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The quest between who I am
Being a mother while living with
Bipolar disorder intertwined with Borderline personality disorder
means there is no clean line
between what I feel
and how I show up.
Nothing stays contained.
My emotions don’t sit politely in corners—
they move.
Through my days,
through my body,
through the way I speak,
the way I pause,
the way I hold her.
They become part of my mothering
whether I invite them or not.
And still—
I give her everything.
What patience I can gather.
What focus I can hold onto.
What energy I can borrow
from parts of me already running low.
Because she deserves
a version of me
that feels whole.
And she is…
extraordinary.
Bright in ways that feel ancient.
Aware in ways that ache.
Some days I swear—
she senses the shift in me
before I even recognize it myself.
It’s in her eyes,
how they study me quietly.
In the way she softens
without being asked.
In the gentleness of her voice
when I haven’t said a word yet.
Her empathy is breathtaking.
And devastating.
Because she shouldn’t have to know me
that deeply
this early.
On the days when the lows come—
when Bipolar pulls me beneath the surface—
I become quieter.
Slower.
Like I’m moving through water
no one else can see.
I forget things I shouldn’t.
I drift, even when I’m right beside her.
The smallest tasks
feel like mountains
I have to climb without oxygen.
And she waits for me.
So patiently
it almost hurts to witness.
“I’m sorry, baby… I won’t forget next time,”
falls from my lips
more often than I can bear.
And she forgives me
like it costs her nothing.
But I feel it.
Every missed moment.
Every almost.
Every place I wasn’t fully there.
Even when she lets it go—
I carry it.
And then the light returns.
The high days—
where energy floods back in like a tide
I don’t know how to control.
I am brighter then.
Louder.
Alive in a way that feels effortless.
I do more.
Say more.
Love out loud.
I become the version of myself
that feels limitless—
like I can give her everything
she will ever need.
And she rises with me.
She laughs louder.
Moves quicker.
Matches my light
like it’s something she’s been waiting for.
But she doesn’t know yet
why it never stays.
Because the fall always follows.
The days where I say,
“Mommy just needs to rest.”
But it isn’t rest.
It’s the aftermath.
The quiet collapse
after pushing too far, too fast, too hard.
It’s my body asking for stillness
my mind doesn’t know how to give gently.
And I see it in her—
the shift.
The way her energy lowers to meet mine.
The confusion in her silence.
The small, unspoken sadness
that lingers in the room.
Because to her,
this isn’t a pattern.
There is no cycle to understand.
Only this:
Mommy was here—
and now she feels far away.
And in the spaces between all of that—
Borderline lives.
In the sharp edges of emotion.
In the moments that rise too quickly.
In the intensity that doesn’t always wait its turn.
Sometimes she sees me overwhelmed
before I can catch it.
Needing space
when everything inside me feels too loud.
Sometimes she sees the reaction
before the regulation.
The feeling
before the filter.
And then the softening.
The apology.
The quiet repair.
I try—
God, I try—
to hold it back from reaching her.
But I know…
sometimes it does.
And that is the heaviest truth I carry.
Not what I feel—
but what she feels
because of me.
That she is learning the language of emotions
through my storms.
That her empathy is growing
in soil that hasn’t always been steady.
But even here—
in the rise,
in the fall,
in the quiet spaces where I am still becoming—
she is loved.
In every version of me.
In the dim ones.
The distant ones.
The exhausted, unraveling ones
trying to gather themselves back together.
Because no matter how I arrive—
I never stop being her mother.
And she never stops being
the piece of me
that reaches for the light
even when I can’t see it yet.
~
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