characteristics of narcissistic parents explained — 1 brief investigation

parents, plural, is the upgrade nobody asks for. one of these is challenging. two of these, working together, is a small business with a logo and a referral program. mine had a logo. the logo was a frown. the frown was tasteful.

i’m writing this on a wednesday at 2:14pm, which is, technically, lunch i did not eat. carla is in a vendor walkthrough on the third floor, the kind that runs ninety minutes because somebody brought slides. the next forty-something minutes are mine. that’s the runway.

this post is about the plural, not the singular. separate investigations exist on each parent solo. this is the one where both desks at the kitchen table operate as a single department, and the kid is the intern who didn’t sign anything but somehow got the dress code.

characteristics of narcissistic parents, the working list

one parent like this is weather. two is a climate, with seasons and a HR department. when both work in the same key, balance becomes the kid. the kid holds the chord together. the kid is also, by twelve, exhausted.

i grew up in a house where the two adults disagreed about almost everything in public and agreed, privately, on exactly one thing: that the version of events the kid remembered was, on careful review, slightly off. they did not say this in the same room. they said it on different days, with the same calm voice. the calmness was rehearsed at separate tables.

characteristics of narcissistic parents, in this post, are not personality traits. they are repeating, dual-operator household behaviors. less two people with a disorder, more two people running the same play from opposite sides of the field. the play is short. the play is the kid.

(which is, give or take, the premise of marriage story: the divorce is the system, not the people. the kid in that movie watches two adults argue with the calmness of a deposition. you don’t need a degree to clock the pattern. you need a couch, a screen, and an evening you weren’t planning to spend rearranging your childhood.)

the desk where dave called and i let it ring

here’s the scene that put this list on paper. last wednesday at 12:14pm, dave called. dave is not a frequent caller. dave calls when something has gone sideways with a renewal, or when he’s at a doctor’s office, or when he wants to talk about insurance with the energy of a man who has just learned a new word.

i looked at the screen. dave with the second-ring rule, where if you don’t pick up by the second ring he assumes you’re dead. i let it ring through to voicemail. the voicemail is full. has been full for about eight months. dave knows. dave called anyway. the calling was the message. the message was: your phone still works.

the dodge was, in real time, the post. the dodge is the move. the move my parents ran on each other’s families for three decades, openly, in front of me. you don’t pick up. you don’t respond. you let the unanswered call do the talking. it works inside a marriage. it works on the kid. it works on a wednesday at 12:14pm with someone named dave.

items 1 to 4, the dodged-call ones

these four are the public-facing moves. the dodging moves. you can spot them at family events from across a parking lot. they are usually performed by both parents in tandem, with one taking the lead and the other holding the door.

1. the synchronized non-answer. the kid asks a direct question. parent A says “ask your mother.” the kid asks parent B. parent B says “ask your father.” both calmly. neither hostile. the kid never gets the answer, eventually stops asking, the system worked.
2. the rotating good cop. on monday parent A is the warm one and parent B is impossible. on tuesday they trade. you cannot predict, on any given day, which one will be the room you can sit in. you walk in carefully, twice, before committing to a sentence. by sixteen, you have a posture you don’t notice anymore.
3. the shared grievance archive. both parents reference the same wrongs done to them by other people, in identical phrasing, sometimes in the same paragraph. the wrong from 1997 is on the kitchen table in 2024 with the same tone of voice. the archive is the marriage. you, as a kid, are the librarian, and you did not apply for this position.
4. the audience-of-one rule. warmth, fights, cold spells, surprise gifts — all delivered with one observer in mind. the kid is the only audience. when the kid leaves the room, the show pauses. the relationship is, on inspection, a play with two actors and a single critic who never wrote a review.

items 5 to 9, the bank-app silent ones

these five are quieter. they don’t make scenes. they show up later, in places that look unrelated. they show up in the bank app i don’t open, in the unopened mail pile leaning on the kitchen counter, in the call you don’t return on a wednesday at 12:14pm.

5. love as a contract with hidden terms. affection arrives, withdraws, arrives again, on a schedule only the parents understand. the kid memorizes the schedule by reading faces in the morning. the contract has a clause about who gets to be tired. the kid never gets to be tired.
6. memory as a household resource. what happened last christmas is decided each december by whichever parent is the firmer narrator that year. the kid’s memory is treated as one of three reasonable accounts, ranked third. you grow up with a sense that things you remember might not qualify as evidence. you stop keeping receipts. then, around twenty-eight, you start keeping receipts of everything.
7. silence as a pricing tool. certain topics cost too much to bring up. the cost is paid in days, not in arguments. you learn the price list early. by adulthood, it has migrated. it now includes voicemails, certified letters, and a small red notification dot on a banking application this post will not name. the cost of opening it, you have decided, is higher than the cost of leaving it. it is, of course, not.
8. the kid as operations manager. who’s mad at whom this week, who’s allowed at thanksgiving, who has stopped speaking to whom — tracked, mediated, and explained outward by the kid. by twenty you could run a customer service department. you have, by my running tally, the soft skills of a hostage negotiator and the resting heart rate of a man who already knows the answer.
9. the inheritance of the dodge. the move that ran the household becomes the move that runs you. dave called wednesday at 12:14pm. i did not answer. i told myself it was efficiency. it was, on second look, technique. the technique is hereditary the way furniture is hereditary. you didn’t ask for it. you have it. you sit on it.

closing pulpit, the parents are plural, the dodging is mine

the nine items describe two adults running a household as a coordinated unit. the kid becomes, by the time they have a desk and a wednesday afternoon, an adult who runs their own life on the same operating system. you don’t escape the system by leaving the house. you escape it by clocking, in real time, when you are running it on yourself.

i did not pick up dave. it lives now on a list with eight other small failures, all of which trace, on inspection, to the same household. the household is closed. the practice is still open. it is in my pocket. it has a notification dot.

this is the part where someone would call me a stupid adult about money and phones, and they would, strictly speaking, be correct. stupid is the right word for it — the word i refuse to apply to myself in most contexts but accept, here, on a wednesday afternoon with a notification dot older than this calendar quarter.

the next time the phone rings — and it will ring, because dave is, like the seventh microwave, indestructible — i would like to pick up. one move, against thirty years of climate. characteristics of narcissistic parents, plural, are the moves they ran. the dodging is the move i inherited. the audit fits in nine items.

writing this from the desk, still. carla is back in the building, audible on the third floor. eleven minutes left. the bank app dot is still there. the voicemail is still full. the next wednesday at 12:14pm is, technically, scheduled.

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