But Love, Nonethless.

Photo by Natalia Figueredo on Unsplash

 Loving someone with Borderline Personality Disorder is such a complex and confusing feeling.

As some say, Love is a choice. When you get married, you choose to LOVE the person despite their flaws and despite YOUR own expectations. It’s choosing to love someone for who they are and where they are. Not for what they can give you.  

This still holds true when you love someone with Borderline Personality Disorder. The exception is that when your mental health and physical well being are being jeopardized, you have to make a very bold decision to leave an abusive situation or remain in a very toxic relationship. And any outsider can tell you “Leave!!” but you know that your emotions are wrapped up with love, disappointment, hurt, and a feeling of being absorbed by the other person. 

How can you love someone who continually hurts you, time and time again. How can you be so blind and dense to not see what everyone else sees?  And the times you say “Enough is Enough,” you somehow second guess your decision and think that, maybe, just maybe you overreacted. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as you remember. Maybe you are the one that is making a big deal out of something so small. 

Your judgement is cloudy. Your sense of reality is skewed. 

This is the power of abuse.  How it plays a constant psychological game with your mind, making you believe that it was just a bad day and things can be different. So you forgive, and try again.

Our souls are created for love. And after all, the person still has lovable traits, even if all that remains lovable is the illusion of who we wish they could be. 

 

When your loved one is a lover, a partner or a spouse, the world is telling you.. “Leave!”

What if the abuser is your parent?

When it’s your mother or father, people tell you, “It’s your mother and father. They are just being a parent. Just shake it off. Just shrug it off. Forgive and move forward.” Time. And time. Again.

So what do you do when you have nobody cheering you on to leave? When you don’t understand why it pains you so much when you do? Like it feels like a huge part of your soul has been ripped out?

 You mourn their loss. You mourn the loss of what SHOULD have been, but because of their mental health, can NEVER be.

You are left feeling a mix of emotions of the parent who would show you how fun or loving they could be but how incredibly toxic and all-consuming their fire is. You desire to love that person, but every time you inch forward, you get too close to the fire, and bounce back with the pangs of being scorched by the very essence of who they are. 

I hate the disease that has consumed my mother. The very fact that she got stuck at an emotional state that is of the child  who experienced repeated abuse at a young age, who has no logic, no remorse, no sense of responsibility, or what is appropriate or not. And she can't see the errors.

I love my mother. So very deeply. So the choice to put a boundary, which most times means vacillating between little to no contact is not made easily. It hurts. I yearn for a mother who is all embracing. A mother who understands that during a crisis in my life, I need her to just be there, and not bring unnecessary toxicity. 

When my baby was diagnosed with cancer, I needed my mom. I needed her to sit with me. To cry with me. To allow me space to grieve. To allow me to manage my family affairs how I choose without being reproached about my decisions. To put her conflict and her paranoia and victimization far, FAR, away from me because I am at my breaking point with fighting for my baby’s life. I need her to give me unwavering support and give grace in my missteps. But she can't. So she won't.

Instead, when I set a boundary to her toxicity, I am made to feel like I am in the wrong, not only by her, but other family members. Yet my mind says “YOU are RIGHT!! BOUNDARIES!!” At the end of the day, my mental health matters more, even more so in a time of crisis. And I won't apologize for loving me enough first.

I try. I try so hard to have a relationship. But I also inch in very, very slowly, knowing that her capacity to be a healthy mother is very limited. And reminding myself to not be disappointed because I should know better when she lets me down. 

But I mourn either way. 

No contact? Sure. When necessary. But it’s hard to reconcile the feeling of love and disdain in one person. And the added element of being a Christian brings an entire level of complexity.

My mother is a beautiful person inside. Dying for love and acceptance. Wounded to her core. But her death grip is suffocating and I stay at arms length, and she feels it. I feel it. And we are both left mourning. A love that is complex. A love that you can’t fully walk away from, at least not unscathed.

But love, nonetheless.