I can dress myself!

“Look, Rosa!” she cried, running into the kitchen. “I got dressed all by myself today!” Beaming with pride, she twirled around to show that she had managed to both choose and put on her entire school outfit without the customary help from the family’s Mexican housekeeper.

“Bueno,” Rosa smiled, clapping her work worn hands together. “You look muy bonita. Siéntate, niña,” she said, pulling out a chair and putting a plate of scrambled eggs and a hot flour tortilla on the table.“Comer su desayuno, niña.”She sat and pushed the eggs around with her spoon before popping some into her mouth, her mind full of showing her newest accomplishment to her mother. 

“Wait until Mommy sees I am so big I can dress myself!” she said, wriggling with pride and happiness at the prospect of her mother’s praise. “I am a really big girl now!”

She had had to drag the desk chair to the closet in order to reach the hangers, and it had taken her more than one try to get the bows on her shoes even and tight, but she had persisted and did it all herself. She had laid out her favourite skirt, the turquoise checked one with the huge patch pockets on the front, on the bed, as she had seen Rosa do, and then she pulled down her favourite blouse, a pretty dark blue and white vertical stripe with cute puffy sleeves that, due to the elastic sewn just an inch inside the sleeve hem, ruched up the last inch of sleeve into a kind of a ruffle. Mommy wouldn’t buy or make her clothes with frills or lace because she didn’t look good in them, so this blouse’s puffy, ruffle-edged sleeve was the closest thing she had. And she loved it.

It had taken a long time to get her skirt pulled up, her slip pulled down, and the bottom of the blouse neatly tucked in, especially in back. Mommy didn’t like it when she looked sloppy, so she was very, very careful to get it right. Just wait until Mommy got home from work! She would be so proud!

She was careful the whole day so she wouldn’t get dirty. It was important that she look as good when Mommy came home as she did when she bounced into the kitchen to show Rosa. When Rosa had tried to get her to change into her play clothes after school, she demurred, patiently explaining in her rudimentary Spanish, that her mother must see that she could now dress herself. Her pride in her accomplishment fuelled her entire day and at 5:30 when her mother’s car pulled up in front of the house, she could hardly contain her excitement.

“You gonna get a whippin’,” her four year old brother prophesied. “You got school clothes on and Mommy’s gonna be mad,” he said. She felt a chill run down her spine but…well, this was different. She had to have the clothes on to show Mommy. She would change as soon as Mommy saw what she could do…” Eagerly she stood beside the front door, tingling with anticipation. Brother stood behind her, like an eager Coliseum spectator, waiting for the games to begin.

Mommy came through the door and stopped short at her two children standing beside the front door…usually they were in their rooms or the kitchen when she got home. “What?” she said, looking from one upturned face to the other. “What are you doing here at the door? And you,” he eyes fell on her daughter, “why are you still in your school clothes?”

She was undaunted. “I had to stay in them, Mommy. I wanted to show you…”

“Show me what?” Mommy snapped, pushing past the two little bodies crowding her. “You know you are supposed to change as soon as you come home so you don’t ruin your school clothes…”

She did a pirouette in front her mother. “See? I did it all myself this morning.” She paused as Mommy’s eyes raked her up and down, a scowl forming on her brow. “I got my clothes down from the closet and I put them on without any help from Rosa,” she hurried on, Mommy’s expression darkening. “I even tied my own shoes and the laces didn’t come loose all day.” She stopped before she got to the “See what a big girl I am” part, silenced by the thunderous look on Mommy’s face.

“You went to school in that?” Mommy asked. “Just like that?”

She nodded silently, her excited smile replaced by a cautious mask.

“Are you telling me that you went to school wearing a turquoise gingham skirt and a navy blue striped blouse?”

She nodded again, her face becoming a complete blank.

“Jesus H. Christ on a goddamned crutch! What is wrong with you?”

She shook her head to indicate she didn’t know…she didn’t, after all.

