Trapped in the F. O. G.?

Every person I have ever known who was struggling with a relationship with a narcissistic parent, partner, boss, friend, or sibling, was actually struggling with feelings of fear, obligation, and/or guilt—at least one of which was keeping them in a victim’s role.

Most often this F.O.G. originates in childhood, a childhood dominated by a narcissistic parent or parental figure. And it doesn’t matter if your narcissist was engulfing or ignoring, overt or covert type, malignant or not: if you had a narcissistic parent, you were indoctrinated to feel fearful, obligated, and guilty. It is one of those things that is part of the universal truths of the children of narcissists.

All human beings are born with the instinct for survival. From infancy, when the instinct prompts us to cry when we are hungry or are too cold or hot, through toddlerhood when we cry when being left alone, up to adolescence when we are supposed to being individuating and learning to survive without our caretakers, this instinct drives us. Its purpose is to ensure our survival through an inborn fear of being abandoned by our primary caretakers, for without them, we would surely die.

Given a normal, functional upbringing, we begin to individuate in our teens, losing both our physical and emotional dependency on our parents and developing the skills and self-esteem to go out in the world and make our own way. We begin grow away from our dependence, both emotional and physical, on our parents. This is the way it is supposed to be, to grow from total dependence upon our parents for every aspect of our existence to being wholly independent and self-sufficient, to become the rock upon which our own children will depend.

Unfortunately, for the children of narcissists, this quite often goes horribly wrong. Individuation is discouraged, even forbidden, as is anything that the NParent thinks will lead the child away from dependency. These children grow up believing themselves to be hopelessly incompetent, unlovable, unattractive, lazy, stupid, and generally a burden on their parents and even on society. And even if they go out into the world and make a success of themselves in the eyes of that society, internally they remain dependent on the approval of others for their self-esteem and sense of right and wrong, never having individuated and learned to rely on themselves.

The process of individuation often brings conflict between the primary care-givers and the adolescent as the teen tries to take on adult activities for which s/he is not yet prepared. But in functional families, the mistakes are learning opportunities, the adolescent grows into independence and self-confidence with the guidance of her parents. In dysfunctional families, however, individuation is derailed. In order to control them and keep them emotionally dependent, narcissists instil into their children, very early in their lives, the grim triad of narcissistic entrapment: Fear, Obligation, and Guilt—the oppressive F.O.G.

Fear

A parent does not have to be overtly abusive in order to instil fear into their children. Ask any adult child of a narcissistic parent what she is afraid of and you will likely get vague, nebulous answers or, if specific, answers that indicate she fears the narcissist’s reaction. Ask the 40 year-old daughter of a 65 year-old narcissist what she fears and the answer will invariably be the parent’s response, most often anger, and the guilt it provokes. If you ask “So what if she gets angry? What is she going to do about it? Ground you? Take away your car keys? Forbid you to go to the dance Friday night?” And the narcissist’s adult child will, at that moment, have a peek into the amount of control she has given to her narcissist.

Sometimes, however, the fear is well-founded. The malicious malignant narcissist will fight dirty. Not content with an intimidating Nrage or guilt-inducing pity party, the malignant narcissist (MN) will spitefully retaliate, often overtly but sometimes covertly. Covert retaliation might be undermining your authority with your children or withholding important information under the guise of forgetting, or saying “I didn’t think you cared/would want to know/were interested…” or some other passive aggressive action. Overt retaliation has no limit: anything from trying to take custody of your children to sabotaging your relationships (including your job) to stalking you to stealing your identity and running up huge bills in your name to accusing you of crimes such as elder abuse, child abuse, animal abuse. The overt malignant narcissist’s repertoire knows only the boundary of getting caught without a plausible excuse for their behaviour: if they think they can get away with it, no matter what “it” might be, they will do it. And they will not feel one iota of guilt, either, no matter how much harm they cause.

If you are dealing with a malignant narcissist, fear is an appropriate response to their advances, no matter how benign the advance seems to be. The only way to effectively deal with a malignant narcissist, whether overt or covert, is to cut all contact and disappear. As long as that MN has access to you, you are legitimately at risk.

