personality traits of a narcissistic mother explained — 1 brief investigation

personality traits in a mother of this type are the kind of personality traits that get passed down like a piano nobody can move. i did not want the piano. i still got the piano. the piano has my name on the bottom in pencil.

so the working list for this one didn’t get written at the desk. it got written, of all places, on a clipboard at a doctors office, at 7:42am, before the receptionist had finished pretending the printer was warming up. i was there for a check-up i had postponed since february. the clipboard had four pages and one pen on a string. i used the back of page two.

now i’m at my desk, transcribing the back of page two into something that resembles a post. carla is in an annual planning meeting on the third floor and is not, i believe, scheduled to come down for at least an hour. tom called yesterday and i didn’t answer. tom owns a house and i rent. tom would have written this list at a kitchen island with a fruit bowl on it. the difference is, frankly, the fruit bowl. it is also a piano.

writing this from my desk, on the back of a clipboard transcript. carla is upstairs. i have, at most, the rest of the morning before someone notices the tab.

before we get any further: the long version of this argument lives in my pillar investigation on gaslighting, because most of the trait list overlaps. a mother who gaslights and a mother who has a personality built around being right are, frankly, the same building with two doors. one door says “you misremembered”. the other door says “you’ve always been like this”. both doors lock from her side.

personality traits of a narcissistic mother, the working list

i want to be careful with the word personality. personality suggests a fixed thing — a setting that came in the box, factory-installed, non-returnable. that is not exactly what we mean here. what we mean is something more like a pattern that has been practiced for so many decades it has worn a groove in the wood. the groove looks like a personality. it functions like a personality. it might, in the end, be one. but it was built by repetition, not delivered by stork. i bring this up because the difference matters when you are trying to decide whether you are describing a person or a sentence she has been saying since 1984.

tom, who has both parents on a christmas-card pipeline and a Volvo with eleven different seat positions, would tell me i’m overthinking this. tom does that. tom is very good at not overthinking. i am very good at the opposite. we are, between us, one functioning adult and one investigation.

i have read parts of three books on this. i have also watched the 1998 film about a stepmother negotiating with the original mother, which is not, technically, the same topic, but it is in the same hallway. the movie is kinder than the topic deserves. that is what movies do. they tidy.

the doctors office where the draft happened on a clipboard

the clipboard was, in fairness, a strange place to begin a list of personality traits. but i had time. i had a pen on a string. i had a doctors office magazine from 2019 with a torn cover. i had, more importantly, just been asked by the receptionist to “describe my family medical history briefly”, which is a question that opens, for some of us, a small trapdoor.

i wrote the date in the wrong box. i wrote my emergency contact as tom by reflex, then crossed it out, then wrote it again. tom, on paper, is the only person whose number i still know without looking. that is, by my own accounting, also a personality trait, but mine, not hers. we’ll get to it on a different day.

under “any chronic conditions in the family” i wrote “personality, hereditary, durable”. the receptionist did not ask follow-up questions. the receptionist had the look of a person who has read worse on a clipboard. fair.

PERSONALITY. IS. A. PATTERN. WITH. A. UNIFORM.

items 1 to 4, the tom-corroborated ones

tom and i grew up in the same neighborhood, three streets apart, and tom met my mother enough times that he can, in a pinch, describe traits one through four with no notes. tom’s own mother is, by contrast, a person who sends actual birthday cards on actual birthdays. this is relevant.

1. she rewrites the past in real time, with calm. a thing happens. you mention it. she says it didn’t. when you produce a photograph she says “that’s not what was happening in the photograph”. tom witnessed this once at a barbecue in 2014 involving a hot dog, a paper plate, and a five-minute argument about who had asked for mustard. she won. tom, who is very tall, looked very small for the rest of the evening.

2. compliments come with a small invoice. she will tell you something kind and then, four sentences later, refer to a sacrifice she made in 1997 that you were too young to remember and too young to thank her for. you cannot pay this invoice. the invoice is the point. the invoice is renewable.

3. her opinion of your friends arrives before they do. she has decided about people she has not met. tom met her once when he was eleven and she had already concluded he was “the loud one” — tom is, noted, the quiet one in any room not containing his own children. the conclusion did not update.

4. crisis flows uphill, toward her. you have a bad day. she has a worse one, retroactively. you call to mention something heavy. by the end of the call she is the one being consoled. tom called this “the gravity thing”. tom is not a poet. tom was right.

items 5 to 8, the personality-grade ones

5. you are, on most days, an extension of her résumé. your achievements are her parenting. your failures are your own. there is no third drawer. this is a feature of the operating system, not a bug, and you cannot patch it from your end.

6. the apology is structurally impossible. not rare. not delayed. structurally impossible. an apology would require the system to admit it had been wrong for thirty years. the system was not built to do that. the system was built to keep going. the system is, in this sense, very impressive engineering.

7. silence is a weapon she practices. she goes quiet in a way that requires you to come find her. you bring the apology she will not be giving. you bring it on a tray. you set the tray down. she eats half of it and tells you the rest is cold.

8. she remembers what you owe and forgets what you’ve given. the ledger is one-directional. she keeps it in a drawer in her head that she opens on holidays. that drawer does not have a corresponding drawer for your contributions. there is, in her house, only one drawer.

cold pizza is breakfast. hot pizza is dinner. i mention this because it is the only opinion i hold that has not, at some point, been described to me as a misunderstanding of how i feel about something. it is, on the trait map, my own personal demilitarized zone. i recommend everyone find theirs and put a fence around it.

closing pulpit, the personality is durable, the mother is yours

the part nobody likes to say is that the durability of the personality is not, on its own, an instruction manual for what you should do about it. some people cut contact. some people stay close and develop a thick set of internal rules. some people compromise — sunday calls, no holidays, no surprise visits, no answering after 9pm. all of these are choices, all of them are valid, all of them have a tax. the tax is real. the tax shows up later, in different drawers.

my own approach is in the embarrassing-to-admit category, by which i mean the voicemail has been full for eight months and that is, technically, a strategy. it is not a recommended strategy. it is the one i could afford. the seventh microwave is, in this metaphor, the relationship — a series of replacements, each one slightly stronger than the last, each one eventually killed by a fork i did not see coming.

tom has a different approach. tom calls his mother on sundays for thirty-two minutes, and his mother sends him cards with money in them, and he is mildly bored by the whole arrangement, and that, friends, is what the brochure of normal looks like. i don’t have the brochure. i have the back of page two from a doctors office clipboard. it’ll do.

if any of this resonates and you want the longer hallway, the gaslighting investigation has the rooms to spare. start there. then come back here. the items are still on the back of page two, and i have not, as of yet, thrown the page out.

the unopened mail pile is at thirteen envelopes, three of them red. one of them is, almost certainly, a card with my mother’s handwriting on the front. it is leaning toward me from across the kitchen counter. i have, technically, not gone home yet.

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