characteristics of a narcissistic parent — 1 investigation

a parent in this category is the kind of parent who can make you apologize for their bad mood. i did this for about twenty-three years before i noticed i was doing it. noticing took a very specific tuesday and a sparky fork. the fork is in a drawer.

i’m putting this together on a wednesday at 7:14am, before the building wakes up, before carla goes upstairs to her annual planning meeting, before the elevator starts behaving like a piece of office furniture with opinions. there’s roughly an hour. that’s the budget.

the post is one investigation. it does not, to be clear, settle anything. it just stacks the things in one column so i can look at them without flinching. the column is short. the things are not.

characteristics of a narcissistic parent, the disclaimer

before the list, the disclaimer. i am not a doctor. i am a man at a desk, with a coffee, and a screen, and a long memory that took its sweet time arranging itself by date. if you want the clinical version, look elsewhere. if you want the version where someone counted the moves at 8:14pm on a sunday because they couldn’t sleep, you’re in the right hallway.

this isn’t about a mother on her own. it isn’t about a father on his own. there are separate posts for those. this one is about the dynamic when both seats at the breakfast table operate, even tacitly, in the same key. one of them does the move. the other one, sometimes, just doesn’t stop the move. both are doing the same job. the job is to keep the parent comfortable. the kid is staff.

which leads to the same place that any extended audit of household weather leads. mine led, eventually, to a longer post on the central pattern, which is the pillar i keep coming back to. characteristics of a narcissistic parent are, in many cases, that pattern wearing a parent costume. the costume is convincing. the kid is an unpaid drama critic who never asked for the ticket.

i mention this for two reasons. one, so the rest of the post doesn’t pretend to be a diagnosis. two, so you know i’m aware of how that sounds. i am. i’m doing it anyway. characteristics of a narcissistic parent are, like most household weather, easier to name on a wednesday than a sunday.

the elevator where the chatgpt summary loaded

here’s the scene that put the list together. wednesday morning, last month, somewhere around 1:38pm. i was in the elevator going down, holding a phone with one hand and a coffee with the other, which is a bad ratio for an elevator. on the screen, mid-load, was a chatgpt summary i had asked for the night before. i had typed, in the bath, the question: what do both kinds of parents do, together, when they are this kind. the answer was loading as the elevator passed the third floor.

by the second floor i had three bullet points. by the lobby i had four. by the time i reached the curb i had eight, and the curb was a different person than the one who got into the elevator. that’s not poetry. that’s just an elevator.

the eight bullets that loaded between floors are the eight i’m using here. i edited the wording. i didn’t change the structure. it turns out that when a piece of software summarizes the weather inside a household, the summary is short. shorter than the household, by a wide margin.

i kept the screen open for two days afterwards. it became the chatgpt second opinion i didn’t ask for and then asked for repeatedly. characteristics of a narcissistic parent, in the version that loaded in the elevator, were not surprises. they were a list of things i already knew, written by something that had no skin in the game and therefore wrote them in normal sentences.

items 1 to 4, the screened ones

these four are the ones the chatgpt screen produced first. they’re the ones that a stranger could observe in an afternoon. they don’t require backstory. they’re the surface, and the surface is informative on its own.

1. the room is always one mood. walk in. check the parent’s face. now you know everyone’s day. the kid learns this before they learn to read. the kid is reading the parent. the parent is the only weather report under that roof.

2. praise comes with an edit. “you did well. you would have done better if you had listened to me earlier.” the second clause is the sentence. the first clause is the wrapper. the kid eventually learns to receive praise the way you receive a piece of mail with a window in it. carefully.

3. mistakes are a referendum. a kid spills the milk. in a normal kitchen, a kid spilled milk. in this kitchen, a kid spilled milk and now we have to discuss what kind of person spills milk and whether the kid is becoming that kind of person. the milk takes thirty seconds. the discussion takes an evening.