“Now every teacher in that school…and that goddamned busybody school nurse…will think I don’t know how to dress my child, that I am incompetent as a mother! Is that what you wanted, missy?” Mommy put her face inches from the child’s pale, wide-eyed face. “Well, missy,” she bellowed. “Is it?”

She vigorously shook her head to disavow such an idea. “No,” she squeaked out, her throat constricted with fear. “I just wanted to show you I could get dressed all by myself…” A forbidden tear escaped from one eye and wandered slowly down her cheek.

Mommy glared at her. “I, for the life of me, do not understand what is wrong with you. Everybody knows you don’t wear stripes and checks together…everybody knows that you don’t wear navy and turquoise. You couldn’t have gotten it more wrong if you did it on purpose…” She paused and bent down to the pale face and, almost nose to nose, asked, “You didn’t do this on purpose, did you?” Mommy asked, her voice softening.

She shook her head vigorously, her blue-green eyes wide with fear. Mommy’s rages were terrifying, but when her voice got real soft and her eyes went half-closed, she was downright chilling.

“Hmmm,” Mommy said and flicked her eyes to the doorway where Rosa stood watching. “Go to your room,” she said, standing up straight. “Change your clothes and don’t pull a stunt like this again, you hear?” She bolted for the relative safety of her room where she tore off the offending garments and threw them onto the closet floor. Pulling on a pair of pedal pushers and a T shirt, she flung herself on the bed, ready to cry out her fear and hurt and disappointment but, before the first sob erupted, she heard Mommy’s voice from the other side of the door. “And don’t you start that damned blubbering, either, or I will come in there and give you something to really cry about!”

Deconstructing rage

Healing from the abuse we suffered at the hands of our narcissists…and the internalized narcissists in our heads who keep us abusing ourselves…is a journey. Just as it took time and effort to turn our joyful little child-selves into angry, beaten-down adults, it takes time to come back from that state, to restore joy and perspective and self-love to our lives.
Six years ago, when I was writing the 46 Memories and working through some of my issues, I wrote a blog entry entitled “Deconstructing Rage.” Re-reading it today, I see a lot of information that some of you may find interesting and/or helpful:

I don’t get mad much anymore. Some years ago I had this epiphany in which I realized that when I was angry, that anger was actually hiding…masking…what I was really feeling, which was mostly hurt, fear, and/or disappointment. After some heavy thinking I came to realize that my anger was actually a reaction to one of those feelings, anger being more powerful and empowering than allowing myself to experience, yet again, those emotions I had come to equate with being a victim.

What brought me to that epiphany was a think-session in which I tried to figure out why I cried when I was mad. Talk about dis-empowering! I used to be able to work up a good head of steam…a really intimidating rage…only to have its intended effect completely neutralized by the telltale red nose, watery eyes, and streams of water coursing down my cheeks. Anger…the towering rage kind of anger…used to be the “big gun” in my emotional arsenal. It was effective, it was intimidating, it got me what I wanted, right up to the moment I started to tear up. I knew the tears to be a sign of an escalation of emotion…an expression of a rage so profound I felt like I was going to explode with it, but my victims took quite an opposite view. Instead of the power of my fury, they saw a weeping woman, ineffectually spitting out blunted barbs.

Eventually I would withdraw to a place of privacy and dissolve into a storm of noisy sobs. When that was over, I would emerge and, if the situation had not been resolved to my satisfaction, a cold fury would set in. This was the dangerous one, because it fuelled retaliation, rejection, or worse. There were no tears in this determined, steely-eyed rage. It was cold, calculating, and bent on getting what I wanted at all costs. It took me years to untangle this and ultimately discover that this was not my process, it actually belonged to someone else, and the tears were my own personal contribution to it…and my only clue.

By the time I reached my mid-thirties, the cumulative dramas and traumas of my life were beginning to take their toll. I fell into a deep depression and began having suicidal thoughts. When things that would formerly enrage me occurred, I would go to bed, curl into a foetal position, and wish for the dark oblivion of death. During this period I found a therapy group and began to participate twice weekly. In the group sessions, the women would expiate their rages by beating huge pillows with tennis racquets, but I simply observed, clenched and rigid, my rage returned and barely controlled. But by the time I returned home, it had returned to its hiding place beneath my depression where it lay dormant, coiled and ready for its next summons.

