Entitlement—you, me, and the narcissist

We all know that one of the hallmarks of narcissism is an overweening sense of entitlement, but just what does the word “entitlement” actually mean? The Oxford English Dictionary first defines it as “the fact of having a right to something^[1].” That doesn’t seem very pernicious, does it? In fact, it sounds quite reasonable—don’t we all have rights to certain things, like Human Rights?

Scanning further down the OED entry, however, we come across this little entry: “The belief that one is inherently deserving of privileges or special treatment^[2].” Now that sounds more like the narcissist’s sense of entitlement. The American Psychiatric Association includes entitlement in its diagnostic criteria for Narcissistic Personality disorder in its Diagnostic and Statistics Manual. The fifth revision states: “Feelings of entitlement, either overt or covert, self-centeredness; firmly holding to the belief that one is better than others…” and “…personal standards are unreasonably high in order to see oneself as exceptional, or too low based on a sense of entitlement ^[3]” The fourth revision of the manual stated it even more clearly: “Has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations.^[4]”

To feel entitled is to believe you have a right to something. And we do have rights to some things, both by law and by the social contract of your culture in addition to the “human rights” to which all of us are entitled. The narcissist, however, believes that s/he has rights that the rest of us do not have, rights that advantage him over you, an absolute right to have what he wants regardless of the cost to others. This kind of entitlement is what I call “toxic entitlement.”

Narcissists defend this entitlement very vigorously. They get angry and indignant if you even hint that they are not entitled to whatever it is they think they are entitled to. And those entitlements can be bizarre to the rest of us: my NexH, Jack gave a perfect example when he accidentally ran a red light with a police car behind him and the cop didn’t pull him over. Jack took this as a sign that it was okay for him to run red lights and so he deliberately ran another one, the cop still behind him and, of course, he was pulled over and ticketed. When he got home, he was livid—in Jack’s mind, the fact that the cop didn’t pull him over the first time meant it was okay for him (not anybody else, mind you, just him) to blow red lights. When the cop pulled him over, Jack genuinely felt betrayed—in his mind, the cop had given him permission, Jack acted on that permission, then the cop betrayed him by giving him a ticket. He insisted that the cop had deliberately set him up so he could write him a ticket and “fill his quota.” It never occurred to Jack that the cop may have been distracted the first time and didn’t see him run the light or maybe it was the cop’s end of shift and he didn’t want the hassle of a stop and writing up a citation. Nope—in Jack’s narcissistic mind, he was entitled to run that second light because the cop didn’t punish him for running the first one, and to cite him for the second light was unfair, unjust, and police entrapment.

Jack had a lot of entitlement issues—there was the time that the Highway Patrol had set up a duck pond—very visible, with police cars parked right out in the open and officers standing in plain sight with ticket books in their hands—for drivers who were turning a one lane freeway on-ramp into a two lane ramp by driving in the shoulder. Every car that tried to access the freeway via the shoulder of the ramp was flagged down and the driver given a ticket. Most drivers were obediently staying in the marked lane while the cops were there and the few who were arrogant enough to try using the shoulder were duly pulled over and cited. Jack, of course, got cited for being in the shoulder despite seeing what was going on because he believed he was entitled to use the shoulder. Why? Because he had been using it for a year and nobody had told him he couldn’t. But the story doesn’t end there—the following day, Jack did it again—in front of the cops who were standing there with ticket books in hand—and got another citation, which made him red-in-the-face, eye-poppingly, foaming-at-the-mouth mad. How dare they give him another ticket? They gave him one yesterday, wasn’t that enough? Now, lest you think Jack was perhaps a little bit thick, the guy was a brilliant engineer with a genius-level IQ: he was just a narcissist who believed that he—not everybody—was entitled to drive that shoulder.

Narcissistic parents create the same kinds of bizarre entitlements that accrue to themselves only. My NM used to tell me “parents are entitled to the fruits of their children’s labours” as a way of justifying turning me into an unpaid servant (literally my labour) and taking and keeping money that came my way, especially money I got for singing (she put me in contests, talent shows, and even arranged guest performances at bars and nightclubs when I was between the ages of 6 and 9), money I earned picking crops in the summer, and money I earned with my after-school job. Any objection I raised (in those rare moments when my indignation was stronger than my fear of her) was met with a smug “Who do you think paid for all those singing lessons [that I didn’t want] or the roof over your head and the food you eat?” That, of course, is irrefutable, since she did pay for all of those things but, being a child, I had no idea that I was actually entitled to those things and she was not entitled to recompense off the sweat of my brow.

Perhaps the worst entitlement that a narcissist parent puts on their children is the never-ending entitlement. From my earliest childhood, from the very day I learned that I could be legally free of her once I turned 18, that was my goal in life—to be 18 and get away from her. What I could not have anticipated was that, in her narcissistic mind, she was free of her obligations towards me but I was not free of my obligations to her. Many of us bump our noses on this particular bit of narcissistic entitlement, the idea that our Ns are entitled to remain in our lives, in whatever capacity they choose, for as long as they choose to be.

An ignoring NM, like mine, will let you go—sometimes for years—without popping back into your life until there is something they want from you. I got married six weeks before Christmas and moved into my own place, just 17 years old, and that year I received nothing from my mother—not even a phone call or a Christmas card. In fact, I didn’t receive so much as a letter from her for several years and she showed no interest in me and mine until a situation emerged in which I had something that she desperately wanted. Then she became my mother and a doting grandmother to my kids.

Despite their feelings of entitlement, most narcissists are not stupid enough to think that everybody else agrees with their entitlement. This is where manipulation comes in: they manipulate situations, perceptions, and information to support their feelings of entitlement. If manipulation doesn’t work as well as they had hoped, they will tell outright lies, fabrications that will bring about the desired result. All of this stems from entitlement: they believe they not only have an absolute right to whatever they want, they also believe they have an unfettered right to do whatever is necessary to get what they want because you are in the wrong to withhold it from them. This is key: you are in the wrong when you prevent a narcissist of from getting what she wants and that, which the narcissist takes as fact, is what allows the narcissist undertake the most awful actions without a shred of remorse or sense of wrongdoing: they believe what they are doing is not only right, they believe they have an unfettered right to do it.

