Unpredictable actions, intense emotional shifts, and suicide threats.

I am opening up about my experience growing up with a step-parent who had bipolar disorder.

At 12, I moved into the house at 1161 Covington Road in Los Altos, California, and began life in what appeared to be a typical middle-class family.

However, those close to us—friends, neighbors, and relatives—were well aware of the underlying turmoil. I never knew which version of my stepmother I’d face each morning. Would she be the nurturing stepmom I had expected, as promised by my father?

Or the aloof stepmom who insisted I start looking after myself and care for my three younger brothers and even demanded that I pay for any food I took from the kitchen?

Some […]

My stepmother grew up in a home marked by abusive alcoholism, and I suspect she may have had borderline personality disorder. When George and I moved into her house, I was eleven, and he was eight. The memory that stands out most from that day is her explosive anger and emotional outbursts.

Our dad had never told her—the woman he married and had two children with—that he also had two adopted children.

After living with our elderly Italian grandparents for two years, he had no choice but to bring us to her house; there was nowhere else to go. Nowhere else he would let us go. My dad, being very non-confrontational, never intervened or insisted that Dotti change.

Unlike what you might expect, […]