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Tuesday, 22 April 2008
Well, at least I didn't turn into a daffodil...
I've been in the land of the insane this week. Or at least the seriously disturbed.
I managed to catch a cold from a teller in Asda's (and what was worse, I knew I would and was too socially programmed to ignore my instincts and go to another till). Hardly had said cold took hold than I came down with some odd bastard species of cystitis. Feeling shivery, spaced out, in pain and incredibly tired, I down-tooled on Cult Fiction (that poor thing is blighted, I tell you) and decided to move away from the computer and do something else.
'Something else' turned into me buying books on narcissist families and immersing myself in the 'madness' that was my "family of origin" as psychiatrists love to call it. (As opposed to your family of rental, or your family of adoption for the day, perhaps.)
In the strange ways of the universe, I have no idea exactly how I came to the narcissist thing. I know I was looking at books on shame on Amazon and I'm guessing one of them sneaked in there. It rung a bell because I remember my brother throwing it into the mix of Ways My Sister is Insane and Therefore My Parents are Not, and My Life is Unchanged… No, Really.
They tell me some narcissism is healthy, but it crosses into pathological narcissism when people can't empathise with other people. There's even some division of thought on when a narcissist morphs into becoming a psychopath – but, hey, they're all the same in my book.
Kidding.
Still, it wasn't comfortable and I do kind of wonder what drove me to do it. You'd think maybe having a little festival of Marx brothers movies or some such might have been a better idea.
I have to admit that although I still feel like crap (the sleep deprivation alone has ensured that) I do feel better for having read them (three of them in a week). But has it helped any?
Yes and no. I do seem to be a rarity in the heady world of Children of Narcissist Parents, in that I recognised early on a lot of the things that others seem to take a lifetime, or two, to spot.
I seem to be even rarer in that I dumped mine, realising that they would never be any use for anything. One of the books I bought actually spends around half the time telling you how to "deal" with these madly abusive parents so that you can have a "relationship" with them.
I think that could probably be adopted as the new definition of insanity to replace the 'doing what you've always done and expecting different results' maxim currently in use.
Of course, it is a form of doing what you've always done, but what they advise is changing your usual behaviour for new behaviours that create a different, supposedly less mad-making interaction with said narcissist parents.
And I say, Why, God, why?
I will never, ever understand people wanting to hang onto families that don't – and, worse, can't – love them. Why would you do that? What in the name of all that's holy are you getting out of the relationship if they don't love you, don't even really know you exist and recognise you solely as a way of off-loading their bad feelings about themselves onto you?
So, any of you fellow Children of Narcissist Parents™ (let's trademark that), if you feel you can argue a good case for why you are hanging onto a dead but painful relationship that still gives you endless grief no matter how much you adapt your 'behaviours', tell me about it – I'd really love to know.
So what of me then? Did I see myself writ large on every page?
Yes, pretty much. It's disconcerting and unnerving to see family scenarios, nearly all set in America, that might well have been played out in the Henery household. To discover that your parents are nothing but a psychological stereotype and that your own behaviours are nothing but bog standard reactions to that behaviour is completely underwhelming. Looks like none of us are as original as we like to think.
Conversely, it's also comforting: to know that you haven't imagined it, to know that you haven't exaggerated it, to know that your realisation that it wasn't 'normal' is immensely reassuring, in a depressing kind of a way. Depressing because you wonder how human beings can be so dumb. This has always been my problem with my family. After a lot of hurt and rage you start to see it in a more detached way and you realise just how breathtakingly dumb their behaviour is (if only it was so easy to see how dumb your own behaviour is).
Take but one tiny example off the stock-pile of my parents' greatness.
My mother had a thing about stuff. She couldn't part with it. She was, and is, a truly bizarre mix of someone who will kill for stuff and who equally well doesn't give a toss about stuff. She's like some ancient biblical painting of good and evil having a wrassle over a man's soul.
My mother couldn't give you anything. No, I don't mean emotionally (that was a given), but she actually couldn't hand things over. This meant in practice that when I went food shopping for the family I had to buy four of everything, because she couldn't cope with the insecurity of not having her share. This also meant there was a rule that you only ever ate your piece. You couldn't have an extra one because four were bought and the four were designated to each individual. If anyone (and it didn't happen often) accidentally ate my mother's piece then she would go deadly silent.
This wasn't a sulk, it was a glacial withdrawing. My mother could be silent for weeks at a stretch if she felt slighted. If it was very bad she would use someone else to communicate – you know the old joke, "Go and ask your father if he wants his supper" when he's sitting right there.
None of this was comic, understand. It was deadly serious. Trust me, a mother who was already 99% absent going for the full Monty was no joke.
