Tension was swelling.  

I could tell by the tugs, by her breath, by her disallowing the nuzzling and denying me her warmth - not just from her body.  

Her breath quickened further.  I could hear it come from her nose and it made the same sound of expelling air that a cow’s nose would.  Mum must have been getting mad if she sounded like a cow when it emptied its lungs, it’s nostrils flaring outwards - wet and sinewy.    

The strokes became less like strokes and more like pulls, then tugs, then yanks.

Her muttering started.  I knew to be quiet - silent.

I stood still.

Tug, tug, tug.

I could imagine her nostrils flare outwards - open and scary, like a cow, as her breath shot out of her nose over me in exasperation.

The tugging stopped - briefly.  

Grunt.  Deep breath.

Stupid, ridiculous hair.

Pain from the first hit on my head with the hair brush.  I knew it wasn’t over.

Tug, tug.

Smack.

Grunt.

Shit hair.

Smack.

Do not move.  Do not cry.  Do not let Mummy know she’s hurting.

Tug, tug, tug.

Smack, Smack…  Smack-Smack-Smack.

Stupid fucking hair.

Tug-tug

Stop crying, I’m so stupid.  Do not cry.  Just breath carefully and she won’t know - just don’t sniff.  Don’t move, don’t cry, don’t let her know it hurts.

My little body buckled when she finally gave up and shoved me away from her in disgust.  I got away without her seeing my tear stained face and went to the bathroom to brush my teeth.  I tried to ignore the burning pain that stung the top of my head.  I knew there wouldn’t be blood - Mum wouldn’t go that far.  I was too stunned to reach up and feel my tender head - what if there was blood?  I let the buzzing carry on without acknowledging it.  

Face wiped clear of salty water.  To be silent meant to not have Mum know I was there.  Be invisible.  Tears on my cheeks would mean she had to notice me.  I didn’t want that.  Her guilt was easily transferred.  Blame was easily shared.  A few smacks on the head with a wooden hairbrush was nothing compared to guilty anger.

My hair - my fault.

Better to mutely avoid the area where Mum was nursing baby Brenda.

The day happened without another mention of the hitting - had I imagined it?  I checked later, while Mum napped and the house was still.  In my nap time I reached up and felt.

A lump was there, the skin was tender, my scalp felt sensitive from the tugging and pulling.

It never occurred to me to tell.

Because my hair was evil, and it, simply, had to go.  

As a result, all through childhood my hair was constantly short.  The glamour of hair was experienced going to hairdressers for consistently short, boyish cuts, instead of the highly desirable ribbons and bows and lengthy feminine styles of the girls at school… girls I so desperately wanted to look like.  I was Mrs Brady when everyone else was Marcia.

My blonde fuzz made me the happy recipient of years of childish questions - ‘hey, you, are you a boy or are you a girl?’  My indignation of having to tell people my gender was lost on my mother.  In fact it was a source of amusement for her.

It was best not to let her know you were hurting.

Everything was my fault though.  I was a naughty, bad, terrible girl.  

I had a secret, one that Mum knew and brought out occasionally to explain to others who ever thought I was good, to prove that actually I wasn’t.  I was exposed and humiliated to friends mothers, aunts and neighbors.  

My shame was in the unusual way I slept.

Every night, because I had trouble sleeping, because things scared me, especially in the dark, I had made a ritual of my own.  One that made my hair messy and tangled and ugly.  I had caused my own hair problem.

I would wrap my sheet around my head and rock, and rock, and rock from side to side until I fell asleep.  

It gave me comfort.  It stopped any noise from entering my head except the rhythmic gentle rustling of sheets against my ears.  It cocooned me in softness.  

See?  My fault entirely.

I took full responsibility for my hair.

Years and years later, while my family watched a documentary about the need for nurturing of animals, rhesus monkeys were shown.  Ones without mothers rocked themselves from side to side in a rhythm I knew only too well.  

The psychologists described the rocking as a way the babies had found to give themselves comfort because they missed their mothers so much.

Mum thought that was hysterical.  

“Oh, Wendy,” she blurted in front of all around us, “Is that why you do it?  Because you miss me?”  She brought it up several times over the following years in my presence… even when she thought I was too old to possibly do it any longer.  But I wasn’t.  

I told you I was ashamed of it.

I was a fucking rocking Mummy-missing rhesus monkey until I got married - to my second husband.  

The only time I didn't rock myself to sleep before then was if there was a warm body next to me or I was too drunk to negotiate the sheets over my head.  My secret addiction.

****      

One of my brother's old girlfriends was a mental health professional.  She first introduced the four of us siblings to the diagnosis Borderline Personality Disorder.  

We all shared the book she bought us.

We all agreed, ‘oh my God, that’s Mum!’

It gave us a reason.  We finally had a ‘why’.  The book even gave us a ‘how’ she managed to be that way.

Finding ways to live with it was much, much more difficult.  Knowing there was a name for it, and the small empathy we had for her never stopped Mum from being a difficult bitch.

Luckily by then I was in my 30’s and had been physically away from her for enough time to finish a degree, get a job, marry my love, buy a house, divorce, and stand on my bare feet again; this time in my own kitchen on polished wooden floors.

I know a lot of people are annoyed by their mothers.  I know people have examples of happenings and subsequent consternation driven arguments.  

Even though Mum is shorter than me by half a foot she can still make my skin crawl in fear.  My decision to stop all contact is confusing to other people unless they walk in these moccasins.  So I don’t even tell people that I don’t see her anymore.   

Silence is something I’ve been good at for years.

I could take the verbal abuse she leveled at me.  But when it inched its grotesque head towards my children my decision was easy.  I saw the monster coming, and not for me - a comment, an argument, a look towards my children.  That was when I had to sit down and say to myself, ‘okay, that’s enough now’.  

It was time to accept I could not have a relationship with this woman if I wanted to keep my own children safe.

After all, what if my child gets tangled hair?  One rhesus monkey per household is enough.