How’s your mom doing?

My mother passed away in early 2024. From a tin box filled with letters from the 1950s and a deep dive into our family’s digital archive, I’ve tried to trace the woman she was before she became "my mother" - a charismatic girl who searched desperately for validation and intimacy, but didn’t always know how to hold onto them.

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In this memoir, I describe what happens when a home becomes an arena where reality itself can't be trusted. I examine the "dance" between Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and chronic depression, and how that dynamic seeps into every relationship - between parents and children, between partners, and between a person and themselves. It is a journey into "Cluster B," a place where emotions are dramatic, the fear of abandonment is a powerful engine, and suffering often becomes the primary language spoken at home.

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This is not an indictment. I wanted to understand how the girl I was always felt she had to "fix" her mother’s world, and how the family myths we built - of a dominant father and a "victim" mother - were only a fraction of the truth.

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How’s Your Mom Doing? is for anyone who grew up feeling that something was "off," but never received confirmation that what they knew was the truth. It is an attempt to dismantle the deadlock where one person's safety is another's pain, and to find, within those cracks, a place where movement can finally begin again.