When you, yourself, do not feel an inflated sense of entitlement, when you don’t know what that feels like, it can be difficult to grasp what it actually means. I often hear people say things like “I don’t know how she sleeps at night…” or “her conscience must be eating her alive” when speaking about the behaviour of a narcissist. When we do that, we are projecting how we would feel—we would find it difficult to sleep at night, our conscience would interfere with our sleep—onto a person who does not share those feelings with us, who may actually be incapable of sharing those feelings of conscience and remorse. What we don’t understand is that the narcissist feels just as entitled to fuck us over, to manipulate us, to take what she wants from us, as we feel entitled to receive a pay check at the end of a pay period. The fact that she did not earn that right like we earned the pay check is immaterial: she feels just as entitled and believes her entitlement to just as valid as you feel about your pay check. And if someone stands in her way, she feels just as indignant as you or I would feel if we found our pay arbitrarily shorted.

Your narcissist truly believes she has a right to anything she decides the wants, including things that belong to others. Ordinary people like you and me take our sense of entitlement from our culture and its rules: our laws and our customs tell us what we are entitled to and, by and large, we accept that. We know that it is wrong to steal, for example, and even thieves know it is wrong to steal, they just choose to do it anyway. The narcissist thinks differently, however. The narcissist believes she has an absolute right to have or do whatever she wants, even while acknowledging that other people might think it is wrong. Peculiar to the narcissistic mind, the narcissist believes the rules apply to you and me and that we are wrong to violate them, but she, the narcissist, is the exception: she sees herself as literally above the rules of her society and culture. In the narcissist’s eyes, you and I need to abide by those rules because 1) we are not special like she is and, 2) it makes us predictable to the narcissist, giving her the advantage of being able to fairly accurately predict our behaviour and reactions. But they don’t need to abide by them because they are special, they are above the petty rules of society—they are entitled.

But they aren’t stupid—they know that there are penalties for violating the rules, assuming they are caught, and so they manipulate. Lying is an effective form of manipulation and they use it without a hint of conscience. Your own mother can, with a straight face and sincere expression, tell your grandmother that you are a prostitute or a drug dealer or mentally ill or a host of other horrifying things that will not only turn your grandmother against you, it will make Granny worry about the safety of your children. Your mother can tell these lies to a judge, jerking out a tear here and there for effect, along with a big lie about how she worries for your children, what if they get up one morning and find you dead on the floor with a needle in your arm? The fact that this kind of thing has actually happened and been featured in news reports all over the globe doesn’t help you—even though the strongest non-prescription drug you take is the occasional aspirin—and it alarms your FOO to the degree that there is a good chance that your narcissist can enlist one of them the lie and give false evidence against you in court, rationalizing that it is ok to break the law against perjury in order to save those innocent little kids from the trauma of finding their hooked hooker of a mother dead on the floor one morning.

Narcissists have no conscience. If getting custody of your children is her objective, she not only honestly believes she is entitled to have custody of them, she also truly believes that she is entitled to do whatever it takes to achieve that goal. And, as much as we don’t want to admit it, there are narcissists who use the sexual assault laws to punish people who don’t bend to their will or who do not behave as the narcissist expected, believing themselves entitled to do so because that is what was necessary to get what they want. Nothing is off the table for a narcissist, as long as she can maintain plausible deniability or shift blame onto someone else. The woman who falsely accused my friend of sexual assault in order to escape conviction for assault and property damage, laid the groundwork for shifting blame even as she testified against my friend. She blamed her late filing of the complaint on “bad advice from another [conveniently unnamed] lawyer” while she was in jail, thereby creating plausible deniability if someone later accuses her of misusing the sexual crimes laws for personal gain: that unnamed lawyer told her she had a case, otherwise she wouldn’t have filed it.

What is important for us to remember when it comes to narcissists and entitlement is that narcissists do not see things the same way we do. They honestly believe they are entitled—they have a right—to have whatever they want and anyone who tries to stand in their way is wrong and, if they succeed in keeping the narcissist from her goal, deserves punishment. It never occurs to the narcissist that she is not entitled to what she wants any more than it would occur to you that you were not entitled to take a walk around your block if that appeals to you. And, just as you would feel wronged if a couple of thugs tried to prevent you from walking on the public sidewalk, the narcissist feels wronged if you try to prevent her from having what she wants, whether it is your husband, your children, credit for your idea, or your time, efforts and expertise.

Being special and entitled, the narcissist truly believes she should not have to pay for your services, whether you are a wedding planner or an accountant or you bake and decorate beautiful cakes as a hobby: you should be honoured to give them to her for free. She does not feel obligated to respect you or anything about you, from your marriage to your parental rights to your ownership rights of everything from your earrings to your clothing to your car and home. A narcissistic mother will rearrange your kitchen cupboards, closets and furniture, a narcissistic sister will “borrow” your clothes and jewellery, a narcissistic “friend” will seduce your husband and blame you, saying it’s not her fault that you can’t keep your man satisfied… They will do these things—and more—believing that they are doing nothing wrong because, while they acknowledge that society has a set of standards, they do not accept that those standards apply to them. In fact, it is not uncommon to hear a narcissist say something like “Well I have my truth…” that truth being what serves the narcissist, even if it is diametrically opposed to the objective truth. Narcissists have their own sense of right and wrong and what serves them is right and what does not serve them is wrong. The narcissist is just as convinced that she is entitled to whatever she wants and those who obstruct her are wronging her as you are convinced that the sun rises in the East and sets in the West.

It is called entitlement and it is a sincere belief that the entitled person has an absolute right to whatever s/he wants and any action taken to secure the entitlement is justified by the existence of the entitlement. You and I know that is just so much convoluted, self-serving bullshit but the narcissist doesn’t see it that way: she’s not kidding, she’s not even over-the-top: she is entitled and will break every rule in the book—and every person who stands in her way—to get what she wants because she believes in her entitlement and will move heaven and earth—often in small, passive-aggressive and painful ways—to get it. And any hurt you suffer is just collateral damage for which she takes no responsibility.