I’d like to say that the rage slowly seeped away, but that wouldn’t be the truth. I just got better and better at keeping it under control. A divorce and remarriage later, it still lurked beneath my surface, popping out occasionally for a snack on someone’s ego, never diminishing in strength or potency, but remaining increasingly closeted. And then my husband died.

For the next nine days I was nearly in a fugue. I was unable to eat anything, and slept only when I was falling-down exhausted…and then for only a few hours. My mind, always alert and active, seemed to be a blank. And I couldn’t cry. Finally he was buried and I skipped the family lunch, hosted by the brother-in-law who had spent his life ridiculing and belittling his now-dead brother. I just went home, took off my widow’s weeds and went to sleep. For 20 hours.

I woke up alone and suddenly realized that this was to be my new life. Oh, I had been alone before…I had been divorced, after all, and had been in a more than a few broken relationships in my life, but this time it was different. This time there were no fights and furies and break-ups and make-ups en route to my single status. No indignant “how dare he?” or “what was I thinking?” moments, no grand emotional production leading up to the apocalyptic moment of dumping or being dumped. This time there was a fragile kind of peace around me, a serenity that was not disturbed even by my numbness or sudden, unexpected moments of tears. I was alone, my heart was rent into ragged little bits, but I felt purged of rage. There was no one to be angry with, nothing to be angry about. He was gone, it was nobody’s fault, and he wasn’t coming back.

The next months of being alone were not, surprisingly, lonely. I spent a lot of time fiddling with the computer…something I do to keep my “upper” consciousness occupied with trivialities so my deeper consciousness can work things out and, eventually, kick them upstairs where I can ponder them. About five weeks after he died, my husband came to me while I slept and told me that it was all going to be okay and when I woke up, I knew.

I had a rather grim childhood and adolescence. To speak except when spoken to was to invite a backhand. Despite being a compliant and willing child, I was inept…as children are, until they have sufficient practice to master something…and so I received daily beatings from an unforgiving perfectionist of a mother. In so many ways I was a disappointment to her, and in so many brutal ways she let me know it. And yet, unlike so many children who buy the abuse and come away feeling at fault and therefore deserving of their victimization, I knew, every time that strap bit into my bare flesh, that what she was doing was wrong, that I was being unjustly assaulted…and I would get mad. By the time I was eight years old, I hated my mother with all the fervour an eight-year-old can muster. But to express that hatred was to invite further abuse, so I learned to be silent and nurture the rage, add to it with each new injustice, and eventually allow it to burst forth and defend me.

It took more than half my lifetime to learn that the rage was the mask that protected me from feeling the pain of my mother’s brutality. If I could focus myself on a rage, I would not feel the hurt. I learned to feel angry the moment I perceived any threat, for rage would not only keep me from feeling my fear, if it was big enough, it could actually drive off the threat. I soon came to realize that disappointment also provoked an angry response, too. We all have expectations of others, as well as ourselves, and I discovered that to keep myself from having to experience the pain of disappointment…or the guilt, if I was disappointing myself…all I had to do was stir up a fine rage and its fury would consume all those hurtful feelings so I would not have to experience them.

Once I had synthesized this in my head, I gave the idea to a few of my friends to see what they thought. Without exception, after some reflection on the matter, they agreed. In the throes of a break-up, if you get mad, it doesn’t hurt so much. Facing fearful situations, anger gives you strength, empowerment. And when someone tramples on your expectations, whether it is the third time the plumber has blown you off or it is some idiot who cut you off on the highway, the anger you feel is actually preventing you from feeling the disappointment of having your expectation unfulfilled: that the plumber would come at the appointed time or that the other driver would respect your right of way.

