narcissist father signs — 1 thorough investigation

a father with these signs is the kind of man who can be present in a room and somehow absent from it, like a chair that has been left out in the rain. i have spent time with such a chair. the chair was my father.

i am writing this from the desk on a friday morning, 9:18 sharp, with the building unusually quiet because carla is upstairs in the annual planning meeting on the third floor and that buys me about an hour. enough to walk through the disclaimer, the dmv line, the dm i still regret, and the five algorithm-flagged signs that brought you here in the first place.

i did not plan to write about fathers today. the_algorithm planned it for me. it noticed i had typed “narcissist father signs” into a search bar last sunday at the kitchen counter and decided i was a content opportunity. fine. i submit.

narcissist father signs, the disclaimer (~260)

let me say up top: this post is not me filing a complaint about my own dad. my dad used to say, “if a man tells you he’s a king, count the people bowing.” he said it twice, on different sundays, and i remember both. so we are clear that the cariño exists. it lives in a drawer.

what i am doing here is something else. i am looking at the patterns the search bar wanted, and i am putting them next to the patterns i have observed in OTHER patriarchs — tom’s father at his wedding rehearsal, the neighbor’s father who narrates dinner like he is hosting it, the breadwinner-style dad who treats the family room like a press conference. these are narcissist father signs as a tipología, not a verdict on any specific man, including the one who raised me.

i am also aware, before anyone writes in, that “narcissist” is the most overused word on the internet after “literally.” i looked it up once on a website that knows things, and the entry was longer than my lease. so we are going to use it carefully, and we are going to use it for behaviors, not biographies.

the dmv line where dad did not call again

here is a memory that is not mine but might as well be. tom told me once, on the phone, that he was at the dmv post office for two hours because his father had promised to “swing by with the title.” the father did not swing by. the father did not call. the father did, however, send a long voicemail later that night about how the dmv was a socialist invention. tom’s voicemail box was already full from a different man, a different month, but he pretended to listen.

that is one of the narcissist father signs the algorithm-flagged list always includes: the broken promise that becomes a monologue. the father does not call back. the father calls forward, into a topic he prefers, and you are supposed to be grateful for the topic.

i thought about tom’s story this morning while standing in the hallway near the printer. it was 9:47, technically still in the planning-meeting window, and i remembered the scene from frasier where martin tells frasier the chair stays. that is the inverse of the pattern. that is a father saying “the chair stays, deal with it” instead of “the chair stays because of YOU.” the difference is who the chair is for.

the dm regret, briefly relevant, with my footnotes

now to the embarrassing part. last week i sent a dm to someone i barely know — let’s call him a guy from the work softball league we don’t have — saying something like, “your dad sounds like a textbook case.” i sent it at 11:23 on a weeknight i will not name here. i was wrong to send it. i was wrong about the day, too, in ways i won’t relitigate. i was right about the textbook, which i still have not opened.

the dm regret is its own genre of event. you draft, you reread, you delete, you redraft, you send, you put the phone face-down, you flip it back over to check, and then the read receipt arrives and you have to live the rest of your life inside the timestamp. mine arrived at 11:47, which felt punitive.

i thought about it again at 1:38pm at the desk, when carla walked back from the third floor for water. she did not look at my screen. she never does. but i minimized the dm thread anyway, because the dm thread, like a liar, doesn’t have to know it’s been seen to be a problem. you can read more about the difference between calling someone a liar in the proper sense versus diagnosing them as a narcissist, because the two get confused, and the confusion does the same damage.

signs 1 to 5, the algorithm-flagged ones

here are the five the algorithm always serves. i have ranked them by how often the dmv line has to wait for them.

1. the grandiosity that is too small to argue with. not “i am a god.” more like, “my way of folding the towels is the only way.” you cannot debate towel folding. you can only refold or flee. a narcissist father signs his name on the linen closet metaphorically. the towels will be inspected.

2. the empathy that arrives by appointment. he can be tender, but only on dates he chose. birthdays go through. mid-week worry does not. you call about a flat tire and you get a story about his flat tire from 1994, longer than the call you wanted to make.

3. the contempt for criticism, even if you whisper. mention the towels, even softly, and the room temperature changes. this is the sign the algorithm hides behind charts. it does not photograph well. it photographs as a pause.

4. the image obsession, household division. the front yard is immaculate. the garage is a museum of grievances. guests get the front yard. you got the garage.

5. the absence inside the presence. sundays should end at 6 PM, in my opinion, and a sunday spent with this kind of father is the reason. he is in the room. he is also in his own room, which is somewhere behind his eyes. the chair in the rain.

verdict, the father is quoted, the signs are loud

i logged the morning in a notebook i pretend to keep: one disclaimer, one dmv story borrowed from tom, one dm i regret, five signs the algorithm wanted. the voicemail on my own phone is full because of an unrelated man, but the symmetry was not lost on me at 2:47pm when i tried to clear it and the app crashed.

the disclaimer holds. the dmv line still moves slowly. the dm is still sent and unanswered, which is its own answer. the signs are loud because the rooms are quiet — most patriarchs i have observed perform best in silence they manufacture.

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