- I grew up Catholic in a home with 2 parents who had narcissistic tendencies (though not diagnosed or at a Narcissistic Personality Disorder level).
- I struggled with my relationship with my mother from the time I was 13 due to her inability to control my life when I wasn't meeting her expectations.
- My brother and I have spent years counseling and putting up boundaries to protect us from her hurtful words and deeds.
- My boundaries are down as my mom's full-time caregiver. And so are the ones I put in place to protect my children and husband.
- My parents were really into spanking, past the point of being effective (if it ever was.) But other than that, we were never abused physically.
- Unlike my family, my husband and I are open, honest, and affectionate with our children. Not perfect, but not blind to who we (and they) are.
Growing up Catholic, with a mother who was very devout and a father who was a detached Lutheran, in a small industrial western Pennsylvania town, I had a few guaranteed experiences. We went to church a lot. I went to Catholic school. My dad worked for a well-known company that paid a good wage, benefits, and even a country club/pool membership. We had a house, 2 kids, a car, and a dog. We were never hungry or without shelter or without basic needs. I got to go sled riding beside my house and played in the field, and "crick" across the street. We participated in dance lessons, music lessons, and swim team. We went to concerts, movies, and festivals at local churches where the food was - well, homemade ethnic food is truly the best! But so much of our life was a lie. I did not understand that until I was a teenager and had the ability to see the way other people lived. From that point on, I knew - and told myself - that I would remember what it felt like to be my mother's daughter, and I would NOT inflict that pain on my own children. What I really wanted most, but didn't have, was love.
You're going to laugh at this, but I give much of the credit for my self-awareness to Pink Floyd. You know, the British rock group. Their rock opera The Wall was my go-to psych therapy during my teenage years. I must have listened to those albums (2 vinyl that had to be turned over and switched) 100 times. Follow the link if you aren't familiar with this masterpiece, and you want to get details. After, oh, the 10th time, somehow, the analogy of the over-protective and controlling mother hit me. My mom was building walls around me. And when I realized it, all I wanted to do was tear them down. She thought she was doing the right things - strict Catholic schools, choosing my friends, no sleepovers, choosing all my extra-curricular activities, etc. - but what she was really doing was controlling me. I was screaming, "We don't need no education!!!" At least the Catholic kind. I understood the themes of the songs - RUN, comfortably numb (I tried different ways to make that happen, but alcohol was the winner), tear down the wall, the horror of war (the Vietnam War had just ended, but the nightly news seared the images into my brain), an unavailable father, and the feeling of being disconnected from your life.
When I was 13, our picturesque little town suffered a devastating flood. The third in 90 years. It wiped out the downtown, again, and permanently scarred the residents and the mills that surrounded the town and provided its financial stability. Most of them closed shortly thereafter as the rise in Chinese steel, big corporations with bigger CEO salaries who ate up smaller companies and their pension plans, and a general loss of young residents, led my parents to retire to Myrtle Beach. I was a rising junior in high school, and it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I left behind the oppression of Catholic schools full of alcoholic administrators, abusive teachers, and priests who have since been charged and/or convicted of molesting my classmates. My new public high school might as well have been on Mars. But I thrived there, where it was OK to be smart; I had friends and learned to speak the local way to avoid a little teasing. At this point, I told my mother that her volunteering at the school would not be tolerated, and indeed, I would drop out if she tried to interject herself. My brother was a freshman at the time, and we paved our own way based on our own reputation. We thrived. I graduated with honors, civics awards, academic awards, and a promising path forward. I stopped the destructive behavior path I was on in PA (but still had fun on weekends.) I was voted, "Most Likely To Succeed." And so I created a doorway through the wall and ran through it. I went to college and then nursing school at the best medical university in SC. I met my husband (he's still my husband) and his very warm and loving family and never turned back. I didn't step foot in a Catholic church for years (but attended other services regularly with my husband and still do.) Each visit, especially the first summer at home from college when my brother's curfew of midnight was imposed upon me, reinforced my desire to get away from my family. I refused to come back to the small world of walls that my mother had created. Instead, I learned to create flexible boundaries that kept me safely outside the wall.
