The Evolution of a Smear Campaign

I had one of my epiphanies the other night…in reviewing my last post—the one about closure—I found myself lingering on the paragraph about why my mother moved in with Nana to take care of her. I was surprised when this happened because my mother never liked her mother and was not shy about admitting it. She never stopped resenting her parents for not letting her run wild when she was a teenager and despite the fact that she snuck out regularly and finally eloped with a guy she had known less than a month, she blamed their strictness for those choices of hers, choices that ended up with my birth and the subsequent ruination of her life.

She never grew up enough, emotionally, to accede to the simple fact that during her adolescence, the social mores of the time included more restrictions for girls than boys and much different expectations. According to NM’s older brother, my Uncle Gary, my grandparents were no more strict than the parents of her peers, the girls she went to high school with, but to hear her tell it, they all but chained her to the house, they were so old fashioned and restrictive. But in reality, it was my mother who was different from the norm, not her parents. Where other girls complied with their parents’ wishes and restrictions, my mother did not. Where other girls stayed home in their beds and slept at night, my mother climbed out her bedroom window and went out and partied in places normally off-limits to the under-aged (she was 15 and 16 when doing this). In typical N fashion, however, she blamed her parents, particularly her immigrant father, for “forcing” her to such extremes in pursuing her happiness—“…if he had let me go out, I wouldn’t have had to sneak…” (An interesting aside: two generations later my daughter, beginning at the age of 14, was doing the exact same thing—without knowing about her her grandmother's antics—and also making it the fault of her parents!)

My mother never outgrew that resentment. When I spent summers with her parents and expressed a wish to stay there full time she told me that they were “different” during the summers and that if I lived there full time I would see that and I would regret it. But my grandparents were somewhat strict with me anyway and I didn’t mind because I interpreted it as a sign they cared about me. But my mother, while happy to dump me in their laps every summer, never stayed even overnight at their house. She was different when she was around them—like she was a kid again and compelled to obey…or dissemble… She had never truly grown up but remained a resentful, spiteful child, hiding her normal bold, brassy, bossy self from them the same way my daughter, at 14, hid the fact that she was wearing makeup from her adoptive parents.

When my grandmother was 69, my grandfather died in his sleep—they had been married for 53 years. For many years, my grandparents had been friends with a couple, Rob and Frances, with whom they liked to play cards and to go travelling in their Airstream trailers. Not too long after my grandfather died, Rob’s wife also died. Before long, Rob and Nana’s friendship went to the next level and soon they were married.

My mother was livid. Rob was a man of very modest means and NM was positive his only interest in Nana was her money. He had an Army pension and some income from his late wife’s estate so he could pay his own way, but that didn’t stop my mother’s projections. On each of my annual visits to my father’s farm, I would stop in and spend some time with Nana and after she married Rob, Nana introduced us. I liked him: I found Rob to be a gentleman who truly admired my grandmother—it was easy to tell by the way his eyes followed her when she walked around the room. I liked him and I was glad she found some companionship in her waning years.

When my grandmother was in her early 80s she fell and broke her hip. The surgeons botched the job, leaving her with one leg shorter than the other and her foot turned outward. The surgery had to be done again and during the second surgery, Nana had a stroke.

In the 1960s Nana and Grandpa built a large 2-story house where, after they were married, Nana and Rob lived together. But disabled by her stoke, the house wasn’t the best place for them, so they moved into a retirement village while Nana recovered from her stroke and her surgery. My mother, suspicious as ever, took it upon herself to divest herself of all of her meagre holdings in the Nevada desert and high-tailed it to Oregon, moving into Nana’s house to “take care of it” while Nana was in the assisted living facility. And that is when the real smear campaign began.

I am 70 years old—a couple of years ago I began seeing spots crop up on my skin, particularly on my forearms—that looked like purple-and-red bruises. They weren’t painful like a bruise but they were vivid and took longer than a bruise to clear up. These marks are called “purpura” and they are a normal part of aging. In older people who have sun-damaged skin (and Nana was an avid gardener in the days before the invention of sun screen), there is a thing called “solar purpura,” bruise-like spots that can be as much as 5cms (2 inches) across.¹ These are perfectly normal on aging skin and when I first saw them crop up on my own arms, I remembered seeing them on Nana’s forearms and on the arms of other elderly people.