I have come to think of anger as a secondary emotion, an emotion that cannot exist in a pure state, as can fear, for example. Anger is a reaction or mask for certain primary emotions like fear or pain…disappointment being a form of emotional pain, after all. What all of these emotions have in common is that when we feel them, we feel vulnerable, victimized, powerless, at risk. Anger, however, is an empowering, pro-active emotion and the moment we shift from fear to anger, we no longer feel vulnerable, but powered by the adrenaline surge that comes with the advent of rage.

For me, crying through my rages was always a curious thing that neutralized the power of my anger. One cries when hurt or frightened, and it was those tears that eventually put me onto the track that lead me to figuring it out. Today, when I feel anger welling up inside me, I immediately analyze it…fear? pain? disappointment? Did that reckless BMW driver scare me when he passed on a blind curve? Did a person’s remark hurt my feelings? Did I really expect that woman to control her child?

I find that I am more prone to mild annoyance today than anything that approaches anger. I have found I can be outraged by something without being angry about it. I have discovered that there is very little worth working myself into a lather about anymore, not even in my marriage...

We have all heard that anger is a corrosive emotion, that harbouring a grudge or holding onto revenge fantasies are like taking poison and expecting the other person to die. But do you know why? Anger and its attendant behaviours (revenge fantasies, grudges, etc.) are part of our “fight or flight” response, a primitive, unthinking, literally mindless instinct. This instinct triggers physiological responses in our bodies, primarily the release of adrenaline. This adrenaline has numerous effects on our body, among them the blunting of pain and a feeling of power and empowerment. Unfortunately, there is a downside to this adrenaline release: it causes stress hormones to be released into your system, which thins the stomach lining and stimulates stomach acid production, it raises both your glucose levels and your blood pressure. It can wreak havoc on your health…

“The adrenalin speeds up your heart rate and intensity of contractions. It diverts blood from organs that are non-essential during emergencies, and redirects it to the brain for thinking and to muscles for movement. Your breathing rate increases to keep up with oxygen demand. You become alert and vigilant.

“Also released is a natural steroid called cortisol. Cortisol is amazing. When facing a short term emergency, cortisol performs an intricately-balanced, controlled shutdown of many non-essential body systems that would tax our resources.

“There's also a dark downside to this wonder steroid. Our bodies are wonderfully adapted to short term stressors. But for each minute that a stressor such as anxiety persists past the time it is needed, cortisol keeps suppressing the body systems that digest, store energy, and grow/repair/replenish cells in major organs.

“As long as anxiety persists and our sympathetic nervous system is activated, cortisol will be released. While it won't kill us outright, it will gradually cripple our defenses, and cause our body systems to become vulnerable to disease and infection, a little bit at a time. For those of us who are already dealing with medical conditions besides anxiety, the effect is much worse. Let's take a look at how this happens:

“[1] It takes a significant amount of energy to create this response. If the demand 'switch' can't be shut off because of our persistent anxiety, there's no time or resources left to store energy, so a deficit occurs. Ever feel really tired after long periods of anxiety? Now you know why.

“[2] The stess response requires oxygen and nutrient-rich blood to reach all necessary areas required to respond, so the heart beats faster and harder. Blood vessels tighten to increase blood pressure. This ensures blood gets where it is needed -- muscles for escape and brain for thinking. Speaking of blood vessels, you know how they branch into smaller and smaller vessels? The branch itself is a point of resistance, bearing the brunt of the increased pressure of blood slamming into them. Do this often enough and the wear and tear over time causes damage to the vessel wall, which the body is obligated to repair. The repair isn't quite as good as the original vessel wall, and may cause plaque to form which thickens the vessel. The repaired area tends to get damaged again and again under all that pressure, so the damage/repair cycle causes a great deal of thickening. Remember, this is happening all over your body. Sometimes these thickened plaques break off under the pressure and join up with sticky platelets, traveling around the system until it hits an area that's too thick or small for it to pass. Blood flow is reduced or stopped altogether by this clot. Whatever is on the other side of that clot needs oxygen and nutrients from blood to survive. But if the blood is blocked, the downstream cells die. Those cells could be leg muscle cells, pancreas cells, eye cells, nerve cells, lung cells, heart cells, brain cells, etc. If the cells happen to be those that carry heartbeat signals, their death can cause the beat to become irregular.

