Family at Fifty:
What's an Empty Nester?

Family dynamics are supposed to change as your children grow up and move out of the house. I've heard the term "empty nesters" and have wondered what that would be like. I will never be one of those people. 

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My daughter, Kayley, is 26 years old. She is bipolar, ADHD, and has borderline personality disorder (BPD). There are medications for the first two, but there is no medication for BPD. Here's how NAMI defines BPD:

People with BPD experience wide mood swings and can feel a great sense of instability and insecurity. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual diagnostic framework, some key signs and symptoms may include:

• Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment by friends and family.

• Unstable personal relationships that alternate between idealization (“I’m so in love!”) and devaluation (“I hate her”). This is also sometimes known as "splitting."

• Distorted and unstable self-image, which affects moods, values, opinions, goals and relationships.

• Impulsive behaviors that can have dangerous outcomes, such as excessive spending, unsafe sex, reckless driving, or misuse or overuse of substances.

• Self-harming behavior including suicidal threats or attempts.

• Periods of intense depressed mood, irritability or anxiety lasting a few hours to a few days.

• Chronic feelings of boredom or emptiness.

• Inappropriate, intense or uncontrollable anger—often followed by shame and guilt.

• Dissociative feelings—disconnecting from your thoughts or sense of identity or “out of body” type of feelings—and stress-related paranoid thoughts. Severe cases of stress can also lead to brief psychotic episodes.

Let me bottom line it for you: she is completely controlled by her feelings. Whatever she feels like doing, she does. And if she doesn't feel like doing it, she doesn't. The "doesn't feel like it" list includes going to school, getting a job, basic hygeine, and communicating with others in a civil fashion. The "feels like it" list includes stealing, drug addiction, sleeping all day, disappearing for days, wild, romantic flings with felons, and the occasional fit of psychosis complete with holes in the wall and profane screaming fits.

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This is why I will never be an empty-nester. My choice is to live with it for the rest of her (or my) life, or turn my back on my only child and let her live in the streets. She cannot make it on her own. She ends up homeless, sleeping in a cardboard box, or more recently, in a detatched garage with no plumbing. It always ends with her calling me Mommy and me picking her up. 

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Yes, I've been through literally years of therapy with her, for her, for me, without her...you name it. There's simply no difinitive answer. No solution. If anyone out there has one, I'm all ears.