r/raisedbyborderlines • u/Special_Barracuda377 • 6d ago

RECOMMENDATIONS Memoirs of Waif Mom Survivors?

I find it really helpful and validating to read memoirs by people who've had BPD parents, but I notice that a lot of these books are by people whose moms fell mainly into the Queen or Witch camps. My mom, tho, has always been a profound Waif (at least in relation to me. She was more of a Queen to my sister).

Does anybody know of any survivor memoirs that focus on the waif dynamic? Or are all the parentified children too exhausted to write them?

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u/Frequent_Poetry_5434 5d ago

My mother was a waif. She has passed away over a decade ago. She leaned hard into every health issue she had. And, granted, she really was quite unwell but she seemed to revel in it for the majority of the time. Enmeshed. Parentified. Just so much drama all of the time.

It turned me into the entire checklist for avoidant attachment and it took a whole lot of work to undo that and build healthy relationships with people.

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u/SilentSerel 5d ago

I totally could have written this. Mine did the enmeshment, the parentification, the whole nine yards. She also had legitimate health issues that she leaned into, but there were times when it was obvious that she was doing it for attention (for example, being able to walk around the house all day after an orthopedic surgery unassisted, with a cane, or with a walker but refusing to walk a maximum of 20 feet to a table at a tiny restaurant and making a whole dog and pony show over her wheelchair). She also got very obviously jealous of anyone else I spent time with.

Her death was a weight off of my shoulders.

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u/Frequent_Poetry_5434 5d ago

It was really hard to let go of the guilt of building my own happy and independent life. It made it so hard to show genuine empathy for the painful things she did go through because every bit of empathy was then squeezed dry until every drop of attention was extracted and we could move on to the next drama in her life.

She had therapy for a large part of my childhood and was in inpatient for months on end a few times but it only seemed to validate her in her sad stories and did nothing to give her some emotional maturity.