I'll try to write more.. it's still hard. May have to do it in chunks.

Merry, as far as "fragile" goes, that's hard to answer. I'm an excellent manager, and one of my greatest strengths is resolving personality conflicts and other interpersonal issues. I've been pretty consistently great with "difficult" people - not people with BPD, just your garden variety office a-holes, prima donnas, and shitheels. I never have been terribly comfortable around kids, though. Only child, geeky, very shy, not a lot of friends. I had a little stepdaughter from my previous marriage who I had an excellent relationship with from ~5 to about 12, after which her dad and I divorced. It was easy. She was a sweet, affectionate child who loved people, and being kind to people. Wicked sense of humor, too. I haven't seen her in two years - she lives with her very cool BM across the country, and her dad took the spousal support I gave him (to see her, specifically) and blew it all on motorcycle gear and random electronics. [That behavior was a big part of why we divorced.]

I see a psychiatrist for PTSD, depression, and anxiety disorders, and another therapist for... more of the same. So yeah, I'm a *mess,* but I'm working hard on my weaknesses and getting better over time. I'm 37, and still very much a work in progress. And I'm *usually* pretty good at pushing through my discomfort. But you called it - I've always had self-esteem issues, and I do very much base my feelings of self-worth on the approval of others. Like I said, I'm working on it, and if anyone others who have had that problem themselves have any words of wisdom to offer, *please* do so. My friends who don't have that problem say things like, "Just get over it," or "Who cares what they think? Let it go," and I love my friends, but that advice does not help me.

Okay, I'll post the actual FB message I sent that started this whole fiasco. Background: we were supposed to get the boys over Father's Day weekend. Then my fiance - let's call him Fitz - then Fitz's brother (36, works about 60 hours/week, going through a divorce with 3 young boys) had a heart attack. So we went to see him instead. While we were there, their mother went blind, and the hospital told us she had a stroke. So we all geared up to go to the hospital. It was Father's Day, and I didn't know if the kids would be trying to call while we were at the hospital, or if he was supposed to call them later - which is what normally happens, btw. And I sent this to the daughter:

"Hi, [SD-to-be].. didn't know if any of you were planning to call your father today, but if you were, this would probably be a pretty good time to do it. We're probably going to be hard to reach for a while later. Just letting you know; please pass on to the boys. Thanks!"

The story of why I would even try to go through the daughter is its own pile of b.s.. she was supposed to be at college - or... in the town containing the college she just dropped out of - but [VERY short version] snuck back into town without telling her father. Fitz found out by accident from one of her brothers, after she had been here for several days. The mom had told them all not to tell him she was there. Then the daughter, after she got busted, tried to play it off as some great Father's Day surprise. There's so much more... let's just say she's got a lot to feel legitimately guilty about. And then we left to visit his brother.

She responded to my message with a kind of vaguely shitty comment, but ended up sending him a text. I wrote her another message to say, "Thank you - that really cheered him up to know you were thinking of him."

So, how did I offend her? Well, apparently the word "if" was an insult to her and her brothers by implying they weren't thinking of him on Father's Day. Because of course they were going to talk to him, and I had criticized all of their timing and intentions, and so on and so forth. I apologized for my wording, and said it was actually not my intention to imply that they wouldn't talk to him, and she just kept going, until finally - being a little overwhelmed by the blitzkrieg attack, and also needing to go to the F-ing hospital, I told her that while I apologized, I wasn't going to absorb any more of her anger, and I was ending the conversation. She went on to send me another half-page or so of text, which was more communication than she's sent to her father in the past 6 months, saying that it was weird an inappropriate that I had *thanked* her for sending the text, and that by saying she was angry I was making more out of the relationship than there was, that I was a non-issue in her life, etc etc etc. And that if I actually wanted to have a relationship with her, *this* was exactly how I should have worded my statements, and I should have asked her to explain more about how she was feeling and not invalidated her, and I had made myself into a victim when no victimization had occurred..

Okay, so I broke off to go deal with actual life-or-death stuff for a while while kind of breaking down emotionally. And I calmed down eventually - talked to some family, and some friends, and read some articles, and prepared to try and reach out again, because Fitz was going to have to see her a day or so, and he was planning to just tell her off, which... borderline mom, potentially borderline daughter... I didn't think that would go well, and I just wanted to try to resolve it less aggressively. So I wrote her, said I hadn't handled things the way I realized I should have, and could I take her out for coffee or something so I could listen to her and try to understand where she was coming from.

