25 characteristics of a narcissistic mother, briefly

twenty-five is an aggressive number. twenty-five is the kind of count you only reach if your mother used to call you every sunday and end the call by reminding you that she had given up something, unspecified. mine did. mine still does.

thursday, 3:42pm. the floor is on a vendor demo two rooms over about a procurement tool nobody here will be authorized to use. carla is on a client call in another timezone, headphones on, door at an angle that means do not knock.

so the project at this desk, before the demo lets out, is to draw the 25 characteristics of a narcissistic mother into a side-by-side and admit, halfway down, how many survive a more honest pass.

25 characteristics of a narcissistic mother is the count most lists settle on; the working set is smaller. recurring patterns: the apology that flows toward her, weather controlled by her mood, affection on an itemized invoice, scripted pity, audience-scaled grief, the silent ledger of small thefts. six of those, sustained a decade, is the diagnosis the other nineteen decorate.

the building this list lives inside is the long survey of how a close relative slowly rewrites the small history of your week until you stop trusting your calendar. the mother apartment is on the second floor, two doors down from the wife unit. the architecture is identical. the wallpaper differs.

TWENTY. FIVE. IS. INFLATED.

1. 25 characteristics of a narcissistic mother, the disclaimer

the disclaimer first, because the post fails without it. i am not a clinician. i am a man at a borrowed afternoon with a bank app icon i refuse to tap and a microwave at home — the seventh — that hummed eleven seconds at breakfast and quit. what i can tell you about the 25 characteristics of a narcissistic mother is what i watched inside one household over thirty-two years.

the woman is not in this room. she would, if asked, deliver a forty-minute counter-argument with footnotes, alphabetized. i inherited her appetite for footnotes. the alphabet did not transfer.

the count of twenty-five comes from a coffee shop last november with a friend’s older sister who works in family law. she said, on the second espresso, that “the lists are inflated by symmetry — five categories of five, the typesetters love it”. that line cost me a year of believing the lists. the title earns its keep at the search box; the working set, audited honestly, is smaller.

2. the comparative table, the long version, briefly

the table sets the 25 characteristics of a narcissistic mother against the general narcissistic profile — the husband, the boss, the wife at brunch — to see which traits are mother-shaped and which are narcissist-shaped wearing a cardigan from a different decade.

the test, by my afternoon math, is which column the same person fills across seven rows for a decade. one row leaning is a tired mother. five rows sustained is the column she lives in. one row is weather; five is climate. the mother-shape and the general-narcissist-shape are, in the engine, the same engine. the wallpaper is what the searches sort us into.

3. the subscription audit that ran while i wrote this

at three in the morning, last night, i woke up and did the thing i have done seven times this year and called it different things each time. the bank app i don’t open, opened. eleven minutes. column of recurring charges, descending.

eleven subscriptions i had no current memory of authorizing. a meditation app from a february in which i had decided, briefly, to become a calmer person. a streaming service whose login i had lost. a magazine that mails a print copy into the drawer, eight issues deep. a 9.99 charge labeled premium.

i canceled four. the fifth, i could not find. the sixth required a phone call to a 1-800 line whose hours were 9 to 5 eastern, which is the universal sign of a charge i will be paying at least one more month. then — this is the part — a banner appeared mid-cancellation, offering me three months free of a tier i had not previously known existed. i accepted. by 3:34am the audit had reduced the count by two and added one.

the audit is the post about the list. the audit is also the list. the same hand that closes the bank app at 3:34 opens it at 3:11 next month. the inheritance is not the woman; the inheritance is the relationship to the column on the right of the ledger. you watch a parent ignore certified letters and you grow up either tearing them open at the counter or letting them stack into installation art. i picked the second.

4. the characteristics that survive the audit

by the time the bank app closed at 3:34am and i sat down at the desk at 3:42pm, the twenty-five had been audited too. four canceled, one reformulated, three duplicates under different names, one resubscribed-to as a free trial of itself.

1. apology that flows the wrong direction. she receives, at the holiday, the apology for her own bad weather. you apologize at fourteen for a christmas you did not ruin.
2. house weather controlled by her mood. the kid develops, by nine, an internal radar more accurate than the local station. the radar does not turn off when the kid moves out.
3. affection on an itemized invoice. a running tab of sacrifices kept in her head, drawn against at every disagreement. you never had access to the ledger.
4. scripted pity, deployed at scale. the patient party at every retelling, regardless of which way the wednesday went. the script is not a lie exactly; it is a script. the lie is in the staging.
5. the silent ledger of small thefts. a tab, in her head, of every kindness she has performed, never totaled, cited in a tone suggesting you have been drawing on a checking account you did not know existed. overlaps with what i tried to draw in the working definition of what people actually mean by a toxic person sustained over months.
6. memory edited live, dared to disagree. last christmas grows or shrinks depending on the audience. the kid, mid-sentence, is recruited to confirm the new version. the kid confirms because the alternative is forty-eight hours of weather.

that is six. six is what fit on the receipt i was using as a notebook before the ink ran on items seven through twenty-five. seven through twenty-five, i would guess, are restatements of these six in different vocabularies. the engine is the same engine; the search box sorts the wallpaper.

5. verdict, twenty-five is too many, the working set is six

the inheritance i am most afraid of is not the script. the script i can hear coming. the one i fear is the relationship to the bank app — the willingness to live inside ignorance because ignorance is cheaper, on the ledger, than confrontation. ignorance is, in this case, financial therapy. i did not invent the line. i quote it back to myself most thursdays.

none of the six require the woman to be loud. she is, in this household, almost never loud. the mother-shape runs on volume zero and a calendar that bends quietly in her favor. for the broader pattern of a person whose presence sustains itself by mild, persistent rewriting — the moron in the older greek sense, not the schoolyard one — see the working definition of moron i tried to settle at a desk much like this one, where the etymology kept escaping into household examples. the mother is, in that frame, a household-grade moron with thirty years of practice.

for two hours of the engine at full output dressed as a mother, watch the 2013 john wells adaptation of tracy letts’s play with meryl streep as violet weston, making an oklahoma house weather-dependent on her mood for one long dinner. five of the six items show up by the salad course. the one that does not is the silent ledger; she audits it out loud.

the demo two rooms over just released — chairs scraping. the bank app icon on the phone face-down to my right has a red badge i am not tapping until i am at home and the seventh microwave has been replaced by the eighth. closing this in three minutes.

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