But that wasn’t what my mother wanted to hear—even after I explained to her that this was normal (I worked in a nursing home when I was in my early twenties—I have seen plenty of elderly skin!) she wasn’t having it. My mother insisted they were bruises because Rob was abusing Nana and she couldn't speak up because of her stroke. Of course Nana could nod her head “yes” and shake her head “no,” so she could have been asked if Rob gave her those marks but my mother wrote that off saying “she’s been confused since her stoke,” and insisted Nana had to come out of that assisted living facility immediately. Rob could stay there, as far as she was concerned, just as long as he paid for it out of his own money, and not Nana’s. And there was my first clue to what was going on with this uncharacteristic “dutiful daughter” mask my mother had inexplicably donned.

She succeeded in getting Nana back to her house and she hired a home care aide to come a couple of times each week to give Nana a bath and a few other heavy-lifting type jobs. During this time NM wrote to me occasionally but wrote frequently to my daughter. The information I got was that Rob had been beating up on Nana, leaving bruises on her (the purpura), and that he was after her money but she (NM) had put a stop to it. Rob wouldn’t dare lay a hand on Nana while she was around to protect her!

Anybody who ever met the diminutive Rob would have had a laugh over this—he was a small man to begin with, and now shrunken with advanced age. He had severe emphysema and literally could not walk across a room without his oxygen tank, a little green cylinder on wheels that he towed behind him everywhere. If he had exerted the kind of energy necessary for assaulting my grandmother, he would have collapsed of oxygen starvation—the man barely had the energy—or air—to walk to the other side of the room!

But the accusations didn’t stop there. Mother scoured the house looking for Nana’s jewellery and other valuables, certain that Rob had a hand in the disappearance of anything she couldn’t find. His list of character flaws ran from marrying a rich widow and expecting her to make his final years luxurious to being a Catholic to being a wife beater to being a thief. And his whole family were no better, in her estimation.

And my mother wasn’t covert or even bashful about her voicing her suspicions and unkind thoughts. Knowing how confrontational and contentious she was, it would not surprise me to learn that she had even said some of these things to Rob’s face. After all, Nana’s stroke had rendered her speechless, so she could not silence her daughter’s poisonous tongue or lay her suspicions to rest.

This was very much in keeping with my mother’s modus operandi. In the past, my mother liked to create a crisis out of whole cloth, then swoop in as the rescuer, garnering appreciation and accolades from those who thought themselves rescued, and admiration from observers. These campaigns were invariably kicked off with a smear campaign, a series of lies that had known or observable kernels of truth but which could not be disproven. Nana’s purpura—having been robbed of speech, Nana could not refute NM’s accusations that Rob had injured her in a violent altercation. And nobody bothered to ask Rob if my mother was telling the truth: they could see the purple marks on Nana’s skin, and Nana’s daughter indignantly accusing him—not to his face, mind you—and people just believed her.

This tactic had worked for my mother on numerous occasions, as far back as the mid-Fifties when she ran a woman out of our neighbourhood by stirring up the neighbours against her. She also used the same tactics to turn the FOO against me in her campaign to take my children to give to her younger brother to adopt. It was a tried-and-true approach and she didn’t waste any time putting the accusations, inferences and innuendo to work for her.

My mother used her accusations of Rob’s abuse to justify removing Nana from the assisted-living facility so she could “keep an eye on things,” the staff’s lack of diligence, according to her, was the only reason that Rob had not been caught abusing Nana. But the only thing she was really keeping an eye on was Nana’s bank account. NM had spent the previous few years of her life living a hand-to-mouth existence in a run-down trailer in a dusty hamlet in the Nevada desert and suddenly she had a cosy, up-market roof over her head, access to endless supplies of cash, and an unprecedented opportunity for NSupply. The situation was tailor-made for her trademark MO, and she wasted no time setting the wheels in motion. She had found herself a comfy berth that was going to eventually pan out as her nest egg for the future, provided she could keep Rob’s fingers out of it.

During the time my NM lived with Nana—after Nana’s stroke—NM got Nana to make some changes to her will. Since NM is the one who told me about those changes, I will never know what exactly was changed, but at one time Nana asked me what, from her house, I would like to have as a memento of her—she wanted to put it into her will. But when her will was probated, I received no bequests. Uncle Pete also said that Nana had promised him something in the house but when the will was probated, that item was missing from the will.

