characteristics of a narcissistic mother explained — 1 brief investigation

a mother with these characteristics, in case anyone is wondering, is the person whose voicemail my phone has been holding for eight months because i cannot bring myself to listen and cannot bring myself to delete. the voicemail is full. the voicemail is, technically, an heirloom.

it is 8:14am on a friday. carla is upstairs at an all-hands on the third floor and i have, by the count my coffee is keeping, an hour before anyone walks past the corridor and notices my screen is not the spreadsheet it should be. the rest of the building is still arriving. i, however, am here, and i am, against my better judgment, going to do this in a list.

writing this from my desk. the kettle on the kitchen counter at home has been off for two days. nobody has noticed but the kettle. let’s go.

the pillar write-up, if you want the wide-angle on the whole pattern this sits inside, is my long piece on how gaslighting works in close relationships. the parental variant of it is, basically, the same architecture with a longer lease and worse plumbing.

1. characteristics of a narcissistic mother, the disclaimer

i am not a clinician. i looked things up. i looked things up the way a person looks things up at 7am on a friday, which is to say with one eye on the door and the other on a coffee that is doing the heavy lifting. so take this as one observation, made from a desk, by a man whose phone has been declining to play one specific voicemail since october.

the term gets used loosely, and that’s fine, because most terms do. but loosely is not nothing. there is a recognizable shape, and people who have been near the shape know the shape, and it doesn’t help anyone to pretend the shape is invisible because the manual they reference on the shows i watch puts it in clinical font. for the rest of us, on a friday, in lowercase: the shape is real. the shape has receipts. the receipts are emotional. they still count.

2. the desk where the landlord excuse arrived again

i want to anchor the rest of the characteristics of a narcissistic mother in something specific, so i mention this for context. yesterday the landlord sent another excuse — about the boiler, about the timing, about the man who was supposed to come tuesday and did not. the excuse arrived as a text. the text was friendly. the text was sentence-length. the text was the kind of thing that, in the moment, you nod at and then realize, two hours later, contained no actual information and no actual commitment, only a tone.

i bring this up because the tone is the thing i want to flag. the landlord excuse and a particular kind of mothering have, in my non-expert opinion, a shared posture: warm, vague, uncatchable. you cannot argue with a shrug. you can only restage your kitchen around the broken boiler and call it design.

this is, basically, the entire experience of growing up with a mother of the type we are discussing. the boiler is broken. the boiler is also you. and the explanation for the boiler is, somehow, also you.

3. items 1 to 4 of the characteristics of a narcissistic mother, the productivity-bro framed ones

i am numbering these because the brief said list and because, frankly, lists make this kind of post feel manageable. there is also a Productivity Bro online — i will not link him, you know the one — who recently posted a thread arguing that “everyone calls their mother a narcissist now”. he said this in a quote-tweet, in a font he chose. i took notes. some of them are below, with the numbers serifed and the framing reversed, because i am, on a friday, against him in particular.

1. the rewrite. she remembers what happened, but better. the dinner that did not happen, happened. the apology you waited for, was given. the trip you took alone, you took with her. the photo album confirms it because she chose the photos. you start to wonder if your own brain is broken. it is not. her album is just shorter than your memory.
2. the audience version. in front of other people she is warm in a way she is not when other people leave. the difference is so clean you could time it. you have. it took thirty seconds. people who only see the audience version will, later, ask you why you are being difficult. you do not have a good answer for them. the answer is “you saw the show. i live in the theatre”.
3. the gift with terms. she gave you something. it was nice. it was, in some way you could not place at the time, also a contract. years later the contract gets cited in a phone call. you had forgotten you signed it. you had not signed it. there was, however, a card.
4. the concern as currency. she is worried about you. loudly. publicly. in a way that requires you to perform okayness back at her, on her timeline, in her framing. her worry is real. her worry is also a way of moving the conversation toward herself, which is, in fairness, where most conversations end up if you wait long enough.

4. items 5 to 8 of the same list, the ex-referenced ones

i learned half of these from my own watching, and the other half from a relationship that ended a few years ago. the ex was, to be specific, fine, and is now, i am told, with a man who owns a station wagon. but the ex did say, on a tuesday in what was probably the autumn of the second year, “your mother is doing it again”. i said “doing what”. the ex said the words. the words took three years to land. the words were free. they were also the most expensive thing anyone has ever said to me, in that they cost three years of my misreading my own life. so:

5. the ledger. she keeps one. it is detailed. it includes things you said in 2011 at a wedding she was not at, repeated to her by someone who was. nothing falls off the ledger. the ledger only grows. the ledger has its own gravity. you are, structurally, in debt to it.
6. the silence as weapon. she goes quiet. the quiet is not absence. the quiet is presence with the volume turned down so you have to lean in. you lean in. you apologize for things you did not do. the apology restarts the conversation. the conversation, again, is about her.
7. the triangulation. she tells your sibling what you said. she tells you what your sibling said. neither of you said the thing. by the time you compare notes you are both annoyed at each other and she is, somewhere, on the phone with an aunt, being concerned, in serif font.
8. the long lease. here is the one i kept underlining in my notes. she does not, in any usable sense, let you move out. you can move out of the house. you can move out of the country. there is a movie about this called Mommie Dearest from 1981 and a quieter one called Lady Bird from 2017 and both of them, in different ways, are about the lease. the building changes. the lease does not. you keep paying. she keeps the keys.

THE LEASE. NEVER. EXPIRES.

5. closing pulpit, the mother is durable, the characteristics are inherited

here is the bad news. the characteristics outlive their carrier. they get passed down in the way bad chairs get passed down, which is to say without anyone signing for them. you find one of these characteristics in your own kitchen one tuesday, in your own tone, used on a person who did nothing to deserve it. you put it down, gently, and back away. it is still there in the morning.

the third yoga mat under my couch from 2023 is, in this metaphor, the inherited trait — one more characteristic of a narcissistic mother that just kept moving with me. i did not buy it for any reason i can now defend. i have not used it. it is still there. it will, statistically, outlast me. so will the things i learned to do at a kitchen table when i was nine. the work, then, is not getting rid of them. the work is noticing them in time.

which brings me to a hot take i want logged in this investigation: “a pension is a faith-based retirement system.” i mention it because i think the same logic applies to the emotional architecture of a difficult mother. you keep paying in. you trust that, eventually, the system will pay out. the system does not pay out. the system was never designed to pay out. you can either keep contributing on the off chance, or you can take the money and put it in a coffee that is doing the heavy lifting on a friday morning. i know which one i did. i’m not saying it was wise. i am, however, saying it.

and look — you do not need a clinical word for any of this to count. the term moron, in the older usage of the word, used to mean something narrower than it does now, and the broader, looser meaning is the one that survived. that is also true of the phrases you use to describe a difficult parent. the loose, lowercase version is allowed to be true even if no manual signs off on it. moron, mother, the long lease, the seventh microwave i killed last spring — language drifts, the experience does not.

the standing desk i bought standing and now sit at is, as of this morning, a sitting desk with extra height. carla is back from the third floor. i have ninety seconds before someone notices i am not in the spreadsheet. let me get the closing in before that.

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