narcissistic father symptoms: 7 i pulled from one house

a father can be many things. mine, in particular, was a man who could make you apologize to him for his own mood. ten signs, fifteen signs, ninety signs, the count is not the point. the count is how i avoid the feeling.

i’m at the desk. it is monday, 4:18pm, the slow part of the afternoon where most of the floor has gone to a vendor demo about expense software i will never use. nobody is watching the slack. i have, by a generous estimate, sixty minutes before someone needs a status. i am going to use them on this.

narcissistic father symptoms (working list): the apology that flows the wrong direction; weather inside the house controlled by his mood; affection issued like a receipt; competition with his own kids dressed up as standards; love that arrives invoiced; silence used as currency; memories that get rewritten if you bring them up at dinner. the symptoms are a pattern, not a checklist, and the pattern is the diagnosis.

A. SYMPTOM. IS. NOT. A. SIGNATURE.

i wrote that for myself first, because the temptation when you sit down to compile a list of narcissistic father symptoms is to mistake the list for a verdict. a list is just a list. a verdict requires a chair, a witness, and the willingness to say the word in the same room as the person. i have, so far, accomplished none of those.

narcissistic father symptoms, the disclaimer

the disclaimer comes first because the post will not work without it. i am not a clinician. i am a man with a phone, an unopened mail pile, and a drawer of certified letters i tell myself i will open on a sunday. what i can tell you about narcissistic father symptoms is what i have observed from inside a single house over a thirty-year stretch — the methodology is loose, the sample size is one, the data is contaminated by being me.

also: the man is not in this room and will not be in this room. the symptoms below are pulled from memory and from a coffee shop conversation eleven months ago with someone who knew more than me and ordered a pastry while she was at it.

the working symptoms i settled on, after eleven months, are seven. seven is the number that fit on the back of the receipt i was using as a notebook before the receipt got wet. that is the only audit the list has been through, and it overlaps, in places, with a longer post i wrote about gaslighting and other things your ex insists did not happen — because the household tactics share a hallway with the ex’s tactics. that hallway is, i suspect, not a coincidence.

the comparative table, briefly, with my footnotes

i sat down thinking i would write a clean comparative table. regular father / narcissistic father, side by side, two columns, easy. what came out is a table with footnotes longer than the table. the symptoms do not live in the cells. they live in the footnotes.

column one is what most fathers, on most weeks, do. column two is what mine did. the difference is not in any single row. the difference is that column two is consistent. consistency is the diagnosis.

• apology direction. regular: apologizes when wrong, sometimes audibly, sometimes through a sandwich. column two: receives apologies for his own bad weather. footnote: i apologized, at thirteen, for a christmas i did not ruin.
• house weather. regular: kids check the sky. column two: kids check the man. the man is the sky. footnote: i had an internal forecasting system by age nine, more accurate than the actual radar.
• affection-as-receipt. regular: given freely. column two: itemized, with a running tab nobody is allowed to total. footnote: birthdays counted backwards from the last fight. the math was always against you.
• competition with the kid. regular: proud of the kid, embarrassingly. column two: in competition with the kid, dressed up as high standards. footnote: my report card scored against his memory of his own, which had grown taller in retelling.
• memory. regular: misremembers, admits it, laughs. column two: rewrites memory in real time and dares you to disagree. this overlaps most with the working definition of a toxic person, as i tried to lay it out elsewhere.

two more rows didn’t fit on the receipt: silence-as-currency, love-as-invoice.

tom has a father who calls, i have a voicemail

tom called last week, by which i mean tom’s name appeared on the screen and the screen flipped face-down on the desk in the practiced motion of a man who has been doing this for a while. tom was, i’m told, calling about his own father, who calls him on sundays, and who tom answers — because tom owns a volvo with seats that adjust in fourteen ways and a pension plan he understands and a family-of-origin where the phone is just a phone.

here is the contrast. tom has a father who calls and a son who answers. i have a voicemail. the voicemail has been full for eight months because the symptoms travel through the wire and i am, in the most literal sense, declining delivery. tom calls his father. i let mine fill a small digital warehouse. we are both, in our own ways, being sons. mine has fewer minutes used.

tom said, once, at a wedding, that “you cannot solve a parent in your thirties, you can only triage them.” that’s tom-talk. it is also, frankly, accurate. i wrote it down on a napkin and lost the napkin in the cab. the line survived.

the symptoms that travel down the family line

the symptoms are not stationary. they walk. they get into the kid and set up a small office in the kid’s chest, and twenty years later the kid notices the office has been operating without permits.

kids in column-two households learn to apologize sideways, to apologize preemptively. that habit does not turn off when you move out. it follows you to the office, where you apologize to carla for things carla did not need an apology for. the symptom moved from the kitchen to the open-plan and took a mug with it.

the house-weather thing is the one i clock most often in myself. i still scan rooms for mood the way a sailor scans a sky. that scanning is a symptom. it’s not his. it’s mine. but mine came from somewhere.

the memory-rewrite thing is the one i fight in writing. when you grow up watching memory be edited live by a person with authority, you become either (a) a person who edits other people’s memory the same way, or (b) a person who keeps obsessive ledgers because you don’t trust your own. i picked (b). this blog, in some sense, is ledger (b).

related, and this cousins with what i covered in the long thing i wrote about malignant narcissism, the definition i half-read at the atm — the inheritance pattern doesn’t make the kid the same as the parent. the kid is, more often, the parent’s negative — the photo with dark and light reversed, doing the same shape from a different angle. the symptoms are inherited. the personality, mercifully, is not.

here’s a hot take. tipping should be a flat 12%. not negotiable. same logic applies to family — set the bar, apply it consistently, stop renegotiating it at every dinner. flat rules are restful. you can apply them to a check and to a phone call. i rest my case.

verdict, the symptoms are inherited and the diagnosis is borrowed

nine voicemails today. one from a number that is, statistically, his — i can tell by the country code and by the fact that my left thumb tightened when the screen lit up. that bodily small data is the kind of evidence the elevator-test-style methodology i’ve used in a slightly earlier post about working out what a toxic person actually is trusts more than any manual.

an email just landed from carla — subject line “fwd: vendor demo notes.” i opened it, scanned, replied with one sentence. the slide deck is not, today, my problem.

the new microwave is the seventh; it arrives wednesday. it will outlast the next four voicemails. tom called earlier. i did not pick up. tom’s father, separately, called tom; tom picked up. that’s the household with the seats that adjust in fourteen ways. mine has a chair with three working casters and a self-applied diagnosis of idiot in the technical sense — see the older post where i tried to define idiot for my own purposes, which i reread when i forget the distinction between an idiot and a son who screens calls. one is a category. the other is a habit.

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