It is important to grasp this, to wrap your head around the idea, that his narcissistic mistress truly believes you are in the wrong because you aren’t the wife she thinks he should have—as such you are not entitled to anything beyond the roof over your head (and she will work to deprive you of that) while she is entitled to champagne suppers and expensive sparklies. She will have no sense of guilt that your kids are deprived of music lessons or a trip to camp because the money was spent on her—she will only feel bad that she had to give up on that Christmas trip to Aruba because he decided to spend the money on his kids. Your narcissistic co-worker will not feel bad about stealing your idea and presenting it to the boss as his own and he has no compunctions against calling you a liar when you tell the boss the truth: your co-worker has his own truth and that is that he thought of it first, even if you were the one who voiced it first. Your narcissistic neighbour doesn’t care that your lawn is pocked with yellow spots where his dog pees, or that his cats use your carefully-tended flower beds for litter boxes, digging up your newly planted greenery—he is pleased that he doesn’t have to clean up after them himself and proud for having found a way to make you do it. For the narcissist, life is a series of triumphs, of getting one over on the next guy, either to advantage himself or to relieve himself of something onerous. She doesn’t care if your brother goes to prison for three years on a bogus sexual assault charge, just as long as she isn’t convicted of assaulting him and damaging his car. She doesn’t care if your business goes belly-up because she failed to pay for the goods and services you provided to her and now you can’t pay your suppliers. It doesn’t affect her so she simply does not think about it and, when she does, she is pleased with herself for having succeeded, for her cleverness, for her superiority. She is, after all, entitled to it all...

1.      Oxford English Dictionary. “Entitlement.” https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/entitlement. First accessed April 25, 2019.

2.      Ibid.

3.      American Psychiatric Association. “DSM-IV and DSM-5 Criteria for the Personality Disorders” https://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/materials/Narc.Pers.DSM.pdf. First accessed April 25, 2019.

4.      Ibid.

Characteristics of Narcissistic Mothers Pt 3

 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

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

3. She favoritizes. Narcissistic mothers commonly choose one (sometimes more) child to be the golden child and one (sometimes more) to be the scapegoat.

And if you are unlucky enough to be an only child, you get play both roles, depending on her mood—that has got to be extremely confusing for a kid, ya know?

The narcissist identifies with the golden child and provides privileges to him or her as long as the golden child does just as she wants. The golden child has to be cared for assiduously by everyone in the family.

This is something I think a lot of people—especially those who were scapegoats—fail to recognize: the GC may get a lot of privilege and attention, but it is at a heavy price. This child is at grave risk for becoming narcissistic him/herself, having been raised with a totally unrealistic sense of entitlement and no sense of family cohesion and loyalty. Their view of the world and their place in it is no less twisted than the scapegoat’s, just twisted in a different way.

The GC is spoiled but there is that unspoken threat underlying it all: do as I say or it can all go away.

Another thing that often goes unrecognized: the GC need not be one of the narcissist’s own children…or even a child! Hindsight being what it is, I can look back and see that my NM divided the world up into Goldens and Scapegoats…and you could be “demoted” from Golden to Scapegoat but never promoted once the Scapegoat mantle settled on your shoulders. My NM had two brothers, her older brother Gary and her younger brother, Pete. NM despised Gary (although she was not above cozying up to him when she needed something from him) but she worshipped the ground Pete walked on. She was the same way with her four grandchildren: the boys were all ignored but my daughter, Annie, was the Golden GrandChild. When NM died she specifically disinherited me and her grandsons, leaving her entire estate to be divided between the two Golden Children: my brother and my daughter. Favouritism and the selection of Goldens and Scapegoats need not be limited to the narcissist’s own children.

The scapegoat has no needs and instead gets to do the caring.

Scapegoats actually do have needs, but are ignored to as large a degree as possible. Whenever I needed something like fillings or glasses or new shoes, I generally got a heap of abuse along with it—or even accused of faking the need or having caused it through neglect or wilful destructiveness. And when the need was fulfilled—I got the visit to the dentist or the new glasses or the shoes replaced, it was always with a stack of guilt, as if I was taking resources away from someone or something more deserving, more entitled, than I.

I suspect every NM treats her scapegoat child differently but that there is a common thread that links us all. In my case, I was pretty much tasked with taking care of my younger brother, something that started when I was much too young for that kind of responsibility. I was to keep him from running out in the street, make him do his chores, keep him out of trouble (but not tattle about his misbehaviour). I had to make his breakfast and lunch—including coming home from school at noon and opening a can of soup or ravioli or such, heating it on the stove, then get him back to school before our lunch break was over. I was two years older, but I was a skinny, gangly kid and he was a husky, hefty boy who was taller than I was.

In my teens, my responsibility for him expanded to include ironing his school clothes and “making sure” his room was clean. In practical terms, it meant doing his chores for him because I would get punished if they weren’t done and he well knew it. Scapegoats become not only convenient receptacle for blame in the N-driven family, they are often treated like household servants, as if they need to earn a place in the household, earn their food, shelter, and maintenance, rather than those things being the entitlements they are to the Golden Children.

Certainly children should have chores and contribute to the household, but in narcissist-headed family, that can be twisted in such a way that one child does a disproportionate amount of the labour or is assigned chores more suited to older, larger, or stronger children or, as in my case, find it necessary to do the chores of another child in order to avoid being punished for not “making” the other child do his/her work.

The golden child can do nothing wrong. The scapegoat is always at fault.

Certainly Golden Children do wrong…but it is rationalized or overlooked or ignored by the N-parent to the degree that a child reporting the bad behaviour of a G-sibling get punished for tattling, the Golden’s Child’s behaviour ignored as part of the punishment!

A perfect example of the scapegoat being at fault was my NM’s proclivity for punishing me when my GCBro misbehaved: I got punished because I didn’t stop him from getting into mischief or make him do his chores or whatever it was that a parent or sitter should have been doing. He was two years younger than me, but a hefty, husky boy who outweighed me by several pounds.

Even when we were younger, NM expected me to control and be responsible for his behaviour. My grandmother once told me a story of how she had come to visit us when my brother was just toddling. He recognized her car as she came up the street and went tearing across the lawn, obviously intent upon running into the street to greet her. Behind him, according to my grandmother, I was running, arms outstretched to grab any part of him I could, tears running down my face. She stopped the car only to hear me screaming that he should stop because “Mommy will spank me” if he ran out into the street. Where was his mother while he was outside playing in an unfenced yard…and why was a not-quite four-year-old put in charge of a sturdy, rambunctious toddler?

Scapegoat children are often made to blame for other things that go wrong in a family or household: I was once told that everything that was wrong in my NM’s life was my fault because I had been born. She had plans…grand plans, mind you…that did not include being “saddled” with a baby at 17 (she was married). How strange, by contrast, when I learned I was pregnant at 17 (and unmarried) I was ecstatic to have a baby on the way...that baby was my plan!