But most narcissists are not malignant narcissists (even though it very well may feel like it to you). Most narcissists are simply out to get narcissistic supply and manipulate people and events with that as their goal: drama and attention and control to ensure a steady supply. It takes real malice, an intent to do you serious harm, to make your narcissist a malignant narcissist. MNs are rare: the average narcissist’s objective is her Nsupply and if you get hurt in her pursuit of that, she doesn’t care. The malignant narcissist’s objective is to hurt you, and she gets her Nsupply from your pain and the difficulty she causes for you. The incidence of MNs in a population of narcissists I once calculated at being less than 3%...and the incidence of narcissists in the population is less than 6%...so the odds of your narcissist being malignant are very low.

But malignant or not, narcissistic parents inspire fear in the hearts of their children. And regardless of any superficial reasons for our fears, there is a single common fear that unites us all: fear of abandonment. This fear is rooted deeply in the subconscious of all humans as part of the survival instinct. In prehistory, to be abandoned by parents or tribe was to be sentenced to death. Survival was, by and large, a communal endeavour. To be cast out alone, exiled, was to perish. From our very first breaths we cry for the soothing touch of another, the sound of voices to let us know we are not alone and we will not die.

The children of narcissists often suffer from emotional abandonment and subconsciously fear physical abandonment. Long after we should have individuated, we may cling to the fear of abandonment that makes little kids cry when they lose sight of Mummy in a crowd—to be separate from the nurturer is to be in danger of death. Those of us who continue, past adolescence, to depend on our mothers and/or other members of our families of origin (FOO), fear separation—whether by circumstance or intent—even if we are not consciously aware of it. We are afraid, not so much of what they might do to us, but that if they reject us, we will disappear.

The fear in F.O.G., then, is not a realistic fear of reprisal but a primeval fear of death by abandonment—to the subconscious, emotional abandonment is no different from physical—and narcissists instinctively play on this fear to control us. And this is why they sabotage our efforts to individuate: they are unwilling to release us from their control because we provide NSupply to them. With rare exception, our fear is wholly unfounded because the vast majority of narcissists actually mean us no real harm—they just want to get their Nsupply—and if we are harmed in their pursuit of it, they simply do not care.

Obligation

Part of culture is obligation. The structure of societies require certain things from their members in order for the society to function. There is the obligation of supporting the society through such things contributions (taxes) and obeying the rules (laws and customs). Then there are social expectations such as respect and manners. Each sub-culture has its own set of rules involving customs, rituals, and taboos. To be born into a society or a culture of any kind, anywhere—including the microcosm of a family—is to be born into obligation and that concept is inculcated into us early.

Obligation is what you owe to others or what others owe you. It is a duty for which the obligated one is responsible. If you are obligated to do something, you are responsible to do it. But obligations are not immutable. Some obligations change with time and over time, and may even go away. Your obligation to feed and shelter and discipline your child, for example, diminishes with time until a point at which your child is an adult and responsible for his own food and shelter and, presumably, no longer needs discipline.

Narcissists, however, pervert the natural obligations of the parent-child relationship, often completely turning the tables such that the child feels the burden of obligations to her parent while the parent feels none towards the child. In a true obligation you are bound either by the laws of your society or the morals of your culture. You have no choice in the matter unless you wish to risk censure by the society and/or the culture.

But, again, narcissistic parents pervert this by convincing that you are bound by obligation where, in fact, there is none. If the entire FOO is controlled by narcissists, as is frequently the case, the child may have an entire chorus echoing the narcissistic parent’s insistence that the child is obligated where, in truth, she is not.

