narcissist mother symptoms — 1 investigation

a mother with these symptoms is the kind of mother who calls every sunday and asks if you have eaten and then makes the answer wrong no matter what you say. i have tried saying yes. i have tried saying no. she has feedback.

this is the part where i should mention, before anyone writes in, that my own mom is not one of these. my mom calls on sunday and asks about mike, that is not narcissist behavior, that is the opposite, that is interest. so this post is not about her. this post is about a pattern, and the pattern wears a lot of faces, and a few of them are mothers, and that is a hard sentence for a tuesday at 9:18am.

writing this from the desk on the wrong side of the office because the right side is in a training. carla is in the all-hands on the third floor. i have, by the standards of this morning, the rest of the hour. let’s go.

the reason i opened this tab at all is the standard reason i open most tabs at this hour, which is that the gaslighting pillar i wrote a while back keeps getting questions in the search box that are smaller and more specific than the pillar can hold. so we go small. we go specific. we go to the mother variant. we go quietly.

narcissist mother symptoms, the disclaimer

before the list, the disclaimer, because the disclaimer is half the post. i am not a doctor. i am not the manual they reference on the shows i watch. i am a person at a desk with a search history and a productivity bro tweet open in another tab telling me that “morning routines build empires” while my morning routine is this paragraph. so the value of what follows is the value of any pattern recognition done in plain shoes, which is to say, not nothing, not everything, somewhere in between, free.

also the word “narcissist” has been on a journey lately. it used to live in a clinical building, behind a desk, with a man in a tie writing on a pad. now it lives in the muted group chat my friend sarah keeps trying to add me back to, where it is applied to ex-boyfriends, bosses, landlords, mothers, fathers, the man at the deli, anyone who took the last parking space, and at least one very confused dog. the word has been spread thin. the symptoms below are the older, narrower meaning. the bigger meaning is between you and your own group chat.

also also: a mother who has one of these traits on a tuesday is not the pattern. the pattern is several traits, every wednesday, for years. the pattern has weather, not weather events.

i am going to stop saying “also” now.

the gym sauna where the draft happened in heat

i should explain why a chunk of this post was written in a sauna. i go to the gym for the sauna. i have been over this. the gym is the sauna, the rest of the equipment is set decoration, the membership is what you pay to sit in a small wooden room and sweat in private. the workout is a story i tell the front desk so they don’t ask questions.

i went in on saturday for what was supposed to be twenty minutes and turned into forty because i opened the notes app, and once you open the notes app in a sauna you have to keep typing or your phone goes to nine percent and you have to leave with nothing. the post you are reading is, in part, a sauna draft. you can probably tell. the sentences sweat.

i thought about the topic in there because someone i know has the mother. has, present tense. she is alive, she is calling, she is leaving voicemails. eight months of voicemails, full now. my friend has not played one in maybe four. she looks at the icon. the icon does not look back, which is, technically, the kindest thing about it.

i don’t open my own bank app for the same reason. it is a small red number that wants a relationship with me. i do not want the relationship. i pay for things by approximation, the way some people pay rent. (this is the bank app i don’t open. it has been closed for, by my reasonable guess, eleven weeks. it is a feature.)

the schrodinger’s fridge is a related principle. you do not look inside the fridge until you have to use it. the food is alive and dead at the same time. opening the door collapses the wave. some mothers are a fridge. you do not open the door until you must. this analogy holds for about another four sentences and then it breaks down, but those four sentences are pretty good, and i am keeping them.

okay, the list.

items 1 to 4, the productivity-bro framed ones

i am framing the first four like a productivity bro tweet thread because that is the form they take when you actually try to describe them out loud to a sympathetic friend at a bar. there is something about saying these things in plain numbered english that makes the pattern legible without making it sound like a court filing. so:

1. conditional approval that flips on a contact lens. she is proud of you, full sentence, with eye contact, and then a single word, and then she is not. the word is usually small. “but.” “well.” “still.” the pivot is the entire instrument. you spend years trying to find the version of the achievement that does not produce the pivot. you do not find it.

