Holiday Hoovering

So, Christmas and Hanukkah are over and the New Year is upon us. How many of you got hoovered?

Hoovering has one major objective: to allow the N to feel like s/he is in control of the relationship. If you have been successfully NC or LC over a period of weeks or longer prior to the holidays, unless your N is a malignant ignoring N, s/he is going to feel that you have taken control of the relationship, something she finds threatening. The malignant ignoring N will have put you out of mind so unless there is a compelling reason to put on the perfect family charade, you will likely be spared any contact. The rest of us are not so lucky.

By now, if your Ns were going to hoover you, it has begun. Most likely you received unanticipated gifts, cards, letters, even phone calls or texts. You may have inadvertently invited such contact by naïvely assuming that she would not take the Christmas card you sent as a sign that all is forgiven and the lines of communication are now fully open again. You may have maintained and defended your NC boundaries but your Ns believe their image is at stake so they have decided to take back control of the relationship by luring your back into their lair the fold.

You may have received just the gift you wanted/needed from them or they may have sent you the same old junk you usually get—Dollar Store and garage sale finds or things they would like for themselves. You may have received something you cannot afford for yourself like a new laptop or tablet or iPhone, or something you simply do not want: a course in Tae Kwon Do or a cruise to a deserted island. Or it could be gifts for your children but nothing for you, or gifts you could never afford for your kids like a battery operated child’s car or a bouncy castle or something outrageously expensive, gifts designed to hoover your kids because kids are easier to manipulate than wary adults and your Ns expect you will come right along with the children.

This is not likely to stop. You may get letters in which they cry about being lonely over the holidays, how they miss their grandbabies, how they miss you. They will paint a dismal picture of the sad lives they have now that you are no longer in it. They will tug at your heartstrings and make you feel guilty for turning your back on this sad, pathetic old woman… Or you may get the letter that rips the flesh off your back as it seeks to excoriate you for your refusal to give them their due. The letter may be blatant and bold or it may be sneaky and passive aggressive, but it feels to you, as you read it, like the attack that it is. Either way, you may get missives from your Ns that are designed to make you feel bad for not allowing your Ns to have their way with you.

If you got blindsided by this kind of crap this year, it was because you didn’t have a plan. The reason you lacked a plan may have been because you didn’t think you needed one—it never occurred to you that your feeling sorry for your N (a fatal weakness they will exploit) might backfire on you. You may have been left scrambling, trying to figure out what to do or how to handle it, on the spur of the moment. Depending on the method your N used to intrude on your holiday cheer, you may have been hurt, outraged or even frightened by their incursion into your peace.

Some Ns will hint at their intentions beforehand by sending messages in advance: invitations to Christmas dinner, hints that you should invite them for a holiday-oriented gathering, even blatantly telling you when they will be showing up at your house—uninvited—to deliver gifts. Other Ns will just send a card with no foreshadowing and pop up at your door uninvited, expecting to be asked in and entertained. Some will send packages with no return addresses—even fake return addresses. Others will send gifts and messages via a third party who is invited—or who is at least not persona non grata—to your home.

Any way you slice it, narcissism takes on a whole new dimension of insensitivity and disrespect during any kind of special occasion, from christenings to funerals, and most especially cultural celebrations. Your Ns friends may think nothing of her not having you over for Sunday dinners, but they most definitely will have something to say if your N’s holiday plans do not include you and your family. Your N doesn’t care about your feelings (if she did, she wouldn’t be an N) but she most certainly cares about her image. When her friends are waxing lyrical about their grandchildren, painting pictures of lavish holiday feasts attended by three or more generations of family, your N is sitting there thinking that you are the reason she is looking bad among her peers. Unless she is an ignoring N, in which case she has told everyone what a bitch you are and she is refusing to pander to you so she has cut you off this season—and how lucky her friends are not to have such difficult and uncaring children—she is going to be feeling that she has to do something so she isn’t left out of the Great and Gracious Grannies Club.

You first need to understand that this is mostly about power. If you have the power to keep her away from you and/or her grandchildren, then in her eyes, you have too much. It means you have the power to make her look bad in front of her frenemies and the rest of the family. It means, to her, that you are in control of her, not the other way around. And this does not set well with any N. Up to the holiday season she can fool herself into thinking she is controlling the silence or she has been able to make it work for her by telling her friends how sad her life is, how lonely she is, all because of you being a bitch.