Children are hard-wired to believe their parents and the other authority figures in their lives. Again, this is part of the survival instinct: children learn about what is safe and what is not from observing and listening to their parents and other adults around them. Until they reach what is often called “the age of reason” (commonly thought to be 7), children are quite gullible and easily led. Age and experience increases a child’s reasoning power but, due to the strictures of his or her upbringing, some topics may be forbidden for the child to apply logic and reasoning to. In more functional homes it is often frowned upon for a child to apply her burgeoning logic and reasoning skills to something considered sacred, like religion. In more dysfunctional households, however, a child will be forbidden to question virtually anything imparted to them by their primary authority figures.

Narcissists, the ultimate in dysfunctional parents, exploit this aspect of childhood by teaching their children, either directly or indirectly, that they are the ultimate authority in a child’s life and that questioning that authority was forbidden. Children of such parents were afraid to apply logic to the pronouncements of their parents, even long into adulthood. My mother, for example, used to tell me that there were three ways to do anything—the right way, the wrong way, and her way. The sheer illogic of that statement did not strike me until long after I achieved adulthood: like most children, I simply believed it because my mother said so.

It is no wonder, then, that when a narcissist and her Greek chorus of Flying Monkeys (FMs) inculcate a child with the notion that Mummy made huge sacrifices for her, and that she owes Mummy a lifetime of gratitude and payback, the child accepts this as incontrovertible fact, just as she accepts the existence of such things as the Tooth Fairy. Unfortunately for the children of narcissists, nobody tells them the truth about the supposed debt of gratitude owed to their narcissistic family when revealing the truth about the Tooth Fairy and, as a result, it is a safe bet that virtually all children of narcissists grow up burdened with a false sense of obligation to their NParents.

The thing about these obligations is that, on the surface, they seem so reasonable, so logical, so rational, that even as adults we accept them as valid. We learn about tit-for-tat in the school yard and grow up with an understanding and acceptance of the concept of reciprocity. What nobody tells us is that where parents and their children are concerned, in modern societies the children have no lasting obligations to their parents, nor the parents to their children. The obligations of parenthood diminish as the child grows and matures and reaches her age of majority; the obligations of a child to her parents also diminish with growth and maturity: that is what individuation is all about—growing up and away from the dependency of childhood, dependency that includes those ever-diminishing obligations to parents such as obedience and acceptance of the parents’ pronouncements.

Children who grew up in emotionally healthy homes care for their elderly parents out of love, not a sense of obligation. They visit, call, buy gifts and do other, similar things out of genuine love for those parents, not because it is expected of them. For many years I drove from San Francisco every summer to spend a week with my father because I loved him, I loved being around him. Visits with my father always left me feeling renewed and strengthened. It is telling that during these week-long visits, I went into town to see my mother only on the last day, as I was leaving town, and then only for an hour. And it was very clear in my mind that these visits were not for me or for her: they were to prevent her from getting resentful about me visiting my father—from whom she had been divorced for over 40 years—and not stopping to see her. Was I doing this due to a sense of obligation to spare her feelings? No—it was to protect my father and stepmother from being cornered by her in the very small town where they all shopped and occasionally ran into each other—it was to protect them from having her dump all of her resentment at my ignoring her onto them. An obligation to protect my father? Again, no—an act of love on my part that they knew nothing about.

What is salient here is doing something out of a sense of duty versus doing it because you love the person and want to take care of him/her. It is free will versus the shackles of obligation. If you interact with members of your family not because it is your duty to do so but because you love them and genuinely wish to do things for them, that is a healthy interaction, done out of love for them. If your primary motivation, however, is one of duty and obligation, then this may well be unhealthy and motivated by a false sense of obligation implanted into you when you were a small child and then carefully nurtured.

You do not have an obligation to your parents or to any other adult family member once you become an adult. If you feel like you do, then you have been brainwashed from childhood to believe that you owe a debt to people who were, in fact, only doing their own duty and who very likely did it poorly: if they had done it well and with love, you would feel no need to be reading something like this. You owe them nothing but basic respect unless, like Ns everywhere, they have managed to earn your disrespect—in which case you owe them nothing more than civility. To paraphrase Anne Lamott: “If people wanted you to [feel] warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

Guilt

Guilt is interesting. The ability to feel guilty is our moral compass…guilt tells us when we have done something wrong and it plagues us until we do something to redress the wrong. It is the angel on our shoulder who tries to guide us to do the right thing. The ability to feel guilt is absolutely essential in order to have a conscience.

