Is This Love, Or Am I Hysterical?

My ex has just asked me if I want to try our relationship again. I live with him now. We co-parent and sleep on separate floors. Every Monday, I go down into his bedroom. He has been seeing other women. Recently, I became the easier choice. He brings up trust. I don’t trust you, I say too quickly. I do not trust myself.

It is Monday. I go downstairs, turning on lights as I plod toward his room. There is a door covered in sticky notes. I leave one every morning before work, signed off xoco, a typo we never quit. I open his door. He sprawls out, hands over his chest, resting in peace. His phone dings. Text alerts. Successive ones. It sounds important. His phone is face down. Always. I wonder who is texting him this early in the morning; perhaps she has a standing date. My sticky notes seem cloying, immature, better suited to a brown-bag lunch. The dog starts to bark. I leave his room quickly and quietly.

I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder in 2018. I had not yet found its life within the zeitgeist, and I was unaware of both its mythos and pathology. At the time, it felt like a warm embrace: the power of definition to steer a vessel back to center. My relationship was falling apart, and it was taking my sanity with it. I was wild with hope but focused on blame. Was I a victim or a perpetrator? I needed a concrete answer. I overpromised and underdelivered. BPD became both prophecy and conclusion. My mind felt irrevocably lost. I threw medications at the problem and discovered alcohol as a panacea.  My love language became an apology. By the time the wreckage cleared three years later, I was living with my parents, attempting to get sober. My ex was with a new woman who braided my daughter’s hair and painted the walls. 

There is a bathtub in the main bedroom where I now reside. It is a jacuzzi tub bordered by stained glass. It is a luxury. He had been seeing some women, often the same one, and a year ago, on our daughter’s last birthday, she took a bath in that tub. I was out of town visiting my parents. I came home to her smell. BPD feels like my emotions want to burst through my skin. I pinch, scratch, and pick at myself, trying to find a state of stasis. We used to call it four o’clock. He said I was always looking around, waiting for four o’clock: code for imminent disaster. When he recently sat me down and told me he needed to talk, his hands were at 3:59. I thought he was going to ask me to move out, that he couldn’t make it work with the woman in the bathtub if I remained. “You’ve met someone,” I jumped to end the conversation before he could start.  “Would you just shut up and listen?” he snapped back, trying to collect his thoughts.  Both of us were having a conversation before either of us stopped to listen. He was anxious, vulnerable. I could see his thoughts forming beneath his furrowed brow. There are moments I want to go back and have this conversation a second time, redo it until I am sure it was meant for me.  I am not certain whether I read between the lines correctly. Maybe he practiced this on someone else first.  With BPD, the clock is always ticking.

Sobriety saved me. I spent three fragile months in my parents’ guest bedroom, nestled into a twin bed surrounded by dialectical behavior therapy worksheets and abandonment workbooks. I took to recovery like an academic writing a thesis. I read, studied, and wrote my way out of the black hole. For the first time in my adult life, I did this without a man as my lifeline. I was on that twin bed, phone tucked in my hand like a teenager daydreaming, when the same ex called and asked if I would move back home. He was newly single and needed childcare. The opportunity to move into his parents’ vacant house presented itself. It would be temporary until I could get back on my feet financially. My parents drove me halfway and deposited me back into his life. My pillow and stuffed bunny moved from one trunk to another. They told him to take care of me. Unfortunately, I have always needed to be taken care of, and I kept arranging my life to prove it. We are still living here today.

When I log into my medical chart, my BPD diagnosis sits in my history stamped with the words NEEDS REVIEW. It is listed next to things like alcohol and tobacco abuse.  I have quit both. No one has come to review these. I have a toolbox of skills I’ve learned over the years, but I’ve rarely needed to use them. My life circles between work and motherhood, asking little of me beyond that pattern. I have not dated. I have not invited any new relationships into my recovery. Am I capable of a healthy relationship, or is my BPD lying in wait? Would love, its physical closeness, emotional intimacy, the reliance on another person, wake it up? Am I in remission, or am I simply alone? 

This Thanksgiving, it snowed, and we stayed home. I wanted to make everyone’s favorite recipes. I worked in the morning and came home to cook. My daughter helped me stir, mash, and mix. We made up songs and danced in the kitchen. Every holiday, we use the same chorus to perform for him: Daddy's (insert holiday), whoa, whoa, whoa. We played board games. I had a strict timeline for when things went into the oven, calling us together with the precision of a football play. We laughed. We ribbed. I had flour in my hair. He mentions this day now, the simplicity, the joy. Surrounded, as a family, as a mom, he could not unsee it. We played at being a family long enough to become one. I made his mother’s recipes, staining her handwritten margins. We feasted.

Four years ago, after the wreckage, we started this life. I cooked dinners, cleaned, and did the laundry; he handled the finances and other facets of adulthood I have always found troubling. We worked opposite hours and shared the occasional family dinner. It was a marriage of convenience without the certificate. From routine and care, we fell back into friendship. We spent a summer at the beach, sunburned and salty. We binge-watched shows and played board games. We were love without limerence: steady, unremarkable, hard-won. I took care of our daughter, and he took care of me. Do you love me because I am a partner? Or do you love me because I am a child you cannot get to leave the nest?

It is Monday again. We are watching Lost. I remember how much I hated the ending in 2010. Fifteen years later, I find it comforting. I cry on the couch. It makes sense now, in a way my younger self could not have understood. I had not lived enough to understand death. We sit on opposite couches, their ends pointed toward each other. A side table does the work of bridging our distance. If we reclined at the same time, our feet might touch. Our love feels like this: distant and warm, adjacent, longing, familiar.

There are miles of things to say between us. We could circle back to his question. I could ask about the women who came between me, and we might still end up here, watching a TV show, enjoying each other’s company, letting fiction do the work for us. It has been thirteen years since we first met.  The day we became a couple, in the throes of love after a 2 Chainz concert,  walking hand in hand down the tree-lined streets of White Bear Lake, felt like a movie.  The beginning of our love story was enchanting. He fawned over my every word, kept running notes on my daydreams. My whimsy turned sour, and I wonder how this older version of myself could both love and be loved by him. That I love him is unquestionable. The question has changed now, as I face him, the most significant proposition since his proposal in 2013 looming between us.

Is this love, or am I hysterical?