This creates divisions between the children, one of whom has a large investment in the mother being wise and wonderful, and the other(s) who hate her.

This is another uncanny peek into my childhood. I can remember feeling hatred for my mother…inextricably mixed with fear…from as young as eight years of age. By this time I had been exposed to enough other households to realize that other little girls weren’t spanked every day, that spanking was a rare and serious punishment reserved for serious breaches of the rules, that other mothers spanked with their hands, not a thin leather strap that left whip-like lash marks on the skin and, most importantly, other mothers punished the siblings of my friends when they did wrong, not my friends. I was not a stupid nor unobservant child and by the time I hit second grade, I knew without a doubt there was something wrong with my mother.

My brother, on the other hand, was a suck up. And a self-righteous supercilious little tattletale of a suck up, as well. For an intelligent person, sometimes I am a little thick and it took me quite some time to realize that the rules were different for the two of us: whenever I did something he had done with impunity—thinking that because he got away with it, I could too, I would find myself hauled up short and punished. If I said “But Petey did it and it was OK,” I would get “Well, maybe so, but you’re not Petey,” as a response between lashes with the strap. Sometimes he would simply lie—make up a story out of thin air—and tell NM in order to get me punished. I remember getting a thrashing for dancing naked in my room when I was nine—except I never let him see me naked, I always closed my bedroom door when I changed clothes—and I wasn’t dancing, naked or otherwise. On another occasion, he wrote his name on the wall in the hallway in pencil and told NM that I did it and when she asked why I would do that, I said “I didn’t do it!” and he said “She did it to get me in trouble!” I’ll bet you can guess who got in trouble, can’t you? I remember being totally surprised when a classmate at school expressed love for her younger brother who was a mean little brat cut from the same cloth as my own brother. “Because he’s my brother,” she responded when I asked why. “Don’t you love your little brother?” I didn’t…but I didn’t tell her that.

That division will be fostered by the narcissist with lies and with blatantly unfair and favoritizing behavior. The golden child will defend the mother and indirectly perpetuate the abuse by finding reasons to blame the scapegoat for the mother's actions.

This is also very true. NM constantly compared us against each other and, invariably, I came up short. The ways parents can compare their kids to each other are legion, but when the parent is a narcissist, the comparisons go only one way: against the Scapegoat child. So, if the SG excels at music or art and brings home good marks, they will be denigrated in favour of the GC’s marks in math—something “important.” If the SG excels in math but the GC is an outstanding athlete, math will be devalued in favour of sports. The Golden Child’s accomplishments will always be more important, more favoured, more worthy of remark or reward than those of the Scapegoat child whose accomplishments are more likely to be ignored or ridiculed than acknowledged or praised.

Because the Golden Child reaps rewards from his position and because, at least in the beginning, we are talking about a child, the GC sticks up for and defends the narcissistic parent—he has no objective sense of right and wrong or good and bad, after all, as all he knows is what has been learned at the NM’s knee. And just as the parent rationalizes and justifies her behaviour, so will the Golden Child. There is something in it for him/her, after all, even if it is only to be spared the tempers of the NM…but often the reward is tangible and, being a child, the abstractions of justice don’t come into play. Often these Goldens grow into adults whose development of conscience and ethics stay stuck in childhood where their collusion with the Nparent not only let them off the hook for their behaviour but brought them rewards as well. They are well compensated for adopting the narcissistic mother’s viewpoint, for defending the NM, for adding the weight of their support with rationalizations, justifications and even outright lies.

When my NM wrote her will, my daughter, the Golden Grandchild, couldn’t wait to tell me that my mother planned to split her considerable estate between my Golden Child Brother and her, cutting me and the three grandsons out completely.

“Does that seem fair to you?” I asked.

Her voice was flippant. “Well, it’s not like you and Gramma had any kind of a relationship.”

That her brothers and cousin were cut out didn’t even occur to her and the fact that NM and I had a poor relationship was, in her eyes, justification. To make that rationalization work, however, she had to buy into my NM’s gaslighting and rewriting of history—and she did. She did to such a degree that, ten years after NM’s death she suddenly stopped communicating with me because of my blog (see 46 Memories) , claiming everything in it to be a lie and encouraging other family members to sever contact with me. Interesting, you see, because most of what she called “lies” occurred years—even decades—before she was born, so she could have no first-hand knowledge of the veracity of my memories. My NM was dead, so the only person available to her to corroborate the stories would be my GC Bro—and what’s in it for him to tell the truth except to reveal him for the flying monkey and errand boy in collusion with our MNM for so many years?

Even more interestingly, my daughter refused to accept corroboration from family members and friends who supported my memory of events (some of them having actually been there). For example, although I was pregnant with my daughter when I married my first husband, he was not her father—I was four months pregnant with her when we met. Her biological father was my high school sweetheart who, upon learning of my pregnancy, disavowed paternity—an all-too-common event in those days before DNA testing. My NM tried to have my high school sweetheart arrested for statutory rape because I was only 17—but so was he so it didn’t work. When I married, NM apparently “forgot” all about my high school sweetheart and declared my husband the baby’s father.

The man I married was sterile, which he knew at the time he married me. Indeed, over the course of our marriage and his two subsequent marriages, he never fathered a child. I told my daughter the truth about her parentage; my first husband told my daughter the truth; my father and stepmother corroborated that I did not meet him until I was four months pregnant with her. But her biological father, when contacted, maintained that he was not her father (he was married and a father by this time and had never told his wife) and my NM continued to insist that my first husband was my daughter’s biological father—and my daughter chose to believe her grandmother rather than me (even though I was present at conception and NM was not). “Why would Gramma lie about such a thing?” she asked me. I have to wonder why she didn’t ask “Why would Mama lie about such a thing?”

The power of a narcissist to divide a family is the stuff of which horror stories are made. Before I was five years old, the seeds of dissention had been sown between my brother and me and NM nurtured them like they were precious. Binding the GC to her and making me the scapegoat was not enough, however—she had to take her poison to the next generation and sow her noxious crop there, as well.

My sons were not present at the reading of NM’s will and so my daughter took it upon herself to lie to them. Instead of telling the truth, which was that she put in her will that she was deliberately disinheriting me and my two sons “for reasons they already know,” (they didn’t—she never even met one of my boys [by her own choice—she refused my invitations] and the other one was very hurt when he learned that she had not provided for him in her will as she had once said she would) my daughter told her brothers that half of the estate was left to all three of them but she was to administer it. This, of course lasted right up to the moment she wanted the lion’s share of the money to buy something for herself. My oldest son, who is disabled, asked her for some of “his” money to buy a car and she turned him down saying it was all gone—she had spent it on her new McMansion.