Guilt feels bad. It feels bad in order to impel you to right whatever wrong you may have committed, in order to make the bad feeling go away. Some people don’t feel guilt, however, which can be a bad thing. I say “can” advisedly because there are people out there who seldom feel guilt because they are careful to live their lives in such a way that their guilt is not provoked. Such people have learned the lessons that guilt is there to teach them: don’t do bad things and you won’t have to deal with guilt feelings.

Unfortunately, such people are in the minority. Most people who don’t feel guilt are personality disordered or otherwise mentally/emotionally disturbed and the lack of a conscience is part of their disturbance: people like narcissists who have neither conscience nor remorse. Either they simply do not have feelings of guilt or they have rationalized and justified their behaviour so that in their minds, they are not guilty of any wrong-doing. Ever.

Then there are people who feel guilty and cannot seem to stop. They just walk around with guilt hanging over their heads. They feel guilty about saying “no.” They feel guilty about taking care of themselves. They feel guilty for taking up space on the planet, for breathing the air that someone else might need, for simply being alive. There are those whose sense of guilt is not so pervasive but triggers each time they perceive someone is not happy or whenever they recognize a feeling of need in themselves. These are all people suffering from toxic or misplaced guilt and much of this guilt is related to Fear and Obligation.

Guilt is the primary way we punish ourselves for perceived wrongdoing. But from whence do we get our knowledge of right and wrong? From our parents, of course. And if our parents are narcissists who are constitutionally incapable of believing themselves wrong? If they believe they are always right and they can do no wrong, then the blame for misadventure of any kind, from a broken glass to a car accident to one of the children getting in trouble with the law—these unfortunate occurrences simply cannot be their fault, can it? And if the Golden Child can also do no wrong, where must the responsibility for any kind of misfortune lie? With the family scapegoat, of course.

It is amazing what a narcissist can blame on an innocent family member and not only believe it themselves but draw others into believing it as well. I was surprised to learn, at the tender age of 14, that everything that was wrong with my mother’s life was my fault. Her unhappy status at that time was not because she chose to drop out of school at 16 and elope with a man she had known less than a month, nor was it because she chose to have unprotected sex with this man. It was not even because she decided to divorce him and be a single mother— No, it was my fault because I had been born. Had I not had the audacity to force myself upon her unwilling person, her life would have been “different,” a word she obviously took to be synonymous with “better.”

Other narcissists are not as overt as my mother in attempting to provoke guilt in their children. Each time a child doesn’t measure up, each time a child is ignored or demeaned or belittled, that child feels inadequate. And that inadequacy alone is enough to create guilt for not having measured up, which can spur a child to greater and greater efforts to please. Over time, it becomes a way of life as children sink into a state in which they feel they have to earn approbation, love, even the right to live. They become people pleasers and over-achievers—or they become depressed and hopeless, convinced of the futility of effort due to their inability to measure up. They feel fundamentally defective, unable to please their caregivers, all giving rise to a pervasive feeling of guilt.

Infants and children are hardwired to please their caregivers. Psychologist Richard L. Rappaport says “The desire to please…is biologically instinctual, and when the parent is ‘pleased’ the infant coos and smiles to ensure continuity of care and nurturance.” When a child is unable to please the parent, she feels guilty for falling short—and, on a deeper, more visceral level, she also feels a instinctual fear of abandonment and the certain death that follows.

As adults we do not feel a fear of literal death because, for most of us, we no longer depend on our parents to provide us with food and shelter. But because we have not emotionally individuated, we fear a kind of emotional death brought about by our inability to please our caregivers. This makes their displeasure our fault—it means we believe we have done something wrong or failed to do something right—and for this, we feel guilty, even though, in truth, we have done absolutely nothing wrong.