“[3] The body stops breaking stomach contents down into components and absorbing them as they slowly wind their way thru the intestine. Instead, it diverts resources away from the digestive tract, and aims them at sources that are more readily available. Once all the fuel available in blood (glucose) is used up for example, the liver dumps glycogen into the system to replace it. After that dries up, the body goes after stored energy in the form of fat (triglycerides stored in fat cells) and protein (muscles and organs). But there's also a problem. Cortisol reduces the amount of insulin. Insulin is the 'key' that 'unlocks' the cell so it can take up nutrients for energy or storage. Cortisol also tells these needy cells not to let insulin's 'key' into the cell's 'lock'. Do this enough and some cells will starve. Not only that, but cells that live can become less sensitive to insulin's 'key', eventually leading to impaired glucose tolerance (IGT) and type 2 diabetes.

“[4] The body shuts down acid secretion in the stomach because it is a non-essential system. Everybody thinks stomach acid increases during stress because of the pain, but here's what really happens: The stomach stops producing stomach lining, mucus and other protective substances because generating them is also non-essential. If this happens for an extended time, the lining isn't as protective as it used to be. So on days when anxiety is low, normal stomach acid comes pouring into that thin stomach lining to do its digestion thing. Only now that thin lining may not be able to withstand even normal amounts of acid, so irritation - and perhaps even an ulcer -- may eventually emerge.” From Health Central.

Believe it or not, you can become addicted to the adrenaline rush, to the empowered feeling you get when the adrenaline kicks in. This may explain why some people refuse to give up their anger…without it and the adrenaline it triggers, they feel disempowered, even vulnerable. They use the power of the adrenaline rush to hide behind, to make them feel strong and able to defend themselves. Rather then learn better, more healthy and socially acceptable coping mechanisms, these people cling to their righteous anger and resentment, nurturing their rage with revenge fantasies and wishes for payback.

But this clinging to rage and anger is not without cost…and a very high cost: “[There are] very real negative ramifications of adrenaline. Here are just a few of the more serious ones: cardiac disease, stroke, high blood pressure, sleep deprivation, diabetes, obesity, panic anxiety disorder, and major depression (Hart 2009).

“Located on the outer layer of the adrenal glands is the adrenal cortex. This section of the adrenal glands produces a group of hormones called glucocorticoids. The most common and popular hormone that comes from this is cortisol which is a steroid. Cortisol helps fight inflammation, raises the blood sugar level, and increases muscle tension among other things. The section of the adrenal glands called the adrenal medulla produces a group of hormones known as catecholamines, one of which is adrenaline.

“The problem with this ‘feel good’ hormone that was designed to alleviate stress on a short term basis or for emergency situations is that too much of a good thing ends up being a bad thing. Adrenaline can increase our cholesterol level, blood pressure, and even cause a heart attack from being too angry.” Source

I get that anger and revenge fantasies make you feel powerful…but at the same time, the chemical soup they trigger in your body is making you weak…and possibly even sick. Not only does clinging to your rage keep you stuck in one place, unable to recover emotionally, it literally, physically makes you ill. In a meta-analysis  of 14 studies conducted between 1965 and 2003, researchers found that stress exacerbates auto-immune disorders such as multiple sclerosis and lupus. Cortisol, the so-called “stress hormone,” is released along with adrenaline…and over time, keeping your body in a constant “fight or flight” condition literally has a negative impact on your health.

Rage feels empowering and, in the short term, it can be. Over the long haul, though, it is damaging to you, both to your spirit and to your body. We hide behind that empowering rage because it numbs us to pain, but the long-term price can be years off your life, impaired health, and continued unhappiness. A wise therapist once told me “the only way out of the pain is to go through it.” I didn’t understand at the time, but looking back, I realize that she simply meant that as long as we refuse to actually feel the pain we have been avoiding, as long as we refuse to face up to the pain of being unwanted, unloved, brutalized, rejected, and neglected, as long as we stay stuck in denial of our real pain and stuck in adrenaline-inducing fantasies of vengeance, we cannot move forward and truly leave our pain behind.

