narcissistic mother traits — 1 explainer, sort of

a mother of this type, in my experience, is a person who can turn a get-well card into a contract. i have one of these cards in a drawer. the card has terms i cannot meet. the card has a pen mark from where she circled the part about flowers.

it is 9:42am on a wednesday. carla is upstairs at an annual planning meeting on the third floor, and i have, in honest terms, the rest of the morning before someone notices my browser tabs. i have eight items, an opinion, and a coffee that is doing the heavy lifting.

writing this from my desk, between the standing-desk-i-sit-at and a stack of receipts. the rest of the morning is mine. let’s get to the list.

this is going to be a list, because the topic invites a list, and because i am, in this post, in a listicle mood. it is also going to lean, in places, on the broader literature on how gaslighting works in close relationships, since one feeds the other in ways that are, frankly, depressing.

narcissistic mother traits, the working list

i have eight. i used to have eleven. i cut three because they overlapped with each other and one of them was, on inspection, just “she does not like the way i hold a fork”. which is its own thing but not, i’d argue, a trait.

i was reminded to write this, of all things, by a productivity bro online. he had posted a thread about “boundaries” with one of those graphs that has no axis labels. underneath the graph he had written, in a font he probably paid for, “the work is the work”. the work is, in fact, not the work. the work, in this house, is the get-well card with the pen mark.

(i sent a dm. i regretted the dm. the dm i regretted is, somewhere, in his folder, like the get-well card is in mine. we are even.)

SHE IS NOT, FOR THE AVOIDANCE OF DOUBT, A VILLAIN IN A FILM.

i need that on the page before we go further. the mother in mommie dearest is a movie character with a wire hanger and a finite runtime. real ones are softer, slower, and have a ringtone you have changed twice and still recognize. real ones do not need the hanger. real ones have the timing.

the desk where the dm regret resurfaced

it resurfaced because of the productivity-bro thread, but it really resurfaced because i opened a drawer for a stapler and found the get-well card. that is, in my experience, how all the trait recognition works. you go for a stapler. you find a card. you sit down on a couch with a third yoga mat half-visible underneath it (mine has been there since 2023 and is, possibly, evolving) and you start writing a list at your desk because the couch is not where one writes lists. the desk is.

i should also flag that one of my acquaintances — i’ll call him stefan, because stefan is what he calls himself when ordering wine — has a theory about mothers of this exact type. stefan’s theory is: “the trait is the tone. everything else is set decoration.” stefan said this with a glass of something dark that he had pronounced incorrectly on purpose. stefan is wrong about wine and right about this, which is, i find, a common pairing.

so, items 1 to 4. these are the stefan-style ones.

items 1 to 4, the stefan-style ones

the stefan-style ones are the ones that announce themselves through tone. you do not need a transcript. you need, in stefan’s phrasing, “the audio”.

1. she rewrites the family timeline. the version where you got the flu in third grade because you “wouldn’t wear the sweater” — that version is now the official version. the sweater was wool. you were six. nobody can verify any of this. that’s the point. she has the audio.
2. she treats your wins as hers. you got the job, but only because she “always knew you would”. the credit is, in the language of narcissistic mother traits writers, pre-allocated. you did not earn it. you collected it on her behalf.
3. she treats your losses as proof. proof of what, exactly, depends on the day. proof you should have called more. proof you didn’t listen. proof of “the thing i told you about in 2014”. 2014 is a year she has, in her version of the investigation, tagged.
4. she remembers everything you said incorrectly. you said you were tired. she heard you say you were ungrateful. you said you were busy. she heard you say you were busy with people who are not her. it is, somehow, always a more wounded sentence in her version than in yours.

none of these alone is, by itself, a diagnosis. in clusters of four or more, however, the picture starts to look like the picture.

items 5 to 8, the productivity-bro ones

the productivity-bro ones are the ones that feel, to the person doing them, like efficiency. they are the ones where she would, if asked, defend the behavior as practical. these are the colder traits. they have the calm of an annual planning meeting.

5. she frames affection as a transaction with terms. the get-well card has a pen mark. the pen mark is the contract. the contract is: flowers, by friday, of a specific color, in a vase that “she has, somewhere”.
6. she weaponizes guilt with the calm of a bank teller. she does not raise her voice. she does not slam doors. she sighs once, in a particular pitch, and you find yourself rearranging your weekend around the sigh.
7. she has a designated “good” sibling and a designated “other” sibling. the roles are sticky. they were assigned, like jersey numbers, at some point in the late 90s. they do not change. neither, conveniently, does the explanation for the assignment.
8. she treats your independence as betrayal, but framed as concern. “you don’t call enough” is not, in her dialect, a complaint. it is a diagnosis. you are, in the diagnosis, “becoming distant”, which is a phrase that means you are, finally, rinsing your own dishes in a city she does not visit.

this is where i am supposed to insert something about the seventh microwave i have killed, because the seventh microwave is, in this house, the universal metaphor for things that should not have to be replaced this often. mothers of this type are, in a sense, the seventh microwave. they keep working. they should not have to be replaced. you should, however, stop putting forks in.

closing pulpit, the traits are inherited, the diagnosis is borrowed and never returned

here is the part i want to leave you with, since it is the part i had to write in order to have the morning back.

traits are inherited. nobody, including the mother in question, picks them off a shelf at the supermarket. she got them somewhere. probably from her mother, who probably got them somewhere, and so on, in a chain that ends, if you go back far enough, with a person who lived in a stone house and was, by all accounts, also difficult on thursdays. that is not a defense of the behavior. it is, possibly, a defense against taking it personally. those are different things.

the diagnosis is borrowed. you read a list like this one. you nod. you think “ah, yes, the get-well card”. you put a name on the behavior. and then, if you are honest with yourself, you have to put the name down again, because the name does not fix the behavior and it does not, sadly, fix the get-well card. it just lets you stop wondering whether you are, on a thursday, the one who is wrong. you are not. that is, in this post and in the longer essay on the word that gets thrown around when you finally notice, the only thing the list is for. you will be called stupid for noticing, briefly, by someone in the script. the abuse is, recognizably, abuse. the recognition is the value.

the get-well card is going back in the drawer. the drawer is, in turn, going to stay closed until the next time i need a stapler. the seventh microwave is, as ever, on its last legs. the third yoga mat is unmoved. these are the constants. mother traits are, as it turns out, also constants. that is, in a roundabout way, the comfort.

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