Narcissists exploit this. We learn very young that our narcissistic caregivers are difficult to please and, due to our hardwiring to please the caregiver in order to ensure continuity of care and nurturance, we go to ever greater effort to please them. Narcissists notice this…the worse they treat us, the harder we try to please them, the more Nsupply we provide. And the more guilt we take on for not pleasing them, the more power over us they wield.

None of this was your fault

The most difficult—but most freeing—thing for us to realize is that none of this was or is our fault. We have been conned, and we were conned at an age where we had absolutely no chance of resistance. The more overt narcissists might inspire an early awakening in a child due to the level of their brutality but for the most part, both overt and covert narcissists fly under the radar when it comes to the emotional abuse of one or more of their children. By the time the child reaches that critical age of reason and the ability to begin thinking critically, she has already been sucked into the narcissist’s vortex, already believes herself to be inadequate, already feels guilty for things not of her own making. She is already engulfed in the F.O.G. of narcissistic entrapment.

The good news, however, is that it was not your fault—you were not inadequate, you were not bad, you were not responsible for whatever is wrong with your narcissist’s life. You are not a burden or a disappointment or otherwise less than… What was wrong was your narcissist: she held you to impossible standards and found you wanting, she set you up to fail and then blamed you and demeaned and belittled you when you didn’t succeed against the odds that were stacked against you. And even if she didn’t demean and belittle you with gusts of ugly words, you knew what the sighs, the rolled eyes, the turned back, the silence meant —you didn’t need words to know that you had not lived up to her expectation, that she viewed your presence in her life as a burden, that you were not what she wanted.

She was the defective one, not you. If someone judged a cage of newly hatched robins by their ability to fly, they would all fall short of the mark and be inadequate, wouldn’t they? If that someone prevented them from learning to fly by clipping their wings when their flight feathers when they came in, they would never learn to fly, would they? And if set free at that point, they would be in grave danger, crippled and dependent because they would not know how to fly to escape predators or to find food. And if the person who caged them and clipped their wings pronounced them to be useless, inadequate, disappointments because they can’t fly, would you agree? Or would you put the blame on the caretaker who crippled them?

What makes you so different from these robins? Your fear, your sense of obligation, your guilt—none of these belong to you. They were given to you by a narcissist, planted in you like a crop, to ensure Nsupply, to make sure you never individuated and took the Nsupply away. Your narcissist has implanted obligations into your head that don’t actually belong to you, beliefs that keep you chained and unable to fly just as the clipped wings keep those robins grounded. You are stuck in a F.O.G. created by a narcissist for her own benefit with no thought to you or your well-being.

The only way out of the F.O.G. is to be willing to challenge those things you believe that keep you bound, to stay with the guilt until you can come to embrace the reality that your Ns have kept from you—the reality that you owe them nothing, that your proper role in life is to learn to care for yourself, not them. Just as you must break free and make your own life, so must they. They cannot remain parasites, grooming and manipulating you to provide them with Nsupply, unless you permit it with a lack of boundaries and an unwillingness to challenge their beliefs and values. You need your own, you need to forge your own path, create your own sense of right and wrong, one which that not include being an “ever-flowing breast” of Narcissistic Supply to people who will exploit you for as long you permit it.

Your narcissist will never change and you cannot change her. She will never let you go, never see the truth of herself, never stop generating that F.O.G. in which you are stuck. It is in her own best interests to lock you down and keep you shackled because if you individuate and find freedom, she loses an easily milked source of Nsupply. The F.O.G. is continually generated to keep you feeling guilty, obligated, and afraid of abandonment, of losing your family, so that you will not see the truth. It is only by facing your fears, shrugging off those obligations that are not truly yours and refusing to accept the toxic guilt, only by admitting to yourself that your NParent and her Flying Monkeys really care nothing for you, that they are manipulating you for their own ends, to maintain their false image to themselves and the rest of the world, only by acknowledging that you are feeling guilty for things that were not of your doing—only then can you shake free of her toxic grip and begin to step out of the F.O.G.