2. weaponized worry. she is worried about you. the worry is not for you. the worry is the leash. it gets longer or shorter depending on whether you called back. you cannot return the worry, you cannot refuse it, you cannot redirect it. it sits in a box and follows you to the doctor’s office and the deli and the wedding you almost didn’t attend. (ironing is a class war i refuse to fight, and worry, in this house, is the iron.)

3. rewriting of memories you were present for. the kitchen incident from when you were nine did not happen the way you remember it. it happened the way she remembers it. the way she remembers it makes her the protagonist and you the small confused side character with a question in your hand. you used to argue. now you nod. nodding is not agreement. nodding is the sound a door makes when it is closing.

4. the public version is a different person. she is charming at the dinner. she is warm with the neighbors. she is funny on the phone with the aunt. you sit at the table watching this happen and you wonder if you have made the entire interior life up. you have not made it up. the public version is a costume the costume is exquisite. the academy should give it something. they will not. they don’t know.

items 5 to 8, the muted-group-chat ones

the second four are the ones the muted group chat handles best, because they are the ones that need a witness, and the witness has to be someone who already knows, because explaining them from scratch to someone who doesn’t is a job and you do not have the energy for the job.

5. money as choreography. she gives, and she remembers. the gift comes back in conversation at strange angles, six months later, at a wedding, in front of cousins. you owe a thing that is not money but is shaped like money. the original gift was small. the debt is a building.

6. the favorite child rotation. there is a favorite. the favorite changes. the change is not announced, it is felt. you discover you are this month’s favorite when your sister stops returning texts. you discover you are not the favorite when your mother starts ending calls early. the rotation is the system. the system has no off switch.

7. crisis as content. her crisis is the family crisis. your crisis is a private thing you are exaggerating. when something happens to you, the conversation is about how it makes her feel. you call to share. you hang up consoled, on the wrong side. you sit in your kitchen wondering who is supposed to be in the kitchen here.

8. the call you cannot end. the call goodbye takes nine minutes. the second goodbye takes seven. the third goodbye takes four. you start saying goodbye at minute thirty knowing the actual disconnect is at minute forty-six. the call has a gravitational pull. you have, on certain tuesdays, simulated a knock at your own door. she heard the knock. she said, “who is that.” you said, “i don’t know, i’ll call you back.” you did not call back. she did, eight times.

that’s eight. there are more. the more is for the people with the longer lists. for the rest of us, eight is enough to recognize, and recognizing is the entire game, because you cannot fix what you cannot name.

i should mention that i looked into a few of the films above on the place where movie people look at movie things, just to make sure i had the years right. i did not have the years right. i now have the years right.

the pop culture references are “Mother!” from 2017, Carrie (1976), and Lady Bird from 2017 also. three different mothers. three different temperatures. one of them is closer to your situation than the others. you know which one. i don’t.

closing pulpit, the symptoms travel down the family tree

the part nobody puts at the top of the list, because it is the heaviest part, is that these symptoms travel. not in a curse way. not in a “you are doomed” way. in the boring, fluorescent-light way: you grow up next to a pattern, you learn the pattern, and then you have to spend a long time at a desk on a tuesday morning unlearning the pattern so you don’t repeat it on someone else. or on yourself, which is the version i know better.

this is why the list is useful even if you are pretty sure your own mother is not on it. the list teaches you what the pattern looks like when it shows up wearing a different jacket. it shows up in bosses. it shows up in landlords. it shows up in the man who calls and leaves the kind of voicemail that is also a leash. it shows up, occasionally, in the mirror, on bad weeks, and the mirror is the worst place for it because you cannot put the mirror on do not disturb.

so you read the list. you check the boxes you check. you do not check the boxes you do not check. you do not send the list to your mother. you do not send the list to anyone else’s mother. you sit with the list. you decide what to do with the information later, on a different day, with a person who is not me, because i am at a desk on the wrong side of the office and carla is coming back in seven minutes and the all-hands does not run long.

my own mom called on sunday. she asked about mike. she asked if i had eaten. i said yes. she said good. then she said, “you sound tired.” i said, “a little.” she said, “okay.” she did not feed it back to me at a wedding six months from now. she will not. that is what the absence of the pattern looks like when you finally see it, and seeing it once is, surprisingly, a thing you can carry around all week.

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