So the response I got today was this bizarre combination of "Look how mature and considerate I'm being" and "You are scum" that I've only heard before from her mother: I really appreciate the offer, and I know you want to have a good relationship with us, and I support that, but you've never been a stepmother to me or the boys, and you have no place in our lives, and I don't want a relationship with you, and we know who the people are in our lives who really care and have actually been there for us, and don't think you know me and have the right to think I'm upset just because you've met me a few times, but I don't want to think I think badly of you, and I really hope you join us for dinner tonight because the boys would like to see you.

wtf

So, okay, writing out the summary now, it is kind of making me laugh a bit, except for the part where she's moving back with her mother and her younger brothers, and now there are going to be 2 of them reinforcing each other and talking shit about us/me to the boys, and Fitz has a promotion ceremony coming up that she's probably not coming to now, and I don't know what to do about our wedding - to which I invited her, her boyfriend, and his parents - which she also criticized me for. And I *really* like the boys, especially one of them who is the only one who has been consistently kind to me despite his mother's influence, and I don't think for a minute that they all see me the way she claimed, but I'm horrified that they will after their mother and sister both work on them for a while. And that is very hard for me to accept, because I thought we had made a lot of progress with each other... but I thought I had made progress with the daughter too, so what do I know about anything?

I could hear her mother speaking through her - same tactics, same *wording* even. I don't know how much she believes of what she wrote [some stuff, like, "the divorce wasn't difficult for any of us" I know was a lie], and even if she does believe it, I know it's mostly just BPD influence. And seriously, she's done some awful things to Fitz over the past few years. Pretty major betrayals, to the point that even he is about ready to just say, "Okay, you're done." And I don't *want* to deal with her ever again - even though I did hold it together long enough to write a brief, pleasant email back telling her to feel free to contact me if she changed her mind. She needs therapy, very badly. She's not trustworthy, and I don't want her in my house. And it's pretty easy for me to switch off my concern for people once they've actually tried to hurt me or someone I care about. So her: less of a big deal today, even with the hurtful statements. But the boys.. I don't want to lose all of them too, and I *know* from the BPD books and from this site and others that it's totally possible that's going to happen. Likely to happen, even. And it really, really hurts.

I'm not leaving Fitz. He's the best man I've ever known. Some codependency issues - or he wouldn't have raised 4 kids with a BP - but he's working on that, like I'm working on my issues, and we're a great team. None of this crap has caused a fissure in our relationship, and I'm grateful. But it also just sucks that something I tried to do to cheer him up backfired this horribly. He formally adopted his daughter less than a year ago, so he could pass his GI Bill benefits to her and keep her on his health care, but he's raised her since she was a baby. He's the only person who's ever contributed resources to support her or the other kids, because the mom can't keep a job more than a couple weeks. And she shows no respect for him unless she needs something, and sometimes even not then. She's entitled and condescending, and he's made a lot of sacrifices to try to keep her in his life, and now with this, I think she finally crossed the line with him. He can take a lot of abuse, but he doesn't tolerate the people he loves being abused. So this is all just awful.

Thank you all so much - your responses were very helpful to me in getting through this event.

I have "unfriended" the SD-to-be from Facebook, and after many long discussions with my boyfriend about the advice y'all gave me here, and our own perceptions, we both agree that she is not welcome in my house ["our" house, normally, but I pay the mortgage], nor will he be using my truck/trailer to help move her back to the city from college later this month. If she dismisses the fact that I have provided a lot of resources to help her, then she doesn't get those resources anymore. If she apologizes - and only if it happens when she doesn't *need* or *want* anything from either of us - we'll reconsider.

Kind of funny update - about a day after we decided this, her BM called my boyfriend at work to say that when SD had gone back to school [again, without mentioning this to her father], she had left their house in shambles. Apparently, BM and her boyfriend must have left town for several days - possibly up to a week - leaving the kids basically alone. We had the boys for a weekend, during which time SD must have been alone in the house. So.. she did not clean up after all their pets, which are *not* housebroken, because BM won't provide consistent direction - big surprise, right? - and when the boys went home, the floor was covered in dog feces, vomit & urine... among other things. So what does BM want from us? She wants *us* to house SD now, because she doesn't want her in her house. And she said that we would be better able to provide consistency and discipline, because she always caves - her words. Funny, she usually refers to us as inappropriately restrictive and/or abusive when she wants the kids, but it's totally different when she's fed up. Anyway, he told her that we would not be taking in SD, and that she needed to not cave this time and have SD create some sort of life plan to get a job and education. (That will not happen. Good effort on his part, though.) I'm sure BM has changed her mind 9 or 10 times a day since then, and I'm sure in the end she'll let SD move back in with her. Until the next time she kicks her out again, at least.

This has all been very hard on my boyfriend, who is being strong because he knows it's the right thing to do, both for us and for SD... but at the same time the idea of not jumping in to rescue his baby girl is completely against his nature. *He* won't cave, though, and I'm just trying to support him emotionally.

Until next time!