Anger, even rage, has its place…but its place is supposed to be temporary and quickly expiated, not carried with us like a security blanket for years…even decades. When we do that, it no longer protects and comforts us, it smothers and destroys us.

For your own sake and the sakes of those who love you and must helplessly watch you slowly destroy yourself on behalf of your Ns, let it go.


Addiction & Recovery" (speaker Dr. Archibald Hart). Adrenaline Addiction. Lesson 16. DVD. www.lightuniversity.com, 2009

Arrested Development

From 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.


All Malignant Narcissists are a case of arrested development. They live in the mindset of a child. Like a child, they know the difference between right and wrong but choose to do wrong when they can get away with it. However, unlike a child, the narcissist cannot be influenced by authority figures. The narcissist believes they are the ultimate authority on everything. They are determined to remain children who always get their way. And like all spoiled brats who control everyone by temper tantrums and bad behaviour they only get worse with the more they get away with.

“…they know the difference between right and wrong but choose to do wrong when they can get away with it…” This describes my mother to a T. How do I know she understood that some things were wrong but chose to do them any way? Because she taught me they were wrong and punished me when I did them. She also taught my brother, the Golden Child, that such things were wrong, but when he did them, I got punished for letting him.

For example, she taught us it was wrong to lie. If she suspected I was lying, I got punished (and punishment at her hands was brutal!). And yet, she regularly and easily lied, and even forced me to be complicit. My father worked two jobs, one full-time day job and one part-time evening job. When he would leave after dinner for his evening job, MNM would dress up, put on make up, high heels and jewellery and go “bar hopping,” (her term) leaving us alone. Not only was I admonished not to say anything to my father about her nocturnal activities, I was expected to keep my hyperactive, undisciplined little brother (who was bigger than I was) out of trouble while she was gone…nice trick for a scrawny 7-year-old and a husky bruiser of a 5-year-old!

On one occasion my brother found our father’s camera and disassembled it. Unable to put it back together, he got a hammer from the kitchen drawer and used it in an attempt to force the front and back halves of the camera back together. I was unable to stop him (and, truth be told, I was afraid to try to wrestle the hammer away from him lest he clobber me with it!) and when my mother got home, shortly before my father was due home from his night job, all hell broke loose. I was punished for “letting” my brother break the camera and we were both sent to bed after being told to say nothing about this, that she would handle it.

The walls in our house were paper thin and my bedroom adjoined the living room. My bed was pushed up against the shared wall, so at night I could hear what was going on in the next room. Through that thin wall, I heard my mother tell my father than my little brother had damaged the camera while she was out at the wash lines…a blatant lie if I ever heard one!...and that he had already been punished for it.

She knew it was wrong to steal, and she taught us it was wrong to steal and even punished us for stealing. But, like all narcissists, the rules didn’t apply to her, only to us lesser and unfavoured mortals.

My father liked to fish and hunt. He and my mother both had jobs to support my mother’s upwardly mobile lifestyle, and my father had a second job as well. What my father wanted more than anything was a good hunting rifle. With it he could not only indulge his pleasure of hunting, he could provide meat for the table. And to that end, my father began saving money, secreting it in the closet, far back on the shelf.

My mother, however, considered such pastimes to be “low class” and did not support his ambitions. Instead of the hunting rifle he wanted, for his birthday she gave him a solid gold tie pin in the shape of a crab. My father was a Pisces, not a Cancer, and I doubt he had ever eaten crab, so the reason for her choosing that emblem was a mystery. And a tie pin? My father owned only one tie and wore it no more than once a year. But it was gold and it was a tie pin so that when they got dressed up to go somewhere, my father would look prosperous...God forbid my mother associating in public with someone whose appearance did not shore up her own.