This problem with giving also meant she faced a terrible dilemma in any other sphere where it might be required of her. She couldn't give presents. She had two techniques for dealing with this: 1) give very cheap, freely available presents so that she didn't feel that anything 'special' was being given and therefore she wasn't, by implication, being somehow deprived. Or 2) take the present back.
My mother regularly took clothes and dress fabric back off me after it was bought, on various grounds, such as "It's too old for you" (green lurex, Chinese pattern satin, some nice pastel psychedelia), or in the case of clothes: "You never wear it", or that good old stand-by – no reason at all, just take it.
I didn't truly see a pattern in this until I was in my early teens and witnessed it operating outside of my relationship with her, giving me some much needed perspective on what was actually happening.
One year when we came back from a holiday in Czechoslovakia, my mother brought home with her a present for a work colleague. That was unusual in itself, my mother had no woman friends and didn't give presents. I don't know whether she had promised this woman something, or it was a game of one-upmanship, but a present was duly bought, a fancy-worked copper-coloured bracelet.
Now, it's important to understand here that my mother never wore jewellery, neither valuable nor costume. When she went out at the weekends she'd wear large, glitzy 60's/70's earrings, that being the fashion then, but otherwise, no jewellery, ever.
Now she brought this bracelet home, took it into Centre 1 (tax office) where she worked and that was that.
I have no idea how I learned this, but I assume I asked her how her friend had liked the bracelet. My mother confessed she hadn't given her it. I have a feeling she either said something odd here, or I somehow twigged it, but I realised for the first time how absolutely insane her behaviour was. Never, ever, would she wear this bracelet (and she didn't), but she was physically unable to give it over to this woman.
I have a feeling she told her she had forgotten to buy her a present or that she'd lost it. I remember her confessing that it was still in her work drawer. I remember her rationalising it: that the woman wouldn't like it, it would be wasted on her, she'd never wear it. Ironic given that it was brought home and put in my mother's jewellery bowl where it languished, unworn, but safe from the horrible fate of being given to another.
My mother never even attempted to overcome this problem. In fact, I don't think she even recognised it was a problem. This, of course, being the problem with being a narcissist – you don't have a problem.
In practical terms this meant that my mother gave me nothing, from cuddles and kisses (awwwwwwww….) to reassurance, compliments, advice, help, presents, not even the bare necessities.
The only clothes my mother could bear to give me were school clothes – so I lived in school clothes. My mother never touched me and disliked being touched. My mother couldn't give help or reassurance, always telling me instead that I didn't need it. My mother was afraid of sickness and avoided the sick room with a repugnance that was almost obsessive, thus meaning that if you were ill you were on your own. Presents meant the cheapest thing she could buy at the newsagent at the last moment and leave in the bag, or wrap in some old 10-sheets-for-10p Xmas wrap. Any request for help, disguised as advice-seeking (the only way you could get her to notice your problem), was always met with a strange and subtle bragging about how she didn't need what you were asking for so she couldn't advise you on it.
My mother was superhuman, beyond perfect. She didn't get ill, have period pains (her periods were well-nigh invisible, so low-profile did she keep them), she always beat everyone at everything she did or died trying.
She's still like that now. When I was in Orkney I started having what I thought was pre-menopausal symptoms. I decided to phone her up and ask her about her menopause. I hadn't had any contact with her for years but we'd been briefly brought together by Max's dad – an aberrant guilt-trip I should never have allowed myself to be sucked into, but that's another story.
Anyway, in the course of the conversation my mother told me that her menopause had lasted only around a year, with virtually no symptoms, and then it was over – painless and a piece of cake. In fact, a typical old Mary Henery I-am-de-greatest summation.
The truth was, though, that this time I could remember some facts that she seemed to have conveniently forgotten. She had, for example, at least once bled non-stop for three weeks. So badly, in fact, that my father had asked me to try and talk her into going to the doctors. Completely unheard of in the shamed and repressed Henery household to actually voice such a squeamish horror, and from my father at that – that's why I remembered it.
She had also conveniently forgotten that she'd had headaches so severe that she'd once been reduced to tears. It was the only time that I ever recall seeing my mother cry, and it was sufficiently shocking that it was carved into my memory.
Oddly, she remembered the headaches when I reminded her, but she had no memory of the crying, only that she'd had to go to hospital for brain scans – a fact about which I knew nothing. Secrecy was our other great fun family game.
But the fact was, even in her seventies, my mother was still acting out Perfect. It was far more important to her that she be seen as indestructible than that she should share anything with me that might help me. There was no mother/daughter bond and never would be, she was too busy winning an imaginary game of one-upmanship with me.
Such, dear friends, is the life of a Child of Narcissist Parents™.
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