My mother also told me that she had seen to it that Nana bequeathed her the house, its contents, and the money in Nana’s bank account, and that the investments and cars would go to my uncles. I have no idea what Nana’s will was before, but I know that neither Rob nor I received anything.

Like Grandpa, Rob died in his sleep one night. Fifteen hours later, Nana was also gone. When I came north for the funeral I was shocked to learn that Rob would not be buried near Nana—he wasn’t even buried in the same cemetery—that his funeral had already been held and no one from our family attended, and that his children were coming to collect his personal belongings and all they were getting was a single small cardboard box with his Missal, a Bible, his Rosary, some papers—like his military discharge papers—and a few bits of clothing. Everything else NM had already discarded or was keeping. She wasn’t even going to let them into the house—the box was on the front porch for their collection. I had liked Rob and I found it very sad that my mother treated him so shabbily but I was still a few years from the breakdown that pushed me into meaningful therapy so I was simultaneously loathing my mother, afraid of her, and yearning for signs that she might someday love me.

For the few years that my grandmother was married to Rob, my mother bad-mouthed him daily. By the time he was dead, nobody spoke his name at my grandmother’s wake. Nana had spent her last years with him, but it was as if he had never existed in her life. Nana’s funeral was well-attended with many people coming to the funeral home, the burial, and later to the church hall where each attendee had brought something to eat and a pot-luck supper was laid out for us. It was as if Rob had never existed, as if my grandmother had remained a widow until her own death. My mother had erased him for posterity, not even giving him a final resting place next to his wife. He ended up buried next to his first wife, which I can appreciate his children probably preferred, but that doesn’t undo my mother’s small-mindedness in essentially cutting him out of our family’s history like a cancer and assassinating his character from the day she found out he had booked himself and Nana into an assisted living facility when my grandmother became disabled from the stroke. He did the right thing—he was older than Nana and tethered to that oxygen bottle: he could not take care of her alone, and this way she would be comfortable with her own furnishings and possessions, but safe and professionally cared for.

But all my mother saw was the money going out of the account every month, her inheritance dwindling with each check. Better that money should go to her, but she couldn’t be satisfied with just saying “Hey, let’s put Mother back in her own home and I will take one of the guest bedrooms and be there 24/7 when you need me.” No, that would be too humble, too ordinary, lacking in NSupply—and some people might actually suspect what she was really up to. No, vilifying Rob and making him look like a decrepit version of Bluebeard gave her a plausible reason to yank Nana out of the assisted care facility, killing two birds with one stone: stopping the haemorrhage of funds that was diminishing her inheritance and covering her real motive for the move.

Smear campaigns are done for a reason. Often the reason is no more than to gain NSupply from listeners, but many times they have a much more sinister purpose behind them. I am sorry to say I did not suspect my mother’s character assassination of Rob for what it was until long afterwards. I thought it was just her nasty suspicious character in action rather than a deliberate way to discredit him in case Nana died first and she had to fight him for the estate. But through the clarity of hindsight, I can see now just what was going on, what she did it, and how well it succeeded: there is no doubt in my mind that if Nana had died before Rob, the very next day my mother would have put that little old man out on the gravel road in front of the house, a small box of possessions in one hand, his little oxygen bottle trolley in the other, and shut and locked the door.

I am sorry, Rob, that I didn’t stick up for you back then—but neither of us really knew, at that time, what she was really up to or to what lengths she would go to achieve what she wanted, which was as much of Nana’s assets as she could get her hands on. I am sorry she assassinated your character and created a bed of lies upon which she could rest a court case against you in the future, if necessary. She did the same to me, but I literally did not see what she was doing to you until it was long over—Nana has been gone more than twenty years and only today am I seeing what went down. I wish I had done more…

¹ https://www.disabled-world.com/health/dermatology/skin/bruising-limbs.php

Undermining: Characteristics of Narcissistic Mothers Pt 4

 The black text is a shortened version of an original work by Chris, The Harpy’s Child. Original at https://sites.google.com/site/harpyschild/  Copyright 2007, all rights reserved