The schism in my family created by my NM more than 50 years ago continues to this day: my GCBro and I have not seen or spoken to each other for more than 20 years; my daughter and one of my sons do not speak to me, nor does my daughter’s young adult son. Her ex-husband, upon being freed via divorce from her, told me how she forbade him and her son to contact me once she discovered my blog (the 46 Memories) and how she called me a liar. NM laid down the reigns of power with her death, but my daughter picked them right up. Who knows what the next generation will be like?

The bad news is that the evil wrought by a narcissistic parent can infect multiple generations of a family—the worse news is that narcissists are not just narcissists at home. That narcissism is carried with them everywhere they go, into everything they do, into their workplace, their politics, their morals, their sense of social responsibility. And they fall short…very, very short…of the marks we expect of the average citizen. My NM once told me, with unmistakeable pride in her voice, that she had never voted. She had never even registered to vote, not once in her entire life. Not because she lacked political opinions—she had plenty of them and was not shy about sharing them. No, she had never registered to vote because she was under the impression that the voter’s rolls were the source of jury duty candidates and by never registering to vote, she believed she would never be called up for jury duty! She didn’t vote, and she had no compunctions about dabbling on the edges of the law, either—I can recall her crowing to her friends about “kiting checks” so she would have cash available to go bar hopping on the weekend, the pride in her cleverness evident. When one friend asked “Isn’t that illegal?” NM’s response was “Only if you are caught, Bea, only if you get caught.”

If you have ever had the misfortune of having a narcissist for a boss, you’ve gotten a taste of what it I like to be the child of a narcissist. But whether you were the Scapegoat employee or the Golden One, at least you got to go home and you had the option of quitting the job…children are stuck in the craziness, often unable to escape even when they become adults and have homes and families of their own.

The golden child may also directly take on the narcissistic mother's tasks by physically abusing the scapegoat so the narcissistic mother doesn't have to do that herself.

This can be seen quite blatantly in families in which some children are allowed—even encouraged—to bully others. More subtly, however, there are families in which the Golden Child is encouraged to prey upon the Scapegoats: taking possessions, ordering the sibling around, expecting one sibling to always step aside in favour of the Golden Child.

My NM’s particular means of putting my GC Bro in control—even though I, as the eldest, was nominally “in charge” of him—was to ignore his transgressions and punish me for “whining” or “tattling.” As long as his incursions into my possessions or my safety didn’t result in an injury that required a doctor’s visit (thereby costing her money), I was a whiner or a tattler if I complained of his physical abuses which ran the gamut from simple pushing to actual punches. To say I was afraid of him would not be an exaggeration.

I do not know how she missed the fact that he was bigger than I was. And to this day, I do not know how she expected me to make him do those things he did not want to do, like dry the dishes or take out the trash. I had no authority, when I complained about his lack of compliance I was punished for tattling and then told to “make him do it,” despite him being both taller and heavier than I was. She simply could not be bothered to take care of him herself and expected me, at the tender age of seven, to know what to do to elicit compliance from someone who didn’t respect me and who could…and did…beat me up.

Narcissistic mothers are, as far as I can tell, exceedingly lazy and selfish when it comes to actually caring for their children. Even the Golden Child doesn’t get the benefit of a fully focussed and loving parent, but gets indulgence and a false sense of entitlement in lieu. As a mother who is too focussed on herself to bother with the well-being of her children, the narcissist finds ways, through choosing favourites and scapegoats and playing them off against each other, to absolve herself of the responsibilities of parenting. Nobody benefits from this style of parenting…not even the favoured Golden Child.

Next: Part 4: Undermining

Narcissists feel entitled

From the House of Mirrors:

Let’s take a look at why malignant narcissists not only don't change but become worse. Keep in mind, they have mastered a lifetime of this twisted way of being in the world, and are always pushing their warped behavior to the limits.


Narcissists feel entitled. Like bratty children, they expect favourable treatment and excessive amounts of attention and adoration despite their unsavoury behaviour. They feel special and exempt from living as others do. They have no desire to grow-up. They feel entitled to remain a spoiled, foul natured, controlling child.

One of the things that strikes me about my mother, looking back, is the double standard she lived by. Narcissists hold others to a higher standard than they hold themselves, and they exempt themselves from the very rules they hold others to.

She absolutely hated it when people dropped in on her, especially when her parents paid her a surprise visit. And yet, she regularly dropped in on her friends (when she had some) unannounced and later, when I was an adult, dropped in on me without warning. Why did she hate drop in visits? Because of the potential of catching her off her guard, her house a mess, herself not dressed—maybe even in the middle of one of her narcissistic rages and meltdowns. She had an image she conveyed to the world and in order to maintain that image, she needed notice of impending arrivals so that she could be sure everything was in place. Of course, she gave no such warning to others—how else could she catch them out in something that she could squirrel away as potential ammunition to use against them later?

She had no boundaries where other people were concerned, especially me. Of course her own boundaries were rigid, fixed, and zealously guarded: my brother and I were not allowed into her bedroom, for example, unless we were specifically invited and stood to be punished if we so much as opened the door. Or, rather, I stood to be punished, because if my younger—but bigger—brother misbehaved, I got the punishment for “letting” him. I was actually forbidden to have boundaries, something that was to have serious repercussions for me later in life.

By the time I reached my teens, my mother was giving me her cast off clothing in lieu of buying me new ones for school. Not only were they dreadfully out of date, but cheap and tasteless—she had always had tawdry taste and it just got worse as she got older. But between gifts from my Nana and my stepmother, and my summer job picking berries and beans, I managed to pull together a decent wardrobe by the time I entered my junior year of high school, something that did not escape my NM. In fact, my closet became the extension of her closet, despite the fact that I was slimmer, especially through the hips. My stepmother, who had excellent—and expensive—tastes, bought me several wool pencil skirts with coordinating blouses, skirts I loved and cared for carefully because my mother would not stand the cost of dry cleaning. By the end of the school year, every one of these skirts was stretched out in the butt, making them baggy on me when I tried to wear them, because of her incursions into my closet. One skirt—and a brand new top—was even ruined beyond repair by her, without even an attempt at an apology or an offer of recompense or replacement. What was hers was hers, and what was mine was hers, too.