This all worked great for me until I decided it was time to actually tear the wall down instead of just going out the door. Now that I was married and living in California, my mother came to visit. I took her to San Francisco. On the way, she told me about some people at her church and the trouble they were having with their children. She said something like, "I'm glad you never did any of those things!" I laughed out loud. She stared. I proceeded to tear down the wall, telling her all the things I had done - deprived, disobedient, dishonorable things - as a teenager, right under her nose. She didn't believe me. I gave her details. She said I was LYING. And then she said something I will never forget: "I don't know why you would LIE like that - are you trying to hurt me on purpose??" Yes, mom, this is all about you and your feelings.
So that, in a nutshell, is what it's like to have a narcissistic mom. I pour my heart out, explaining the troubles I had as a teen growing up in a home where I couldn't be myself, protected THANK GOD by a loving heavenly Father from having any severe consequences from my attempts to feel good about myself. To feel love. To feel affection. To feel acceptance. And in response, I don't get acknowledgment, concern, apology, understanding, kindness, or anything else that says, "I hear you, and I'm sorry I didn't see what you were going through." Instead, I got an admonishment for hurting HER. She refused to let the walls come down.
Over the years, my brother and I have had many discussions about the scars of our upbringing. He went through years of counseling, and I benefited from those discussions. I acted as his emotional memory. There were things he blocked that I remembered. My mom knows this and has said on a couple of occasions as we were discussing our insecurities and neuroses, "Surely that doesn't have anything to do with the way you were raised." Um, yes. Yes, it does, mom.
So what is a caregiver supposed to do when the boundaries you create to protect yourself have to come down? This has been the hardest part of taking care of my mom. She did not change. She just forgot. And now that she has some cognitive impairment, it's amazing how selective her long-term memory is. Ask her about her leadership roles in the symphony or memories from college; she can tell you lots of details. Ask her if she remembers forcing me to take piano lessons for 7 years, despite my lack of aptitude, and she is a blank (although she did admit one time a while back that she kept me taking piano so long because she enjoyed her weekly visit with my teacher, Aunt Char.) The opportunity for me to be acknowledged, or for her to offer forgiveness, seems to have passed because she doesn't remember the things I do. And even if she did, let's be real, it's unlikely she would apologize or acknowledge that she did anything wrong. I've tried, and she doesn't. We don't really talk; the apartment is quiet. Thank God my son is here, or I'd lose my mind. And still, she does not acknowledge when we have to sacrifice something to help her. When I talked to her about where she would go when she got out of rehab, she stated emphatically that she would not go back to Columbia, where I live. Never again. I offered to move to a handicap-accessible house. Still no. So I said, "So you expect me to leave my job and everything and move here?" And she quickly said, "OK." No acknowledgment of what that would mean for me, my husband, or my own children. Simply accepting that I would do that to meet her needs. Despite the years of boundaries, this was still her expectation - that I would conform. And given no other choice, I did.
In the song, "Don't Leave Me Now," the lyric focuses on the main character of the opera (Pink) as he calls out to whoever is listening, with desperation, to not be left alone. He is begging for his wife/mother/anyone to come back and love him. I get that. In an interview about the song he wrote, Roger Waters stated this about the fundamental truths found in the song:
"...if you're interested in writing songs or books or poems or writing anything, then those are the things that you try and write down, because those are the things that are interesting, and those are the things that will touch other people, which is what writing is all about, you know. Some people have a need to write down their own feelings in the hope that other people will recognize them, and derive some worth from them, whether it's a feeling of kinship or whether it makes them happy, or whatever, they will derive something from it."I'm glad he wrote The Wall. It touched my life. I've been writing down my thoughts and feelings as a way of acknowledging them during this caregiving journey. The wall is high, but I made a door, and while the boundaries are down, I'm staring at the mirrors and learning the lessons that I have yet to learn. "Together we stand, Divided we fall." (Hey You, Pink Floyd.)
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