[There are two basic types of narcissistic mothers, the ignoring type and the engulfing type. These may—and often do—overlap but most NMs have a basic style and will be primarily one or the other. Some of the following points may not apply to your NM simply because they describe an engulfing characteristic when your NM is an ignoring type—or vice versa. But our mothers are not the only narcissists we will encounter in our lives. In fact, being raised by a narcissistic parent actually sets us up to be prey for more of the self-centred emotional vampires as we go out into the world, from girlfriends who are anything but friends to lovers who love themselves best to husbands who are the mirror image of dear old mom. So, whether something looks like it applies to your NM or not, read and consider it carefully—it may give you the awareness necessary to avoid the predator lurking around the next bend. As ever, my comments are shown in violet. -V]

It's about secret things. The Destructive Narcissistic Parent creates a child that only exists to be an extension of her self. It's about body language. It's about disapproving glances. It's about vocal tone. It's very intimate. And it's very powerful. It's part of who the child is. ~ Chris

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4. She undermines.

Undermine: weaken, dent, chip away at, challenge, destabilize, demoralize, undercut, damage.

Your accomplishments are acknowledged only to the extent that she can take credit for them. Any success or accomplishment for which she cannot take credit is ignored or diminished.

When I was in the second grade, it was discovered that I was bright. I was completing my classroom assignments so quickly, the teacher was giving me workbook pages she hadn’t even addressed in class yet, and I was completing them quickly and accurately. Unfortunately, she told my NM which precipitated a bit of an educational crisis…the second grade was too “slow” for me, so somebody (I wonder who?) suggested I be promoted to third grade in the middle of the school term.

NM had bragging rights on this one. her kid was brilliant, advanced, skipped a grade…the fact that I was struggling with math concepts like multiplication that nobody bothered to teach me elicited no sympathy in her—I was smart, I should just do it (maybe why I just hate that phrase!). Like owner of a race-winning horse or prize-winning dog, she was proud that she was the parent of such a child. That pride, however, did not extend to me or to helping me…I was expected to stay smart and continue bringing home brag-worthy grades no matter my private academic difficulties. This actually shaped many of my class choices in high school, leading me away from math and science and anything I thought might be difficult because I feared her reaction to my possible grades. I stuck with things required by the State for graduation credits and made sure my electives were, in my estimation, easy. I even refused to be in the Honours classes my senior year because I knew that the classes were harder and I might not make the grades that would keep my NM from sneering, berating, and punishing me.

Even so, my senior year of high school brought a string of straight A report cards that earned nothing for me in acknowledgement from her: nothing less was expected and anything else was worthy of punishment…anything less was not brag-worthy.

At about the same time I was uprooted from my second grade class room and flung, unprepared into the third grade, it was discovered that I could sing. Really sing. Suddenly, although I retained my role as ScapeGoat child, my mother turned from largely ignoring to engulfing. I had always considered a lot of attention from my mother to be a dangerous thing—the longer I was around her, the more likely she would think of something for me to do or a reason to punish me…seriously, by the time I was seven, I knew that out of sight was out of mind, that my greatest chance of safety lay in being quiet, unobtrusive, and invisible to her.

But finding out I could sing changed all that and I was suddenly the Golden Goose—with my voice and her management, I would be famous! (And she would be rich.) I didn’t want to be famous, but my big voice got me a lot of (unwanted) attention, which she basked in. I don’t think she ever forgave me for screwing up her dream by refusing to cosy up to smelly, disgusting old men who were casting movies and for finding ways to get out of singing engagements with fake sore throats and an inability to stay on key (which, since my singing teacher said I had “perfect pitch” was obviously fakery on my part). But while she viewed me as “the next Shirley Temple,” NM fairly glowed as the person responsible for my talent and my cuteness—and my clever little costumes and custom-made audition outfits made and designed by her.

Aside from my brief stint as a potential generator or riches, NM was pretty much uninterested in me except in ways I could be of service to her. I had chores well beyond what is reasonable for a child of my age (would you expect an eight-year-old to bake a cake twice a week with no adult supervision, in a gas oven that required a match to light?) and I was expected to perform in such a way as to reflect well on her (perfect grades, become a famous singer/actress) all with no regard to the costs to me or what I might want or be interested in.