She felt entitled to snoop, not just when I was a kid but when I was an adult as well. Anything she wanted to know, it was her right to know. Right to privacy? Only she had that. Being a malignant narcissist, violence and intimidation were part of her repertoire, so to object to her predations—like going through my purse, gym bag, dresser drawers or coat pockets—was to invite retaliation, both verbally and physically. I learned early not to say “no,” not to object to anything another person expected of me, because I would get hurt as a result. I couldn’t even allow my facial expression to convey anything lest I get smacked, so I learned to school my face into a blank, something that still happens without thinking in times of stress. I learned to make myself numb to her predations—then to all predations—then to all forms of stress—and to make my face reflect only a numb compliance.

Charlie, my late husband, had such a mother as well. Charlie was a magician with his hands…he could build anything. But Charlie, who was dyslexic, had failed to graduate from high school and because of his reading problems, his mother labelled him “stupid.” His younger brother. Alvin, was not dyslexic and he not only graduated high school, the family sent him to college (Maman said she would have sent Charlie to college if he wanted to go, but he was too stupid—whether she meant too stupid to grasp the opportunity or too stupid to make it through, she never made clear). Alvin was a self-made millionaire and very clearly Maman’s darling. The fact that Alvin’s millions were not cleanly made, that he was regularly in trouble with state regulatory agencies for the less-than-honourable methods he used to make his money, didn’t bother her a whit: Alvin was a millionaire and that excused everything otherwise unpleasant about him. Charlie was an afterthought…except when she wanted something. When she bought a new house and needed a deck build, she called Charlie. She expected Charlie to drop everything and come build her deck…and she expected him to pay for all of the materials, supply free labour, and do it on her timetable, regardless of what his plans might have been. If Charlie demurred, if he asked for money for supplies, if he didn’t get it done on her time-table, he got the sharp side of her tongue…and everybody in the family heard about it for months, even years, afterward. Charlie did not have the option to refuse…he was her son and she was entitled to the fruits of his labour long past the time he was married, a parent, and a homeowner himself. She monopolized him until he was done with whatever she wanted, then ignored him until she needed him again.

Charlie couldn’t say “no” either. His narcissistic mother was the only one allowed to draw boundaries, and those boundaries were one-way only. The problem with this kind of entitlement on the part of the parent is that children learn very early that there is an unpleasant consequence for noncompliance, no matter how outrageous the demand, and come to believe they have no right to say “no.” In later years, when the threat of repercussion may be long past, the person still believes they have no right to say “no,” and this can lead them down destructive paths they might not otherwise have taken.

This inability to say “no” cost me time (agreeing to do things I didn’t want to do), money (agreeing to donate or give or spend, even though I could not afford it or did not want to), and self-esteem. This last came from my inability to say refuse sexual advances from dates. This led to a promiscuity problem that perhaps could be more accurately called “date rape,” in that I initially resisted but if the man was insistent, I did not feel I had the right to say “no.” Lurking in my subconscious lay the fear of retaliation for refusal, and so I complied. This was the later effect, however—I was sexually molested by a neighbour at about age nine because I was afraid to break away and leave: he was an adult and I was compelled to submit to anything an adult might want (heavens, if I had to lay across the bed while my mother striped my bare butt with a thin leather strap and not move or cry out, how was I to know it was OK to run from a neighbour who was holding me securely in his lap, one hand under my skirt??). I was also sexually molested by my stepfather at age 16 for largely the same reason. I, of course, gave both men a wide berth after my experiences with them, not an easy thing to do with regards to my stepfather in a tiny one-bedroom apartment in which I slept in the kitchen!

The narcissist’s sense of entitlement extends beyond family members and friends. Narcissists believe that rules are made for other people and that they are exempt. James (now my N-ex) and I were going to work one morning in his car, and he was driving. The freeway ramp we needed to take to get to work was stacked up as usual and James simply drove onto the right shoulder of the ramp to pass all of the waiting cars—something he did every morning. I had complained about this (I am a “wait your turn” kinda gal) but his reckless, retaliatory driving after my complaints were scary enough to shut me up. On this particular morning I could see that there were several police officers standing in the grass just off the shoulder with ticket books in their hands and I warned James. He ignored me and, sure enough, he got pulled over and given a ticket. He was outraged! The fact that he had driven that shoulder every morning for weeks, in his mind, made it his right to do so, and he was livid at the police for “taking away” that perceived right.

But the story doesn’t end here. The following morning he did exactly the same thing and got another ticket and he was even angrier the second morning that the first, accusing the cops of setting up a “trap,” and his ticket entrapment and therefore unjust. This was not his last stupid car trick, either. Driving the kids home from some event one afternoon, James ran a red light. There was a police car behind him and when the police car didn’t pull him over, James took that as permission to run red lights and proceeded to do it again! And he was angry and verbally abusive to the officer when he got pulled over and ticketed again, because after he didn’t get nailed for the first light, he felt entitled to run the next one.

This kind of entitlement can be unbelievably petty: I once bought English muffins at the market because they were on sale—ordinarily we could not afford them. From that day forward, James complained bitterly about no English muffins for breakfast: he was entitled to his English muffins and I was a withholding bitch to refuse to buy any more! And it can be huge: I knew someone once who broke into an old house that appeared to have been abandoned and stripped it of antique furnishings, dishes, and a host of other lovely—and collectable—things. “Nobody is using them, so why shouldn’t I have them?” was his rationale. But the house and its contents was part of an estate that was being litigated and he was merely rationalizing his thefts, as narcissists are wont to do.

Children are born feeling entitled and they raise holy hell when their needs aren’t met. It is programmed into the as a survival mechanism—baby cries, Mama feeds, baby survives. Young children have no concept of “others” as existing for anything other than their own survival and entertainment. They have no empathy, compassion, or remorse (ask your infant how bad he feels about keeping you up all night…). But children are supposed to outgrow this infantile narcissism as they become socialized, they are supposed to learn that they can’t have everything, that they must share, and that the feelings of others are just as important as their own. Some children never grow past that sense of entitlement, that feeling that they…and what they want…supercedes the feelings, wishes, and needs of everyone else on the planet. It is this arrested development that leads to their epic sense of entitlement.

Missing...

They had been robbed!

Horrified, she stood in her bedroom, the closet door open, and surveyed the bare floor where her toys used to be. Her doll crib and cradle, the little high chair, the box of doll clothes…almost all of her dolls…gone! All gone! She ran out of the room crying.