Freedom is within your grasp: all you need to achieve it is to accept the truth.

Sources

http://law.jrank.org/pages/4175/Age-Reason.html

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/7113.Anne_Lamott

Rappaport, Richard L. Motivating Clients in Therapy: Values, Love and the Real Relationship

She's aggressive and shameless: Characteristics of Narcissistic Mothers Pt 16

 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

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

16. She’s aggressive and shameless.

This may be more a malignant NM trait—the aggressiveness—than a “normal” NM trait. All NMs are shameless, however, because they feel completely justified in their outrageous demands. And if what you are asking for is “reasonable,” why should you feel any shame about it?

NMs can be overtly or passively aggressive in how they about making their demands. A woman I know has a mother who has so effectively screwed up her finances that she is in danger of being booted out of her retirement community, along with her husband who suffers from dementia. Because the woman’s mother and father will have no place to go…except into her own home for the remainder of their lives…my friend has been manipulated into detangling the mess her mother has made of the finances and then managing them indefinitely, lest she end up with a passive-aggressive narcissistic mother and a dementia-suffering father under her roof along with her own family.

Another friend’s mother did something similar: Kelli lost her job, as many have done in this economy. She sold her house and moved in with her boyfriend but when the funds ran out, she had to tell her mother, to whom she sent money every month, that the well was dry, she was only working part time at WalMart, and couldn’t even meet her own obligations. Kelli’s mother’s passive aggressive response was to stop paying her rent (which was roughly equal to what Kelli had been sending her every month) and to continue living as she had been all along. When she was evicted, she blamed Kelli. Kelli’s brother offered their mom the use of a cottage on his property, but she turned it down. When last heard from, she was in some kind of shelter for the indigent elderly, blaming Kelli for her ignominious situation.

My late husband’s NM, whose tastes far exceeded our budget, would tell us she didn’t want anything “for the house” for her birthday or Christmas. She also informed us that she didn’t wear costume jewellery. When her heavy hints for real jewellery—far outside our budget but not that of the NGCBro—went ignored and we found other things to give her, she would punish us with lengthy silences.

Some narcissists are more overtly aggressive in the way they present their demands and how they respond to your refusal to accede to them. They will yell and scream, break things, make threats, take back (or break) things they gave you and just engage in a host of overtly aggressive acts. When Charlie’s Aunt Bea died, his mother was executor of her estate. While at Maman’s house for Christmas dinner, Maman presented Charlie with a sheaf of papers for him to sign. Charlie demurred, saying he wanted an attorney to review them first.

Now Charlie was dyslexic and he grew up feeling like he was stupid. That was because the school put him in remedial classes and his family assumed this meant he had a room-temperature IQ. Charlie and I had been together for a couple of years at this point and were engaged…and he had learned, through me, that he was not stupid he just had a perfectly manageable learning disability.

But when Charlie told his mother he wanted a lawyer to look over the papers before he signed anything, she went ballistic. She, who had called him stupid all of his life, was incensed that her “stupid” son would seek competent assistance before signing something! She accused him of not trusting her—blaming me for that—and then told him “If you do not sign these papers tonight, you are stupid!”

Charlie was stricken—I could see it in his face. So I stepped in front of him and said “He’s not stupid and you cannot call him that!”

She turned on me and in her heavy French accent said “I am heez mozzer! I can call heem anyzing I want!”

I turned to Charlie and said “I am ready to go home now. How about you?” With a look of relief, he nodded his head and we went to the coat closet to get our jacket, his mother following us and continuing to shriek abuse at us in two languages as we walked out the door.

Sometimes they are very overt in their aggressiveness!***

She doesn’t ask. She demands. She makes outrageous requests and she'll take anything she wants if she thinks she can get away with it.

When  was a kid, she took every dime, every dollar I received as gifts or earned picking crops during the summer or babysitting as an adolescent. When I was a teen, she took my clothes, my jewellery--anything I had that she wanted became hers. And it didn't stop when I grew up and had kids of my own.