Most of us DoNMs didn’t have stage mothers but we have all lived the disheartening experience of not being good enough as ourselves, as children, but only worthy of note because of our accomplishments. What you did was what was important, and what you did was important only if it gave NM bragging rights (made her look superior because she had a kid that did something worthy of remark) or, perversely, your behaviour was so bad as to bring her sympathy for being your parent. Otherwise, you weren’t worthy of her interest. It is hurtful, demeaning, damaging, and if we internalize it (and most of us do) it haunts and harms us for the rest of our lives.

Any time you are to be center stage and there is no opportunity for her to be the center of attention, she will try to prevent the occasion altogether, or she doesn't come, or she leaves early, or she acts like it's no big deal, or she steals the spotlight or she slips in little wounding comments about how much better someone else did or how what you did wasn't as much as you could have done or as you think it is.

I was fortunate enough to spend my sophomore year of high school (10th grade) with my father and stepmother. Away from NM, no longer afraid that if I sang around the house she would hear me and try to take my life away from me and make me into a painted puppet to earn her a fortune, I began singing again. I joined the school choir and was quickly put in a place of prominence.

The following year I returned to NM’s to live and I joined the choir there as well…and quickly became the “go to” soloist for my vocal range. During those two years of high school, in every concert we put on, my NM did not attend a single one, even though I was a featured soloist in almost every concert. And when my choir made the All City competition, at the last minute she rescinded her permission for me to attend the event, leaving the choir without one of its soloists. As much as she could have had bragging rights (“I made sure she had professional singing lessons when she was little—just listen to that voice”), I suspect the fact that there was no prize money, no payday for her at the end of my performance made her angry and she refused to go partly as punishment to me for thwarting her, partly because, without money to collect, she had no motivation to go. Go to see me excel, go to give me moral support, go because she was proud of me? Not a chance—and I knew it. There was nothing in it for her, and nothing else mattered.

Likewise, my academic award presentations were ignored, and my having an after school job was not countenanced until she figured out a way to pocket half my paychecks.

This is typical of NMs and the typical DoNM comes away from the experience feeling that no effort put forth is ever sufficient. Even engulfing NMs who attend every function can impart the same message with competitive commentary: somebody got more awards, you didn’t get the highest award, or if you did, how your appearance or your acceptance speech or even your posture or how you walked in high heels are all fair game to bring you down a peg, to keep you from feeling too “full of yourself,” to keep you humiliated and humbled,

She undermines you by picking fights with you or being especially unpleasant just before you have to make a major effort. She acts put out if she has to do anything to support your opportunities or will outright refuse to do even small things in support of you.

If you have ever caught yourself holding back from trying something you really wanted to do because you feared failure, you probably had an undermining parent. Rationally speaking, we all know that nobody is going to everything right the first time. We didn’t learn to walk with our first step, we didn’t learn to ride a bicycle or roller skate the first time we tried…but somehow, over time, we internalized messages that we have to do everything we attempt perfectly on our first outing. No mistakes allowed.

Once we have internalized that message, nothing is easy, especially if you have an NM because now you carry her with you in your head, everywhere you go, everything you do. Once you have internalized her unreasoning perfectionism, the criticisms that say you are going to screw this up, you can’t handle the stress, you never follow through, or whatever her undermining tactics tend to be, she becomes right…because you stress yourself out listening to her and worrying about yourself, her prophecy becomes fulfilled. You choke up, you fail, and eventually you may ever stop trying.

If you think you need help with something, you may find she intentionally withholds it, from giving you consent to do something to prying a few of her precious hours away from the TV or whatever her particular addiction is, and donating those hours to helping you to succeed.

You see, she doesn’t want you to succeed. You are supposed to fail and all of her undermining and refusal of support and help are for that reason. If you succeed, you get the glory, the attention, the kudos—not her! Depending on how malignant she is, she may even intentionally set you up to fail, just so she can read the good inner feeling of being right.

And don’t think for one minute that this kind of behaviour is limited to our NMs. Those of us raised to be Scape Goats somehow give off some kind of signal detectable by narcissists of all kinds, like a sick or injured animal gives off a scent detectable to the local predators. If you were raised as a Scape Goat by a narcissistic parent and you haven’t attracted narcissistic “friends,” lovers, even husbands, you are one seriously lucky person!

In my case, I managed to attract Jack, a particularly malicious specimen. Because I had no idea, because he was sooo nice to be in the beginning (or so I thought), because his narcissistic abuse of me was insidious, I didn’t really catch on to what kind of person he was for many years…years in which I increasingly thought I was losing my mind.