She has no concept of a relationship in which someone is not in control, so no matter what your real reason for NC or LC, she perceives it as you thinking you are in control of her and she cannot countenance that. Some Ns will pick a fight in order to come out in control (they do not doubt their own power) but others—my guess is most of them—simply ignore your boundaries and do what they want. And if you refuse their invitations despite their manipulations, then they will barge in on you and your events without invitation, even if they have been specifically told to stay away. They will do whatever they can to wrest what they perceive as control of the relationship from you.

So what can you do? You can have a plan. If you have a fair idea of the kinds of things they will do, you can have a plan as to how to handle it. Just make sure that your image in the family is not more important to you than the peace you get from keeping her out of your special occasions because this is one of those “You can’t have your cake and eat it too,” situations. Personally, I look at it this way: she is already assassinating my character behind my back over absolutely nothing so I might as well do something to deserve it.

What kind of plan? Well, what is your N likely to do? Here are a few scenarios:

1. Sends cards/letters to your children

Get a PO Box several months before the holidays and put in a mail forwarding notice with the post office. Have all mail forwarded to the PO Box. Intercept and determine what to do with the letters/cards. If they contain money or gift cards, decide whether to give them to the children or donate them to charity.

2. Sends packages to your house

A.      Invest in a custom-made stamp that says “Moved, left no forwarding address". Stamp the packages (and any mail addressed to you or your partner) and sent them back.

B.      Give the contents of the packages to a women’s shelter or other charity

C.      Put the packages in the bin

3. Shows up at your house uninvited

A.      If you answer the door and are surprised by her, close the door. Do not answer again until you are sure she is gone

B.      Tell her to leave and not to come back. If she refuses, call the police.

4. Calls on the phone

A.      Don’t answer

B.      Block her

C.      Tell her to not call again

Narcissists can be very creative and they can come up with all kinds of things that you hadn’t thought of so you have to have a “go-to” response. Mine is basically this: avoid contact. That means do everything you need to do to avoid contact: hang up the phone, close the door, walk the other way. It means never to invite them in, accept an invitation, respond in any way other than to say “leave me alone.”

We talk a lot about setting and enforcing boundaries with our Ns but this is a time that we must set boundaries with ourselves. The N is ruthless and heartless. They will do anything, literally anything, to get what they want and sometimes they only want it because you are withholding it. (That is when you finally capitulate to their heartbroken begging for a chance to see your children and when you give in they spend the time criticising our housekeeping by doing your housework or playing cards with each other and pretty much ignoring you kids.) You need to set boundaries with yourself now, boundaries that say that even if NM really IS heartbroken about not seeing your kids, it is too late. She had her warnings and she refused to respect your boundaries and now it is over and you will no longer allow her to hoover you back into a one-sided, self-serving relationship that gives you stress and anxiety and nothing in compensation for it.

You see, regardless of what your N thinks, the power ultimately rests with you and it always has. She cannot take it away from you, although you can give it to her. Whatever disguise she chooses to use—heartbroken grandma, outraged mother, pitiful old lady, cold, aloof superior—the struggle is really about control—control over you. She will put any face on it that she thinks will work to get you to relinquish control to her and you have to keep your eye on the truth so as not to be distracted by her theatrics, empty promises and meaningless gestures.

Why does she want control of you (even ignoring Ns want this control)? NSupply. If she has control of you, she has control of the NSupply she gets from you and through you. All of her antics, including all forms of hoovering, come down to this one thing: NSupply and control of its sources.

So, the best way to handle hoovering, especially around the holidays when it invariably ramps up, is to not respond and block all avenues of access to you and your family. For some very persistent Ns, it may take a Cease and Desist letter from a lawyer, even a restraining order from the court. But if you are serious about your peace as they about their NSupply, you won’t hesitate.

Set some boundaries for yourself. Start now so that by the time the holidays roll around next year you will be experienced and practiced at protecting yourself and your home and family, you will have heard all of her excuses and stories and complaints and you no longer feel a tug at your heartstrings when she rolls out one of her tear-jerking tales designed to soften your resolve. You are the one in control of your life and she cannot take control without your cooperation. The hoovering is all about her and her image and her NSupply and not in the least about you or your feelings or well-being. Remember that and don’t fall for her tricks. If you successfully resist long enough she will go elsewhere, to those whose resistance is less formidable. Then, and only then, can you have some peace.

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