Return the community, is how discharge from hospital is described, we called it coming home. It is funny in a weird way how everything becomes jargonized, arranging service in the community rather than help when you get home.

Most odd, it is the change that I made when my kid became ill, I stopped being their mother and became their carer. I am still their mother. Normal relationships and ties cease to be primary when someone is ill. It feels like you need to fit with the forms and the care plans that must be created.

It is difficult being on the cusp, if I hear the phrase development of the therapeutic relationship again I might actually high five someone, anyone, in the face with a chair. It is not just the cusp of coming home but the big news for us is despite the conversations occurring when my kid was only seventeen in a half, therefore eighteen is a whole half a year away is she is almost an adult…six months away but the development of the therapeutic relationship is paramount.

It is another twist of the screw that this is an on-going, probably permanent psychological state, diagnosis is both a blessing and a curse it gives an explanation for the behaviours but it also indicates that this is not a phase that there is no prescribed end in sight. This is a living with and not a return to the life that you knew, kind of state. Recovery has different parameters now, it is a challenge to accept that recovery comes in different guises and it is not a linear progression, the paradigm of illness, treatment, recovery, no longer is an option.

I feel so stupid. I have known this but not acknowledged it, for a while, probably since about halfway through her admission but there was still part of me that hoped that this would still be something that she would fully recover from and would be able to step back into the life I was expecting her to have. A hiatus from an expected trajectory, a learning experience, humility learned at an early age, maybe leading towards the development of a more compassionate adult. There is a big difference between knowing and accepting.

No one actually says out loud this is likely to be lifelong, you are seemingly supposed to gain this knowledge through some kind of psychic osmosis – well that and Google. This is what BPD is, hey, throw off the mantle of anxiety and psychotic depression….that was just a rouse to carry you through to this place where the reality is revealed, ta dah. It is like some kind of grim TV show, where they do the big unveiling and leave you to deal with your Rocco living room when you liked minimal.

Back in the day we were told that this was not going to be enduring, that there would be conventional recovery, despite my best efforts, I feel cheated. I don’t feel that anyone deliberately mislead us but it still requires a massive change in world view. I wish I was nicer, that I could find it genuinely easy to accept this seismic change and that it was not such an uphill battle.

If I just look at her, I just see her and there is no need to seek acceptance, she is there. Like always, just my kid, with all her foibles, her quirks, there is no diagnosis, it is just who she is and I love her. That bit is easy.