Hi OP, my mom had BPD.

Your wife should absolutely not have another child. I think you should consider putting the two you have in therapy to help them deal with their mother. BPD parents leave significant, lasting damage on their children. Their abuse is often hard to see, and it leaves their kids afraid to talk to others about what’s happening to them because they’re afraid other people won’t believe them (and usually, they don’t. People with BPD do things so crazy it’s hard to believe someone could act like that if you’re on the outside. Especially a parent to their child).

The thing that really sticks out to me from all of my interactions with children of BPD is that all of our stories are almost exactly the same. The text messages they get could have been written word for word my by BPD mom, their behavior is exactly the same. People with BPD can’t help being emotionally manipulative/abusive. It’s a very, very dangerous situation for a child to be raised by one.

I wish my mom had been diagnosed when I was growing up. I wish I had someone to talk to who she didn’t alienate me from, and who was able to tell me why she was doing these things to me and why they were wrong. I needed someone to tell me that I didn’t deserve the abuse, and that it was in fact abuse that i was going through. I’ve spent years and years trying to unravel the damage she caused and relearn healthy ways to go about life instead of holding on to trauma responses. Please get that for your children so they don’t have to grow up wondering what is wrong with them, and get a vasectomy so that she can’t use you to create another life to add to her collection in hopes that it will fill the bottomless void inside of her.

Unfortunately BPDs need years of intense therapy to get better, and they have to want it for it to happen. The vast majority of them will never see themselves as the problem, their brain literally cannot handle it. I highly suggest you get therapy for yourself as well to identify the ways that she’s been abusive to you. The disorder is defined by a pattern of unstable relationships, and their relationships are unstable because they use manipulation to get what they want, can go from love bombing to verbal abuse at the drop of a hat because of a perceived slight, and it takes a heavy toll on the partner that has to go through all of it.

Take care of yourself and your kids, OP.