Need this wonderful community to reality-check me re: my elderly & broke BPD mom asking for financial help!
I am incredibly grateful for this community, who have helped me grow and heal so much through the years, with your unwavering support and reality checks.
I am in need of one of those reality checks tonight! My dBPD mom has been a financial mess for at least my entire life, and I'm 43! She quit her full-time job with no backup plan in 1999, and has just kind of been wandering around, surviving on disability and now social security payments, ever since. For many years, she was counting on money from an inheritance that never came. Her only real financial asset was that she owned our family home outright, following a divorce from my dad. She is also a gambling addict.
She and I have been NC for about 15 years, with maybe 3 or 4 one-time moments of contact in there.
A year or two ago, I learned just from googling her that she had gotten a reverse mortgage, failed to pay it back, and her house was being foreclosed on (I found some of the related legal filings). She never contacted me about it back then, and when I was concerned and thought about reaching out and getting financially involved, a lot of people on here talked sense into me, and I never reached out to her.
Well, she finally reached out to me about it. In an incredibly long text (which, I am sure you can guess, did not include the words "please," "how are you," or anything else that wasn't about herself and how she was feeling), she told me what I already knew, which was that she was in the hole and being foreclosed, and needed a large amount of money to stop the foreclosure.
Part of me did wonder if I should try to assume ownership of her house, for a few reasons:
- I did love that house, I love the community, and the idea of it going to a horrible corporate bank, with all of my childhood mementos still in it, breaks my heart. I should also note that the area has gotten much fancier through the years, and I could never afford a house there now.
-I thought maybe it could be a decent financial decision. I have been saving for a down payment on a house for a number of years, and thought maybe if I bought her house and had her as a tenant, I would get my money back and then some when I sold the house after she died.
-I also had, for the first time maybe ever, a moment of pitying my mother. She lies constantly about health issues and other problems to try to get my attention, but I know this time that the problem is real. I have no interest in having her back in my life, but I do feel some empathy regarding the fact that, due to the way her childhood played out, there's no timeline where she's not BPD and out of control.
All of this financial instability is 100% her decisions and her fault, but her having to move out at 75 did tug on my heartstrings.
This is where I need you fine folks to talk some sense into me. My trying to buy this house and have her as a tenant is an especially bad idea because:
-the amount of money she needs = slightly more than my complete life savings. I have been saving for a house for over a decade to get that amount of money, and it is still not the number she mentions needing, so I don't even know where I would get the extra money — borrow it???
-I just got laid off! I have a lot of freelancing lined up, my expenses are limited, I don't have kids or pets, I am married (though I was the breadwinner and my husband doesn't make much money) and I have the aforementioned savings, so I am not super-scared financially. I am actually a little excited to get some training to pivot to a more stable line of work.
But...all that would go out the window if all my savings were tied up with my mom's house, because then I would be totally broke in the moment, and need to find new work this exact second just to get by month-to-month.
-even if I bought it and my mom was the tenant, my mom will probably find some way to screw me over. My mom and I first went NC, close to 20 years ago, when I found out she had drained my childhood bank account — checks from relatives, bonds, etc, that totaled $30k. She said she spent more than that much raising me, so she was entitled to it. She also opened credit cards in my dad's name when they were divorcing. She is a Witch type, and constantly absorbed in a fantasy that everyone except her is very wealthy, so if she defrauds them or harms them financially, it won't matter or hurt them because they are so rich.
Fine people of this sub, please give me a reality check! I have always just ignored her texts in the past, but this one is weighing on me.
(If you read the texts, you might think something got cut off — but nope — she literally began her monologue with "I have no money."
Also if you read the texts: my dad does not have millions of dollars, lol. He also hates my mother and would obviously not lend me any money to help her even if he had it)
UPDATE: I would just like to thank this wonderful community, and all the people who have taken time to talk to me about what a massive mistake this would be. I have decided not to respond to her texts.
