narcissistic parent signs — 1 thorough investigation

a parent with these signs, much like a building covered in these signs, is something you really should be able to identify clearly from across the street if the lighting is decent. the lighting is rarely decent on parents. that is, in many ways, the central problem with the topic.

i am writing this from my desk on a wednesday at 9:18, because the apartment is not a place where i can sit with the topic for very long without becoming the topic. carla is upstairs in an annual planning meeting on the third floor, which gives me approximately one hour to type before someone notices the screen.

the trigger, since you asked, was the gym sauna last night. i do not exercise. i go to the sauna only, sit there for eleven minutes, and listen. last night a man told another man a story about his mother. i have been thinking about it ever since, which is how i ended up here, with this topic, on a workday.

narcissistic parent signs, the disclaimer i need to make first

i am not a doctor. i am a man at a desk who once had a parent and now has a landlord, and i have started to suspect those two roles share a contract template. i looked it up — the topic, not the contract — in the kind of book a man at the bar called “the manual they reference on the shows i watch.” it agreed with me, which is suspicious.

before i list anything, the disclaimer: a parent who occasionally forgets your birthday is not, by my reading, a narcissistic parent. a parent who forgets your birthday and then makes the forgetting your fault, in front of company, while taking a photo for posting — that is closer. patterns over incidents. patterns over incidents. patterns over incidents. that is, i’m fairly sure, in a serious magazine somewhere.

this is, in the most literal sense, a topic that lives next door to the broader pattern of gaslighting, which is why this post sits where it sits in the investigation. if you walked in here looking for a checklist, the checklist is downstairs in the verdict. if you walked in here looking for the texture, stay.

quick note on the manual i did not name: i refuse to drop acronyms. acronyms are the formal wear of opinion. i will use words like “patterns” and “signs” and “the kind of behavior that makes thanksgiving an investigation.”

the gym sauna where stefan came to mind

the lugar, since the editorial line wants it noted, is the gym sauna only. i pay the membership for the sauna. i have never used the weights. the weights have never used me. it is a fair arrangement.

last night, in the sauna, i was thinking about stefan. stefan is a man i know who became a wine guy at thirty-four. stefan has opinions about a wine called something orange and a region called something with hyphens. stefan also has a mother who, by his own admission once and never again, told him at a dinner party that his palate was “developing, but in the wrong direction.” stefan laughed when he said it. nobody else did.

this is where the wine taught me more than the wine ever intended. a parent who corrects a thirty-four-year-old man’s palate at a dinner party in front of his friends is a parent operating on what we will, for politeness, call first rights. the parent thinks they retained editorial control after the kid moved out. they did not. nobody told them.

and stefan, to his credit, did the only thing a man can do in that situation, which is laugh, refill his glass, and never bring his mother to dinner again. there is a verdict in there somewhere and it is not flattering to anyone.

the landlord-parent metaphor, briefly extended

the metaphor i am working with is this: a narcissistic parent operates on a lease they wrote when you were three and never updated. they own the unit. they collect rent in the form of attention. they refuse repairs. they show up unannounced. they re-key the locks when they feel like it. they call it love.

the landlord excuse, which is canon in this apartment, is the line my own landlord uses when the boiler dies in february: “i was going to call.” the narcissistic parent uses an identical sentence about emotional repairs. “i was going to call.” the call never comes. the boiler is the relationship. the boiler is cold. you put on a sweater and pay rent on time.

here is where i get into trouble with the metaphor: a landlord, at least, can be reported to a board. a parent operates outside the board. the board is, in the best case, your therapist, and in the worst case, your therapist’s voicemail. mine is full. it has been full for eight months.

the seventh microwave i have killed sits on the counter behind me, working, judging me. that microwave will outlast the lease. the lease will outlast the metaphor. nothing outlasts the parent.

signs 1 to 5, the parental-grade narcissistic parent signs you can actually use

here is the part of the post you came for. five signs. each one drawn from a man at the bar, a stefan story, or a sauna monologue i was not supposed to overhear. these are not clinical. they are the kind a normal person can spot without a credential.

sign one — the credit ledger. they take credit for things you did and blame you for things they did. this happens at family dinners, in voicemails, and in stories told to people you’ve never met. you are simultaneously the trophy and the receipt.

sign two — the public correction. they correct you in front of others. your shoes, your job, your partner, your wine. they would never do it in private, where there would be no witness to the correction. as frasier crane demonstrated for eleven seasons on a sitcom set in seattle, the public correction is its own art form, and the only person enjoying it is the corrector.

sign three — the conditional weather. they are warm when you perform and cold when you don’t. you learn to read the room before you walk into the room. by twenty-eight, you can tell the temperature from the parking lot.

sign four — the boundary contempt. a boundary, to them, is a personal attack. you ask for a small thing — please call before coming over, please don’t bring up my career at the table — and they treat the request as a betrayal so large it requires a six-paragraph text at midnight.

sign five — the calendar that bends one way. their birthday is sacred. yours is logistics. their crisis is everyone’s crisis. yours is “well, you’ll figure it out, you always do.” the calendar bends toward them like a plant toward a window. coffee is achievement, but only when they brew it; when you brew it, you used the wrong beans.

verdict — the parent is a landlord with first rights

the verdict, since the editorial line requires one: a narcissistic parent is a landlord with first rights, an unrenewed lease, and a calendar that bends only one way. the signs are the lease language. the unit is you. the move-out is harder than any move-out you will ever do, because the boxes are not boxes.

if you came in here trying to figure out whether your parent qualifies, the honest answer is: i don’t know your parent, and neither does the manual the men on tv reference. but if four of the five signs above made your shoulders rise, that is data. shoulders are honest. shoulders do not have feelings to spare.

and if you are looking for the broader frame on what people do when they want you to question your own version of a memory, that frame is sitting next door at a piece i wrote about being called dumb for noticing things, which turns out to be the dumb-by-design move parents and partners both reach for when the leverage is slipping. dumb is a useful word for a person who has run out of arguments.

the third yoga mat is still under the couch, in case you wondered. it has not become a sign of anything yet. give it a year.

↑