u/Last-Initial81

My mom's mania took off and rapidly spiraled a week before my wedding. I nearly had a nervous breakdown myself, as I was closing up a half year performance review at work and didn't have some of the wedding stuff lined up.

My fiancé was horrified at how my mom was behaving. He previously thought that I'm blowing things waaay out of proportions and just being a heartless daughter for not being as kind and forthcoming with my mom as with my dad and everyone else. He became a lot more understanding within that last week before the wedding.

I never hid the illness from him. She had an episode early in our relationship, about 6 dates in. Back then, he popped up in her social media because I added him as a friend, and she started texting him. I begged him to block her, and she was hospitalised with psychosis within a few days of that. He didn't think much of it.

I planned my wedding around minimizing triggers to her, as I knew that it would be a stressful and exciting occasion. I made peace with my dad not appearing, he has spent 20 years of his life managing her disease and has always been a major trigger for her. He has a new family, so him not appearing at my wedding wouldn't be as sad for him. But I really wanted his mom, my grandma, at the wedding. She is getting old, and she might not get to see her other grandkids getting married.

Apparently, it was too much. Mom's long time long distance boyfriend broke up with her about 6 weeks before that, which probably didn't help.

My grandmother and I spoke to mom's doctor, trying to get her hospitalised. But the doctor knew about the wedding, and generally thought that I'm blowing things out of proportions. I've been watching my mom's manias unfold for 15 years, and I knew that she will be involuntarily hospitalised around the time of my wedding – once the aggression towards everyone started and sleep ended mom needed 7-10 days to get herself into trouble.

So my wedding was going to be fun.

4 days before the wedding she brought 3 homeless men, one of them a recently released convict for murder, to her flat and was calling first me, and then my brother. I was at a boardgame party, so the call didn't last long. My brother was called next, and he recorded an hour of those men making threats about my dad's family, and all four of them were obviously drinking.

In the morning, my maternal grandparents went to my mom's flat and spent 6 hours trying to convince her to leave the flat and see her doctor. Eventually my called me, checking in on me, this time around she is convinced that I'm in danger, and I asked her to go with grandma.

It made her angry, but I then told her that if she doesn't get treatment, she can forget that she ever had children, and she will never know about her grandchildren. My brother is fully on board with that threat, and it worked. I don't think she remembers the threat, as she didn't mention it since, but she really lost it when she heard it.

She's been inpatient for 10 days now, and I feel horrible and helpless. She has built her life around her love for her children (my brother and I). She was the most caring mom when she was healthy. She still is endlessly supportive and her love for us is so unconditional and unreserved, when she is well. Yet, I am always chilly with her, and I am straight up cruel with her when she has her episodes, which probably doesn't help her at all.

I couldn't be more happy about my now husband though. He was wonderful through this, and he has done everything in his power to minimize stress and support me though this mess.

It started when I was 8 and my little brother was 6. Mom disappeared in mid December and we spent the holidays without her. Dad went out of his way to make it fun for us – it's one of the more memorable holiday seasons for me, in a good way. I didn't understand why mom is away, but I was otherwise very happy and excited.

Since then, my dad and grandparents were working very hard to hide my mom's struggles from us.

I discovered my mom's diagnosis at 14. She returned late at night after being away for a bit, but it was a school night and I was ill with pneumonia, so my brother and I were sent to bed pretty soon after her return.

Then she woke me up at 4am, inviting me to have tea with my greatgrandma who died several years ago. She seemed to forget that I'm there quite often, and at some point she tried to light up her sigarette using running tap water.

I politely excused myself, because she seemed irritated, and went to my parents' bedroom to wake my dad up. Dad woke up immediately and sent me to bed, asking me to lock my room now and to help my brother get ready for school in the morning if nobody else would be home.

Then my dad divorced my mom a few months before my brother's 18th birthday, because her illness was unbearable for him, and she made her latest manic cheating very public among my dad's collegues. He kept the family together for us, because he had a lot more power as a husband and a father married to the mother.

It's been almost a decade since, and I've been involved in managing my mom's condition for 15 years.

It drives me mad when doctors don't listen to me – I have a lot more experience with this case than they do.

I'm scared that eventually my grandparents will no longer be able to handle most of the management.

I'm scared that my mom will eventually get somebody killed, because she keeps befriending very shady individuals in her manic episodes and tells them everything about everyone she knows.

I also hate that I seem heartless to everyone when she's healthy – I'm not eager to spend time with her and don't want to share details about my life. She is the sweetest and most caring mom until she isn't. But few people see the moments when she isn't – we do our best to contain it, so that she doesn't scare away everyone in her life.

She seems to like her manias and when it takes over she's impossible to reason with. She doesn't say it when she is stable, but asking her about the fights that she picked up during manias leads to her answering "Are you saying I was wrong?" – which further confuses my relationship with her. She lies and manipulates outside of manias – but hides it better.

I hate having to deal with the duality of her, I cannot take a position and hold it, it keeps shifting, and I feel like a monster and a heartless daughter abandoning her ill mom much of the time.