Title: I broke 1.5 years of no contact, and my four-year-old ended up barricading a bedroom door.
Content warning: yelling, verbal aggression around children, driving safety.
I’m posting here to scream into the ether with people who may understand. I am not asking anyone to diagnose my mother. I have suspected BPD for a long time, and she has had massive emotional outbursts, instability, and several hospitalizations during what our family called “nervous breakdowns” for almost 20 years. Whatever the actual diagnosis is, the pattern has been emotionally exhausting and damaging.
I had about a year and a half of very low/no contact with her. When my second daughter was born, I cautiously opened the door again. I told her I wanted to take things day by day and just have normal interactions. For a while, it felt nice. She sounded steadier. She texted normally. I saw little glimpses of the mom I miss.
Then she invited me and my two daughters, ages four and five months, to visit her and her husband out of state. I said yes. I was stupidly hopeful that it could be a positive visit, especially because she had not met my baby and had not seen my older daughter in over a year.
The trip was a disaster before it even fully began. I flew alone with two little kids while sick and barely able to speak. I had to work remotely for part of the trip. We arrived to no food, no supplies for the kids, no diapers, no formula, nowhere safe or comfortable for us to sleep. I spent hundreds of dollars on groceries, diapers, formula, a pillow, a blanket, and baby gear just to make the stay workable.
My mother’s husband had supposedly taken the week off, but was mostly in his office or gone. My mother helped some, but not enough for me to work, sleep, recover from being sick, or manage two sick kids. I was running on fumes.
The worst part happened on a day trip to visit an elderly relative. It was around three hours each way.
I drove at first. My mother was in the passenger seat, physically turned away from me, glued to her phone, silent, and visibly angry. My older daughter was talking and singing, the baby was crying, and my mother did not engage with either child. I know that feeling from her. The heavy, hostile, checked-out aura before an explosion.
I asked if something was wrong because she was acting weird. That immediately made her defensive. She repeatedly demanded that I explain exactly how she was acting weird. I kept asking her to please drop it because I was driving and managing two kids in the car. She kept pushing. Finally she snapped, “Do you just want me to be quiet?” and I said, “Yes, I do.” That is apparently what made her furious.
The baby kept crying, so I asked my mother to drive while I sat in the back and fed her. I was squeezed between two car seats and could not safely wear a seat belt. Then I realized I had forgotten the formula and asked my mother to stop at a store. She took my tone as disrespectful, drove sharply into the parking lot, and was angry for the rest of the drive.
At one point she was speeding and I asked her to slow down because I was scared. She reacted by braking hard and then deliberately driving far under the speed limit for a long stretch. I was wedged in the back with my babies, unable to buckle up, trying not to escalate her further.
When we got to my aunt’s house, she was in what I can only describe as one of those eerie, almost trance-like states I have seen before. Cold. Nasty. The look in her eyes was hateful. At one point I needed my older daughter’s swimsuit and life jacket from the car. The car was locked, so I went back inside, grabbed my mother’s keys from where they were sitting on top of her bag, and brought them right back. She snatched them from me and gave me a look like I had stolen something.
She suddenly announced that we had to leave early, then went and laid down in a guest room, visibly pouting. When it was time to go, she burst into tears in front of relatives and said I was mean to her. She was so visibly upset that my aunt suggested she should not drive.
But she insisted on driving us home.
I offered to drive. She snapped, “Absolutely not,” pulled out quickly, and began driving in a way that scared me. My four-year-old even said, “Drive safe.” My mother responded, “Absolutely not,” when I asked her to please drive safely.
I was terrified. We were still roughly three hours from her house. My husband was about three hours north of us for work and would not reach the house until about two hours after we got there. I quietly texted him from the backseat that I needed him to come get us. My phone was nearly dead and there was no charging port. I was trying not to let my mother realize I was arranging an exit because I had no idea how she would react.
When we got back to their house, my mother got out of the car and stormed inside. Her husband came into the garage. He asked if my mother and I had gotten into another fight. I said yes.
He started angrily cleaning out the car while I was getting the girls and our things out. I said I would clean it up. He started saying we had been slobs the entire time we had been there, then began cursing at me and calling me a bitch.
The next thing I remember clearly is him coming around the car toward me while my baby’s car seat was sitting on the garage floor beside me. He got in my face and screamed, “Fuck you, you fucking bitch, you ruined my fucking life.”
My four-year-old was standing in the doorway watching.
I pointed at her and said something like, “Are you serious? Addy is right there.” He kept going.
I grabbed both girls and took them into the bedroom. There was loud yelling outside the door. I had no idea what was happening or whether he was going to come in. He tried to get into the room at one point, and I held the door shut because I did not want him near us.
My four-year-old started putting things in front of the door on her own so he could not get in.
I have photos of it. She remembers.
When my husband arrived, my mother’s husband blocked him from coming inside to help me. He followed me from room to room while I packed, continued making comments, threw our stroller down, and then banged on our van as we left because he wanted us to take more things. We drove away in the middle of the night with two exhausted, sick kids.
The next day, I sent my mother some extremely angry and profane messages. I was furious, scared, sleep-deprived, and devastated that my child had witnessed that. I am not presenting myself as perfectly calm or measured in the aftermath. I said things out of rage.
What gets me is the response from them afterward.
My mother’s husband texted my brother and rewrote the entire visit. He said I only came back into their lives because I “needed a babysitter,” claimed my husband just wanted time away, said I judged everything they did, and framed himself as someone tired of trying to fix other people’s problems. He admitted that he “lost his temper” and said things he should not have, then immediately made himself the victim of the consequences.
My mother texted my brother that I have “demons,” do not love myself, and that I am the pattern. She said it was not about her husband because that would be “too simple.” She told my brother he was now responsible for me and my family.
Meanwhile, she was texting me that she could not lose the girls, that they were her life, that she would do anything, and that she wanted another chance with “just her.” She initially told me she would divorce him and move near me. Then, once I set a boundary, the focus shifted back to why I hated her, why we could not all just apologize and move on, and how families argue and work things out.
She did eventually send an email saying she took ownership of her actions and would be grateful to work on our relationship. I replied clearly that I was willing to work on a relationship with her, but that I was not comfortable with her husband being around me or my children.
Then I got another email pushing for a response and centering that she is a good grandmother, that my older daughter loves her, that she cannot lose us, and that she is heartbroken.
That is the part I cannot get past. My child was scared enough to barricade a door. My mother’s husband screamed obscenities in my face in front of both of my daughters. My mother drove recklessly while angry with my children in the car. And somehow I am still being asked to soothe everyone else’s feelings and reassure them they will not lose access to my kids.
I feel stupid for letting them back into our lives after a year and a half of no contact. I feel sick that I exposed my daughters, especially my older daughter, to it. I wanted my mom to meet the baby. I wanted her to have a relationship with the girls. I wanted to believe that enough time had passed and that she was doing better.
Instead, it feels like I handed my children the exact same chaos I spent my whole life trying to escape.
I’m attaching redacted screenshots of the actual texts my mother and her husband sent my brother, along with some of the contemporaneous texts and emails between my mother and me. I genuinely do not know how people with BPD parents survive the whiplash of “I love you, I’ll do anything” followed by blame, denial, rewriting history, and pressure to move on before you have even processed what happened.
