Started bad, got worse, got a bit better for a while and ended very badly. That was our day.
I can barely write about this. I don't even know what to say.
She's in the other room right now talking to Jack. M is over for the night and mentioned that Suzy was in the other room having an cell phone conversation with someone and sounded very upset. I was unmoved. M (of course) was a bit unnerved by my lack of concern. But at this point, I can't be concerned every time Suzy is upset. I try to decifer the times that it's life-threatening or when I couldn't live with myself as a human being if I ignored her, but now with the other stuff I'm just trying to step back.
The problem is, I step back and distance myself from her because she keeps hurting me and accusing me of things I didn't do and lying to me and about me. And she interperates this "stepping back" as rejection and then gets even more upset which leads to more behavior that I can't deal with. I don't reject her and that's what I was trying to explain this morning. I was trying to get her to understand that I'm her mom and I'm never leaving her. I love her unconditionally. But she doesn't believe that I love her and will for ever; she keeps expecting me to reject her.
I am so embaressed by her behavior. M saw me typing and just rolled over in bed to ask how I was doing. I said just that, that I am so embaressed by Suzy's behavior. M's response is supportive, as usual ("you don't have anything to be embaressed about with me." That's what M's saying now, but no one you're casually dating, even if long term, really ever signs up for something like this. Just like Suzy expects me to eventually reject her ("just like everyone does, because no one ever loves me and everyone eventually thinks I'm a total bitch and doesn't want me to be in their lives"), just like Suzy feels that way about me, I feel that way about M. But I think M will eventually tire of the crisis that is my life via Suzy and will back off saying that it's too much drama. I would if I was M.
So Suzy's in the other room and M says she sounds upset and I should intervene. Instead I go to the door and listen. Suzy's in the condo's living room about ten feet away speaking loudy enough that with the door shut and the fan running I can still here. She's tell Jack a story about how something valuable, I think she said her video camera, was stolen from the condo a few days prior. The thing is, an incident happened where someone left the door open and we came back to find the security guy at our door, but even though I couldn't find some money I left out (at the time), we later found it and the Suzy's video camer was NOT stolen. It was the first thing she looked for and it was there. Suzy says her $35 was stolen. I never saw that out, but she also says the thief took $35 bucks from her purse and left a couple of ones, which seems doubtful to me.
She's describing things in detail to Jack but some of the details are wrong. I can't tell if she's mis-remembering what happened or if it's the normal details that get changed in the course of telling a story, but eventually it's clear: she's lying again. She's exaggerating what happened and chaing it so she appears to be more of a victim.
Intellectually I know that all of this sounds like BPD. I know it. But at the same time, it hurts because I just want Suzy to be normal and happy and have a good relationship with me. She's 21 for godssake, this is when kids are supposed to be having good relationships with their parents to make up for all the sucky teenage years (which, for some reason, jsut weren't that bad with her compared to this).
After ten minutes of increasingly loud conversation I opened the door and asked her to keep it down.
"But I wasn't even being that loud!!" (My response if I had been her would have been something more like, "oh god, I'm sorry. I didn't realize it's 1am. I'll get off the phone now and go to bed. Sorry for keeping you up."
I responded with a less than steller answer (why less than steller? Because it's wasn't honest. The honest answer would have been, "you're speaking in a loud voice and I can hear you. I heard the lies you just said but when I heard you lie abou tme it really made me mad so I decied to come in and confront you. Instaed I said something like "well I guess it's echoing a lot in her because it sure sounds loud to us. Say hi to Jack for me." The last part was what shut her up.
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