One year, when my kids were small, I had the opportunity to take a temporary job out of town for three weeks during the holiday season…the money was extraordinary and I needed it. Like most young single mothers, I asked my NM if she would take the kids for those weeks while I took the job—she had pawned me off onto her parents virtually every summer of my youth, it was not like such a request was without precedence in my family. Of course, at that time I knew nothing about NPD or personality disorders and my once ignoring, punitive mother was being nice to me for a change, so why not ask? To my great surprise, she agreed.

When the time was up, she didn’t want to bring them back. She did, but she did her best to convince me it would be in “their best interest” to let her have them! This was the woman who beat me stupid as a child for the slightest infraction of rules that changed with her mercurial moods—I was going to let her raise my kids like she raised me? Not a chance!

But I was still living under the admonitions laid down in my childhood, chief among them being she was above criticism—not even sarcasm was allowed—so instead of having the kind of blow up that burned in my breast, I simply thanked her for her offer, but said my kids belonged with me.

At the time I had no idea what she was plotting but in retrospect, it became pretty clear. Within a year she had succeeded in taking both of them away from me, spirited them out of the state where she lied to a court to get a permanent guardianship (after having my parental rights terminated on the grounds that I was a “drug addicted prostitute” who neglected the children and abandoned them—none of which was even remotely true). Within two years, they were in New York, adopted by her childless brother and his wife, people who had been turned down by the state as adoptive parents through the state agencies because they could not pass the home study.

This was her response to my refusal to 1) abort my illegitimate child when I became pregnant at 17; 2) accede to her demand that I give the child up for adoption; 3) accept her withholding permission for me to marry by getting a court order permitting it; 4) come running to her for help when the going got tough, per her prediction, so she could reject me; and 5) give the kids to her when she finally got tired of waiting for me to beg for help and she had to debase herself and actually ask me to give them to her. It was payback, it was aggressive payback, and it took a lot of planning and money to pull it off but for her, the vengeance must have been worth it.

Her demands of her children are posed in a very aggressive way, as are her criticisms. She won't take no for an answer, pushing and arm-twisting and manipulating to get you to give in.

And if you won’t give in, finding ways to force you to give up whatever it is she wants. My NM spent years on a smear campaign to make me look like the Whore of Babylon. It started when I was very young, telling family members my every transgression, real or imagined, and amplifying them with the most negative spin she could imagine. If I didn’t get a fork clean when I did the dishes, I was trying to give us all food poisoning; if GCBro hit me, either I provoked him or I was a tattletale, making mountains out of molehills; I had an overactive imagination so nothing I said could be believed; if she saw me talking to a boy, or she saw a boy’s name doodled on my notebook, suddenly I was having sex with him. Anything I did or didn’t do was construed in the worst, most immoral or intentionally evil way possible. And after of hearing this coupled with some common adolescent mistakes (chiefly, I got pregnant out of wedlock at 17), there was nothing she could say about me that the FOO wouldn’t believe.

So, when my answer to her question about taking my kids was a resounding “NO!” she went on to plan B. She actually got one of her brothers to perjure himself in court and even though I had a letter in my behalf from the welfare department (I was a fit parent, I had a fit home, etc.), NM succeeded in getting a temporary guardianship based on my uncle’s perjured testimony. When I came to her house for my first scheduled visitation, the house was empty, a For Sale sign in the yard.

It was eight years before I saw my children again, eight years before I discovered the depth of her treachery: she took the kids to another state and applied for a permanent guardianship. I should have been notified of the hearing but I wasn’t because she lied and told the court she didn’t know where I was. In such a situation, you are required to publish a notice of the hearing in a newspaper of the other person’s last known address: she published in a city I had not lived in for years and she knew I didn’t live there. Because I did not show up in court to object, my parental rights were terminated and NM got a permanent guardianship. And from there it was a straight shot to my childless uncle to give him the children he had been unable to get any other way.

