Echoes, I am amazed! It must feel so great to have this relationship with your son now! You must have worked so hard!

I was married 7 years before I had my first daughter. I had to make as sure as I could that our marriage would last.

I did not believe I could be a good enough parent on my own.

Also, when we did decide to have children, we also decided to move back to the same state our families live in....I think we both knew we would need a lot help--and I knew my kids would need my parents (not so sure about his!). I have the only grandchildren, and my parents love them dearly......I always think they love them better than me. And I often think they still love me because of them.

BPD absolutely affected my parenting, and it absolutely affected me as a parent. I wasn't a very good parent, at all, until they got to be about three. The pre-verbal ages drove me crazy. Everyone helped, everyone got in my way, everyone survived, and we are very happy now. Four years of very intense therapy for me, messy therapy before that, and some therapy with my therapist for the kids and my husband--because it really is true that family-involved therapy for a person with bpd has higher success rates.......................However, and I feel creepy about this, we don't talk about the borderline dx. We talk about it as bipolar. The stigma, still. I still have trouble with it, and the community at large has trouble with it, and I lost my career because of it............So...we're not going there for a few more years (my kids are 11 and 14).

Something else, we've learned: If people have kids, they need a spouse who is an involved spouse...not one who avoids conflicts. That's too weird for the kids, and it feels to them like no one is protecting them. So the borderline individual ends up carrying the emotional weight of the childrenas well as their own--because the spouse is just being calm and serene--and distant.

Being forced to be responsible for my children made a huge difference in my behavior. Not necessarily my thoughts. But huge differences in my behavior. I had to protect them, reassure them, help them, love them. Over time, I loved doing that. I had enormous difficulties over those years--three hospitalizations, debilitating depression, insomnia, all kinds of sleep disorders, eating disorders.....on and on. But, you know, life all by itself carries a lot of that for me. Having kids gave me much more beauty, tenderness, love than I'd had, and it gave me a sense of the future. I never thought I'd live past 30.