“Mommy! Mommy!” tears streamed down her face. “Mommy, somebody robbed us!” she wept.

Mommy was in the kitchen, peeling potatoes. “What are you talking about?” Mommy said, looking down into her tear-flooded face. “And why are you bawling again?” Mommy smiled tightly. “Would you like something to cry about?”

She sniffed deeply and shook her head, stemming the tears and swallowing her sobs. “Somebody stole my toys!” she said, an indignant note creeping into her voice. “I opened my closet to get hangers to hang up my school clothes and my toys are gone!” her voice quavered, and tears pricked the back of her nose. “Somebody stole them!”

Her mother rolled her eyes and turned back to the potatoes in the sink. “Nobody stole them. What a drama queen you are! The Salvation Army came by looking for donations and I cleaned out your closet. Now go change your clothes and do your chores.”

She stood there for a heartbeat, staring at her mother incomprehensively. Mommy had given them away? She fought the urge to ask for a reason, knowing to question such things risked being branded “insolent,” the thin leather penalty for which hung, innocently, limberly, menacingly, on the back of the kitchen door. Before Mommy could question her hesitation…another dangerous situation…she turned and headed back to her room.

….*…. ….*…. ….*….

She didn’t like liver. In fact, she hated liver. It was tough and sinewy and as difficult to chew as leather, and it had a powdery, granular texture, and it left a nasty, gag-inducing aftertaste in her mouth. She could not imagine why Mommy insisted she eat it…or why Mommy ate it with such obvious relish. But Duke liked it…and if she could push the pieces around on her plate long enough, dinner would be over and she would be left at the table alone. Then, maybe, she could slip the offending bits to the dog.

He was a collie, big and blonde and hairy, like Lassie. And all the neighbourhood kids loved him. Before they got Duke, nobody ever came over to ask her to come out to play, but once they got the dog, kids came over every day. At first they came to play with her “Lassie dog,” but then, later, they came to play with her, too.

Duke was like a magic talisman. He loved her, she could tell. He was always happy to see her when she got home from school, and he came to her room and licked the tears from her face when Mommy spanked her and she cried. He comforted her when she was afraid, wrapping his hairy body around her and licking her until she relaxed in his furry embrace. She didn’t care if he made her sneeze or her throat tickle. He was her dog, even if Mommy said he was the “family dog,” and she loved him.

Mommy was saying something. “…daydreaming again. Eat your goddamned dinner!” Mommy was barking at her. She spooned up a mouthful of potatoes and shoved them in her mouth.

“I gave Duke away today,” Mommy said to Daddy just as she removed the spoon from her mouth. “The people will be coming for him in the morning.” She gagged, nearly choking on the potatoes.

“Noooo!” she wailed, swallowing quickly. “You can’t!" she cried. "He’s my dog! You can’t!”

Mommy looked at her incredulously. “What did you say to me?” she hissed, her eyes narrowing down to slits. “He is not your dog and where did you get the idea that you can tell me what I can and cannot do?”

She shook her head, tears pouring unnoticed from her eyes. “Why?” she sniffed piteously. “Why? I love Duke!”

Mommy rolled her eyes…not a good sign. “Because you are allergic to him and besides, you don’t take care of him. His coat is in a big knot and I can’t afford to pay grooming fees every time I turn around.” Mommy was right…she had tried to brush him but her seven-year-old arms just weren’t strong enough to drag that wire brush through his thick coat…and he did make her sneeze, but she didn’t care.

“Please,” she begged, choking on sobs, “Please don’t give him away! I love him!”

Mommy eyed her with a look of incredulity on her face. “Stop that blubbering this instant! He’s a dog, for Chrissakes! The way you’re carrying on, you’d think I was giving Brother away!” When the quiet sobbing continued in the form of soft hiccups, Mommy scowled at her. “Eat your supper,” she commanded, sternly eying the pieces of liver still heaped on the plate.

She followed Mommy’s gaze to the plate and immediately gagged. “I’m going to be sick!” she cried, bolting from the table towards the bathroom, barely making it in time. She retched miserably into the toilet, gasping for breath between waves of stomach contractions.

“Oh, Jesus,” came Mommy’s voice from the bathroom door, dimly heard through the buzzing in her ears. “You sure have an inventive imagination, I’ll hand you that,” Mommy said, shaking her head. “But your tricks may fool Daddy and Nana, but they don’t fool me at all. The dog is going in the morning. Now fetch the strap and go to your room. Eventually you will learn not to try these dramatics on me!”

….*…. ….*…. ….*….

Nana had an aviary way out at the far end of her huge back yard. Nana called it “the birdhouse,” but it was big enough to walk around in. It was bigger than the shack they used to live in out on Gramma’s farm that Gramma now used as a chicken house. And the birdhouse had nearly a hundred twittering, chittering, fluttering jewel-colored parakeets flitting about in it, to her utter delight. She loved the birdhouse, with the warm smells of the little birdy bodies and the homey scent of the large burlap sacks of their feed. And Nana let her come out with her on Wednesdays to feed the birds and to band the ankles of the newest babies. She loved the birds. She loved Wednesdays. She loved summer. She loved Nana.

Nana had a nestbox open. “Look, honey,” Nana was saying. “Your little nestling is fully fledged now! Before long he’ll be out in the flight cage, stretching his wings!”

She stood up on tiptoe and peered into the nest. “Oh, Nana! He’s so pretty! He’s so green! When can we take him inside?”

“As soon as he can eat by himself, dear. It should only be a week or so…”

Nana knew her birds. In just over a week the little parakeet was ensconced in a pretty brass cage suspended from the hook in the kitchen dinette. She carried his cage up every morning where he could have bright sun, and where Nana could help her hand tame him. His little beak was sharp and her hands bore the marks of his displeasure, but she didn’t care. This was her little birdie, and she was going to tame him and train him and love him. Nine wasn’t too young to have a bird all your own, Nana said so.

Mommy wasn’t pleased. Mommy hated birds. And now Mommy was going to have to drive for 24 whole hours with a bird in the car. That the bird was in a cage didn’t matter, and Mommy was mad at her. But Nana had taken Mommy out to the back of the garden to talk before they left, and when she got in the car all Mommy said was “You are going to carry that Goddamned birdcage in your lap every inch of the way home, is that clear? Every Goddamned inch. In your lap. Understood?” She had nodded silently, settled the cage in her lap in the back seat…where she could have put it on the seat next to her if Mommy had permitted it, and settled herself for the long, silent drive home.