So, knowing the rifle would never be a gift from his wife, Daddy started saving money from his night job. And then my mother found it. I know she didn’t ask him about the money, what it was for or why he was hiding it. I know this because I still remember hearing them, through that paper thin wall, fight about it. He demanded that she give it back and she very sarcastically said she wouldn’t even if she could—it had already been spent. He was outraged, she was completely unashamed…her tone of voice was superior and condescending. And a few weeks later a new living room suite arrived, a sectional sofa and chair and several blonde wood tables, all perfectly in keeping with the trend of the day. She even got a neighbour, who was a carpenter and painter, to come and paint the living room walls to match the rosy pink chair and intense turquoise bouclé loop sofa. Daddy’s savings were gone, but my mother had the trendy new furniture she wanted that leapfrogged her into the position of having the newest, most fashionable and enviable stuff on the block.

She knew stealing was wrong…she told her children it was wrong and even punished me if she suspected me (or my brother) of stealing. Yet, when she found it, she shamelessly and without remorse, stole the money my father had been saving for a hunting rifle, something that would not only bring him pleasure but would have the added benefit of putting meat on the table (he liked to go deer hunting and a single deer could provide us with meat for the table for the better part of a year).

While Lisette states that narcissists cannot be influenced by authority figures, like parents, I am not so sure this is entirely correct. My mother, for example, moved from the northern Willamette Valley in Oregon to San Diego to distance herself from her parents (and a scandal she created that caused the people in their very small town to shun her) and she seemed to dread their visits. She changed when they were there, she actually seemed normal. It proved to me that she did know how to behave properly because she did so in front of her parents. I got no beatings while they were around, no nasty, vituperative tongue lashings, and I wasn’t punished for my brother’s misbehaviour. Life seemed normal…or at least what I imagined to be normal…when my grandparents were there.

My grandparents had several big walnut trees in their back garden and when they came down to visit, they always brought a big box of walnuts with them. I can remember sitting on the floor in front of the TV, cracking and eating walnuts to my heart’s content—I was never hungry when my grandparents were around. But as soon as they left, those walnuts were gathered up and put away, with instructions that we were not to touch them without permission, permission for which I was too intimidated to ask. Eventually they would go bad and they would be tossed out with the trash. Once my grandparents were gone, so was my mother’s “good” behaviour.

My mother had a temper and I was terrified of her when she let it loose. “…like all spoiled brats who control everyone by temper tantrums and bad behaviour…” Yep, that was my mother. I was afraid of her in general, but when she got angry—which was often—I was frequently in fear of my life. For one thing, anything could set her off. I had to wash the accumulated breakfast and lunch dishes when I got home from school (even though I was so young I needed to stand on a chair to get to the sink). My brother was supposed to dry them and put them away, but because he knew that he would not get punished for failing to do so (I would get it for not making him do his chores), both the washing and drying fell to me. If I did not put them away “right,” if I stacked the pans wrong, if I put the can opener in the wrong drawer or mixed a big spoon in with the little ones, it was a punishable offense. I have been dragged out of bed by my hair, my mother screaming almost unintelligibly at me, and pulled into the kitchen where I was told to put a glass or cup in its proper place or pick up a piece of trash that had not made it into the sack, then whipped with a thin leather strap every step of the way back to bed. Did she know this was wrong? Of course—“if you tell your precious father about this, you’ll get twice as much tomorrow when he leaves for work,” she would tell me…like a naughty child, a schoolyard bully, who threatens you with more violence if you report his bad behaviour.

They never grow out of it. My mother remained mean and angry and punitive right up to her death. When she died she had two children and four grandchildren. She had inherited a lot of money from her parents and when she wrote her will, she wrote one child and three grandchildren out of it “for reasons they already know.” One of those grandchildren she had refused to meet for the whole of his 26 years—how could he know anything? But her last act was to put the cat amongst the pigeons and create conflict and hurt feelings among her children and grandchildren for years to come. I can just imagine her writing out the will, smiling and congratulating herself for turning one of her grandchildren into the next family bully and sowing a legacy of dysfunction into the next generations. Like spoiled little chidren, narcissists must always get their way.