4. the apology is upside down. a parent forgets a birthday, raises their voice, breaks a thing. the apology, if it shows up, arrives in the kid’s voice. “i’m sorry i’m sorry i shouldn’t have.” the kid is apologizing for the parent’s bad day. nobody asked them to. they did it anyway. they will do it for years. it will eventually leak into their job, their relationships, their elevator behavior. it leaks. that’s the whole point.

those are the four the elevator screen loaded first. you can spot all four in a single afternoon visit, if you’re paying attention, which most visitors aren’t, because the household has been trained to be quiet for visitors. the visitors leave. the visitors say “what a nice family.” the kid, age nine, knows what they saw and doesn’t have the vocabulary yet.

items 5 to 8, the elevator-grade ones

these four took longer to load. they’re the ones a stranger doesn’t see. they require living inside the household for a year, or being the kid for the whole run, which i was, for about twenty-three years before the fork incident reorganized my filing system.

5. the kid is staff. small jobs. specific jobs. emotional jobs. “tell your mother i’m not angry.” “tell your father i didn’t mean it.” the kid is a runner between two parents who are, in fact, in the same room. the kid is the post office. the post office is nine years old and tired.

6. memory is contested as policy. “i never said that.” “that didn’t happen.” “you remember it wrong.” this isn’t an occasional disagreement. this is a household policy. the kid grows up taking notes. the kid grows up checking the receipts. the kid grows up, eventually, in a relationship, checking the receipts there too, and being told, again, that they remember things wrong, and the entire pattern points back to the kitchen on a tuesday in 1996. (related, in a way the kid doesn’t like to talk about — see the wider field on whether the dumb feeling has a real source. the dumb feeling, to be specific, has a source. the source is the kitchen.)

7. the kid’s success is the parent’s biography. a kid wins a prize. the parent says “we won.” a kid loses. the parent says “you embarrassed us.” both sentences say the same thing. the kid is not a separate person. the kid is a chapter in a book the parent is writing about themselves. the book is long. the kid eventually realizes there are no other authors.

8. the parent is the victim of the kid. this is the move that took me longest to name. when the kid finally pushes back, even a little, even at thirty-two, even by saying “i can’t make it for thanksgiving,” the response is grief. the parent is hurt. the parent is wounded. the kid is the perpetrator of this wound. the kid is now apologizing for having a calendar. (every meeting could be a 3-line email. every family argument, by the same logic, could be a calendar request that nobody is grieving.)

those are the eight. that’s what loaded in the elevator. the screen went black after the eighth one because the phone was at twenty-three percent and the elevator’s lighting is unkind to phones. the eight items, by then, were already in the doc. the doc was open in another tab in a stack of some number i refuse to count.

closing pulpit, the parent is filed, the characteristics travel

this is the part of the investigation that nobody likes, because it doesn’t end with advice. you can’t unmake the eighteen years. you can’t unsubscribe the kitchen from your nervous system. the kitchen made certain decisions about which parts of you would be loud and which parts would be quiet, and those decisions hold, for years, in the way that a microwave holds a smell long after the food is gone. (mine is the seventh. it has held seven different smells. they were all, technically, the same smell.)

what you can do, and what i did, eventually, around 4:08pm on a wednesday in this calendar year, is name the moves. one through eight. on a list. with no commentary except “yes” or “yes also.” the list does not change the parent. the parent is, by now, a fixed installation, like the third yoga mat under my couch in 2023, possibly evolving. the list changes you. the list is for you.

characteristics of a narcissistic parent travel. they get into the way you respond to a boss raising their voice, the way you read a partner’s silence, the way you sit in an elevator next to someone with a tense face. you carry the kitchen out with you. naming the eight is not exorcism. naming the eight is just labeling. once the labels are on, you can at least see what’s in the boxes.

i’m not telling you to call your parents and read them the eight items. that’s a different post and i’m not the person to write it. i’m telling you that the list exists, that it is short, and that it loaded for me in a working elevator between the third floor and the lobby. yours might load somewhere else. mine was an elevator. yours might be a kitchen kettle. either way, the items are roughly the same eight.

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