She enjoyed having the little green bird she had named “Pesky” in her room. Mommy refused to allow it in any other part of the house. The little brass cage stood on the upended orange crate that served as her bedside table, and every day she let him out to exercise…but only in her room…while she cleaned the cage and replenished his food and water. He had learned numerous little tricks, was beginning to learn to talk, and would flutter excitedly in his cage when she arrived home from school each day. She kept her bedroom door closed because Mommy didn’t like him…no point in “borrowing trouble,” as Grandpa liked to say.

She opened her bedroom door on a warm, sunny autumn afternoon and the first thing she noticed was the lamp standing where Pesky’s cage should be. She felt a sudden hard, shrinking coldness in the region of her heart as she looked down to find his bag of seed and her T-stick missing. Pesky was gone. And she knew…she knew…

“Mommy!” she ran to the telephone and dialled her mother’s number at work. “Mommy!” she cried when her mother picked up the phone. “Mommy! Where’s Pesky?”

“How many times have I told you not to call me except in an emergency?” her mother snarled. “Your Goddamned bird is not an emergency. Now get off this phone and get your chores done!”

“My bird!” she cried. “Where’s my bird?”

She could almost see Mommy’s eyes roll. She was gonna catch hell over this when Mommy got home, she knew it.

“He made you sneeze. He got feathers all over the room. He stunk.” Mommy said.

“Where is he?” she wailed, fearing the worst, visions of Pesky's delicate little neck unnaturally twisted, his brilliant green plumage decorating a trash heap some where. “Where is my bird?” she sobbed.

“Christ on a crutch!” Mommy swore. “It's a goddamned bird! Quit carrying on like it was something important. I gave it to Nick and Ida. Their kids aren’t allergic to the damned thing. Now get off this phone and get your chores done. I’ll deal with you when I get home!”

….*…. ….*…. ….*….

“Sit down and eat,” Mommy said, plunking down a pot of sliced wieners stirred into several kinds of beans. It smelled foul. “Sit down, I said!”

She looked around the kitchen. “Daddy’s not here yet,” she said, looking at his place at the table where there was, curiously, no plate.

“And he’s not going to be here,” Mommy snapped, fixing her with that “or else” look. “Now sit down and eat.”

Did this have something to do with the bloody handkerchief she had found in the kitchen this morning? It was Daddy’s and it was folded neatly next to Mommy’s purse, that fashionable basket-weave purse made of chrome spindles and stiff strips of coloured aluminium woven through them…she thought she saw blood on one edge of the purse, but she needed to go to the bathroom. And when she came back to the kitchen, the purse and hankie were gone, as if they were figments of her overactive imagination. She had dismissed it until now.

“Where’s Daddy?” she asked, knowing she was treading on thin ice and edging slightly away, out of arm’s reach.

“I threw the bastard out,” Mommy said through a mouthful of beans. “Now sit down and eat and, so help me God, if you start blubbering, I’ll knock you ass over teakettle all around the room!”

She sat. She ate. She tasted nothing.

….*…. ….*…. ….*….

The kitten was sleek, black, and had the greenest eyes she had ever seen. And her sister was the most precious calico, with the sweetest, deceptively soft little white paws. Pussywillow, their mother, was an ordinary grey striped tabby, but somehow she had produced two absolutely gorgeous little kittens. “Aphrodite,” she named the sinuous black one, for they had been studying Greek and Roman mythology in her seventh grade Social Studies classroom, and surely this classically beautiful creature deserved such an evocative name, “Calico Boots” she called the other, a fluffy little minx that loved nothing more than to frolic with a bit of string or even a blade of grass. She adored them.

School was out and it was time to go to Nana’s for the summer. She stepped out of her last class of the day and heard a car horn blaring almost as soon as she stepped onto the pavement outside. Mother had come to pick her up from school! What was wrong?

She ran to the car and jumped in, noticing the back seat full of boxes. Were they moving again? “Where are we going?” she asked, glancing towards the boxes.

“To Nana’s,” her mother answered, putting the car into gear and bulling her way into the congested road. Another car honked at her, but Mother ignored it and accelerated into the opening she had created. “School’s out, time to go to Nana’s.” Mother turned on her with that trademark narrowed glare. “Or would you rather spend the summer here with me?” she asked, her mouth forming into a parody of a smile.

She looked away, shaking her head briefly. “I didn’t think so,” Mother said with a more genuine smile, aiming the car at the main highway and wrenching the wheel sharply to put them on the road. She could swear Mother smiled at the jostling she took, but focussed her eyes out the window.

Two hours into the drive she suddenly thought of her sweet little cats. Mother liked cats, though…maybe she would take care of them? “What about the cats?” she finally said, after pondering the wisdom of inquiring.

“What about them?” Mommy asked.

“Will you take care of them for me while I’m gone?”

“Sure,” Mommy said. “They don’t eat much.”

At summer’s end, after enduring another 24-hours trapped in the car with Mother’s endless opinions and vicious criticisms...even of those people she called her friends, they arrived home. She dragged the first of the boxes out of the car and to her room…why Mommy packed everything she owned for just a summer at Nana’s---toys, books, school clothes and junk drawer included---she would never understand…and ran to the back door to greet the kitties. She hoped they remembered her… She flung open the back door to be greeted with only the bare cement of the back yard. She looked around for a moment before noticing the food and water dishes were missing.

She didn’t even bother to ask.

….*…. ….*…. ….*….

“Mama! Mama! Somebody’s at the door!” her four-year-old daughter called loudly. Hoping it wasn’t Mother again, who had an unnerving propensity for showing up at her door unannounced and then heaping her with unwanted…and ultimately ignored… “advice,” she put down her book and made her way to the front of the little house. Looking through the window she was surprised to see a stout, stern-looking, tweed suit-clad woman peering boldly in at her. The woman flashed what looked like a badge and jerked her thumb towards the door, mouthing the words “Open up!”

Puzzled, she opened the door, only to be roughly shouldered aside by the woman just as a police car pulled up abruptly in front of the house. What on earth?

“I am Mrs. Delacourt,” the woman announced loudly as a uniformed police officer took a position blocking her front door. “I am from Child Protective Services,” she proffered a business card, “...and we have had a complaint about the condition of your house and the welfare of your children…”