narcissist mom traits — 1 thorough investigation

mom traits, in the casual register, is a phrase that lets you put the topic down faster than the formal version. i prefer being able to put it down. i pick it back up later. i pick it back up at brunch, sometimes, when i should not.

and brunch, frankly, is where you spot it. the casual register is the giveaway. people who say mother have a script. people who say mom have a posture. the posture is the data. that’s what this list is about.

before we go further: the topic is a soft cousin of the broader pattern of being told your memory is wrong, which i wrote about elsewhere and which lives upstairs from this one. you don’t need that file open to read this. you can come back to it on a friday when you have the rest of the morning, which i, today, do.

narcissist mom traits, the working list i’m willing to publish

i kept the list in a note on my phone for, give or take, eleven months. i revised it three times. i deleted it twice and rewrote it from memory, which is, in this category, an irony i’m aware of. memory is the whole game. that’s the point of the post.

five items. not eight, not nine, not seven. five. listicles that hit nine items are usually four items padded by a person who needed the article to be longer. i needed this article to be honest. honesty fits in five.

before the list, the staging. the staging is the whole reason i’m writing this on a thursday and not sunday: on sunday i would be answering a phone call and re-reading my own list against live audio, and that’s a bad way to test a hypothesis.

the desk where the landlord rang and the notification chimed at 9:14am

the landlord rang the buzzer at 9:42am, which is a thursday hour i was not expecting him to use. the landlord, on principle, does not ring buzzers. the landlord sends a sentence in an email two weeks late explaining a thing that happened three weeks ago. the landlord, ringing, is a category event. i did not answer.

thirty seconds later, the_notification chimed. the notification is the small one in the corner that the phone uses to tell you someone has, at a distance, had a thought about you. in this case, it was a calendar reminder i had set in november and forgotten about. the reminder said: “call mom — birthday — flowers.”

the buzzer and the notification, in the same minute, are two things the universe coordinated to make this post awkward to write. i acknowledge the joke. i’m writing it anyway. the seventh microwave is on a counter behind me, plugged in, judging from a distance. the third yoga mat is under a couch on the other side of the apartment, reportedly gathering things i don’t want to enumerate.

the staging matters because narcissist mom traits, as a topic, is one you have to write while not on the phone with one. that’s the test. you write the post, you don’t take the call, and you watch what your hands do at 12:14pm when the second reminder fires. mine, today, were typing.

items 1 to 3, the hot-take-collection ones

the first three items are the ones that show up in casual conversation, by which i mean they survive a brunch unaltered. they are, in shorthand, the hot take collection. she has takes. she defends them. the takes are the trait. these are not crimes. these are postures.

1. she edits your childhood live, while you’re in it. “you loved that camp.” you did not love that camp. you cried in a cabin for nine nights. you have a picture. the picture is, somehow, in her album, captioned “his favorite summer.” the caption is the trait. the caption is doing all the work.
2. she has takes, and the takes are not negotiable. she will tell you, on a thursday, that “people who require constant validation are exhausting” and the irony will not land because she has built a small sealed room around it. she also has a personal version of “mondays are objectively the best day of the week, you just don’t know it yet”, which is, charitably, hers. uncharitably, it is the trait.
3. she keeps a list of your friends and an unsigned grade for each. she’s met them three times. she has scored them on a five-point scale she invented. the scale is do they reflect well on her at the door. you found out about the scale in 2019. you have been managing it since.

three items. each one is a posture. none of them is a tuesday. a tuesday is one event. these are postures, which is the difference, which is the whole post.

items 4 and 5, the subscription-audit ones

the last two items are the ones i found while doing a subscription audit, which is a thing i do every six weeks because i’m a person who pays for streaming services i do not stream. the subscription audit is, secretly, a personality audit. you find out who you were when you signed up.

4. she calls when the news is hers, not yours. she has not asked about the job in fourteen months. she has, however, called four times in the last six weeks to update you on a thing that happened to her at a brunch. the brunch is in another state. the brunch was last april. the brunch is the only news.
5. she frames her absence as a gift to you. “i didn’t want to burden you.” “i didn’t want to impose.” these are the two she likes. they are the two that flip it. she didn’t show up. she is the one being generous. the language did the lift. you’re saying thank you within fifteen seconds, on the phone, on a thursday, while a buzzer rings in another life.

that’s it. five. that’s the working list. you’ll notice i did not include the obvious ones. i did not include “she takes credit for your job.” i did not include “she compares you to the cousin.” i did not include the famous one about birthdays. those are not omitted because they’re wrong. they’re omitted because they’ve been written, by everyone, for fifteen years. the five above are the ones nobody writes down because they don’t sound bad enough on the page. they sound bad enough at the table. that’s the difference. that’s the test.

closing — the mom is plural, the traits are inherited

last note. the literature i have not read but am fairly sure exists, somewhere, possibly in a serious magazine, will tell you that “the mom” in this category is plural. she is several people. there’s the mom at brunch. there’s the mom at the funeral. there’s the mom on the phone at sunday 7pm, which is a slot i no longer pick up. she is, in fact, a roster. you have a relationship with the roster, not the person. that’s what makes the traits portable.

which means — and this is the part i didn’t want to write — the traits are inherited. you do them too. i do. i have done item three on a thursday this month. not to a friend, to a barista, but it counted. i scored her on a scale. the scale was does she remember the order. she did. she got a five. the scoring was the point. i caught myself. i logged it. a working definition of the toxic register, which i wrote up earlier, has more on this. the inheritance is real. the inheritance is the whole reason you write the list. you write the list to read it back to yourself.

pop culture, briefly: there’s a show called gilmore girls that built seven seasons on the casual register. people loved it. people quoted it. nobody, as far as i can tell, treated it as a documentary. i’m not sure that was fair to it.

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