Jack was big on winning. I have seen him trounce a 6-year-old at Monopoly with no shame and a lack of understanding why I thought it was a horrible thing to do. What’s so bad? He won—was he supposed to let the kid win? For years I didn’t tip to what Jack was doing to me, but in retrospect I can see it started long before we were married. Jack loved to set me up to fail and when I succeeded he would fall into furious rage.

On one occasion, I wanted a new car. We had only one car and sharing it was not convenient for him. He suggested a second hand car, but I wanted a new car with a warranty, one I wouldn’t have to worry about breakdowns. I was going to school and I had a baby who had to be ferried around to day care and doctors and such.

Jack decided to teach me a lesson and gave me a low budget, $2,500, saying if I could find a car for this price or less, he would buy it for me. This was in 1974, when a new Mustang went for around $3,500. It took me weeks, but finally one morning spotted a new Pinto for $2442 and dragged him out of bed to go look at it. And the end of the day I had my new Pinto and he had a complete meltdown. I was completely confused because I expected him to be overjoyed not only that I had found a car within budget, but a NEW car that would not cost him extra money in maintenance and upkeep and repairs. I could not fathom his rage at all.

Later, it came out. It was a test and I was supposed to fail. I was not supposed to find a new car so cheap, I was supposed to fail and come to him, tail between my legs, admitting I was wrong and he was right and then gratefully accept the second-hand car, the crumb, he wanted me to have. It was the first of many such tests and eventually, like a good little DoNM, I learned to fail, to be less so he could be more, to be dumb so he could be smart, to be wrong so he could be right. My NM’s daughter.

NM was the kind who withheld all kinds of assistance. When I was 17 and pregnant, she wanted me to have an abortion (illegal in the US at the time but she didn’t care); when I thwarted that, she decided to give me a “choice.” It was the famous manipulator’s choice—to make the appearance of reasonableness by giving what looked like a choice but which was, in fact, only a choice between two onerous possibilities. In my case, I could live at home during my pregnancy, provided I agreed to give the baby up for adoption or if I insisted on keeping the baby (an almost untenable choice in 1964) then I would have to go to a maternity home, essentially a locked institution, and be on my own.

Now, you would think that getting married would be one of the options for me but no—that would give me a way to keep my baby and she was not looking for that. No, she wanted the baby gone…and the offer of the maternity home? Well, in those days it was commonplace for the babies to be seized and the young mothers coerced into signing them away…I knew that and if I did, you can bet she did too.

Eventually, however, I got married. She was livid. She told me that I had made my bed and I had to lay in it and not to come to her for help when times got rough. So I didn’t and, even when she could see how much I later struggled as the single mother of two pre-schoolers, she offered no assistance. Why should she? Well, aside from the fact that she was my mother, she and her husband owned four businesses, four houses, and 21 apartments. You think maybe an offer of a job, grandma babysitting and an apartment at an affordable rent might have been the offer of a loving parent, right? All I got from mine was “You made your bed…” and a continued gloating at my failures.

She will be nasty to you about things that are peripherally connected with your successes so that you find your joy in what you've done is tarnished, without her ever saying anything directly about it. No matter what your success, she has to take you down a peg about it.

Fast forward 15 years. I have married Jack, who was a minor executive with a Silicon Valley tech firm. I drive an English sports car, have a corporate job myself, own a large home, wear nice clothes. Jack has a trade show in Las Vegas and invites me to come along…and my NM lives outside of Vegas, so I agree to go…and she agrees to meet me for dinner.

I show up for dinner in a form fitting silk dress, killer high heels, real gold earrings, professionally coiffed hair. Men in the hotel lobby turn their heads as I walk through to the restaurant, a few make appreciative comments. I look like a million bucks and for once in my life, my NM has got to look at me with pride. I look gorgeous and prosperous and successful.

She gets into the elevator with me…she hasn’t seen me in ten years…and the first thing she says to me is “You’ve gotten fat.”

We had a strained dinner, I went downstairs and declined her offer of a lift back to my hotel. I took a cab and cried every second of my way back, only to have Jack look at me disdainfully when I got back to the hotel room and say “your mascara is running and you look like hell.” It’s what narcissists do.

Next: Part 5. Demeaning, criticism and denigration.