These women do not give up. Depending on how malignant they are, they can stalk you, trump up legal charges against you, malign you to your entire cast of family and friends, call your place of employment and make trouble: there is no depths to which they will not sink in order to get what they want and to “show you” that you cannot deny them.

And they do it with no sense of shame or remorse or guilt. After the affair with my children blew wide open, both of my uncles apologized to me for their part in it…they were good men taken in by her lies, as was the rest of the family. Twenty years later, however, NM went to her grave still maintaining I had abandoned my children and she had done the right thing. They never, ever, admit wrong, no matter the evidence stacked against them!

Next: Part 17. She “parentifies.”

Denial—the core of Narcissism

Denial is at the core of narcissism. Without it, Narcissistic Personality Disorder simply could not exist.

“Denial (also called abnegation) is a defense mechanism…in which a person is faced with a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept and rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence.” Simply stated, denial is lying to yourself and believing the lie.

Brought down to its very essence, denial is expressed in two basic forms: lying to oneself about others (the woman who cannot admit her man is cheating on her, for example, even though there is ample evidence of his perfidy) or lying to oneself about one’s own self (the jowly, bloated, middle aged matron believing she looks “hot” in fashions better suited to her 13-year-old daughter). One need not be a narcissist to engage in denial—we all do it from time to time, whether it is in reference to romance or fashion or health. But while not all deniers are narcissists, all narcissists are deniers—narcissism could not exist without the ability to deny reality and believe that denial.

When you are in denial about yourself it can take more than one form: it can be as superficial as believing you look really good with a trout pout or as deep as believing that you are entitled to whatever it is you want by whatever means you must employ to get it. You can deny what the mirror tells you, substituting in your vision what you want to see; you can deny that the rules of society and law apply equally to all of us and behave—without qualm—in a way the rest of us believe to be unethical.

Denial with respect to others is something you see all the time: people who essentially bury their heads in the sand rather than acknowledge unpleasant truths they don’t want to deal with. But there is a deeper, more pernicious kind of denial with regard to other people: the refusal to acknowledge the feelings of others and the substitution of something less true but more palatable to the denier.

The narcissist engages in denial that serves him, that allows him to always be right, that allows him to feel good about himself, no matter the cost to others. The narcissist’s lack of empathy allows him to look at someone who is crying as a result of some cold or cruel remark he made and believe she is not really hurt, she is trying to manipulate him. Or, if acknowledging she is hurt, she is hurt not because of something he said or did but because she has chosen to be hurt by his words or deeds.

Because a narcissist does not live in reality, however, sometimes his denial backfires on him and causes problems—but don’t think for a minute the narcissist learns anything from it. The boyfriend of a friend of mine now has a partially crippled hand due to his denial: he got an infection and refused to see a doctor about it, saying it was “fine.” Eventually, pain (and his girlfriend) drove him to see a doctor but by then the bones were involved and some of them eventually fused. His denial of the severity of his injury—whether because he subconsciously thought he was Superman or whether he was afraid to see a physician—caused a far-reaching consequence. Did he learn from this? No—he blamed the cat that scratched him and the next time he got really sick, he refused treatment until he was so sick he had to be admitted to a hospital in critical condition.

Unfortunately, most narcissistic denial doesn’t have the outcome of the narcissist being the only one injured. My mother denied I needed glasses—my science teacher sent me to the school nurse because I could not read the blackboard from the front row. The nurse checked my eyes and told my mother I needed glasses. When my mother said I was “faking it,” the nurse gave my mother the choice of taking me to the optometrist herself or she would call in CPS and lay a charge of neglect (she had been dealing with my mother for years by this time and was not fooled by her at all). All the way to the optometrist’s office I was harangued, terrorized and screamed at, accused of faking, and promised the beating of my lifetime after the doctor’s tests proved it. The drive home was absolutely silent—I needed glasses stronger than hers—but no apology was forthcoming for her tirade en route. Her denial of the reality of my needs took the form of believing me to be a “drama queen” and a “hypochondriac.” Even when I was truly sick, like when I had pneumonia or an allergy attack that swelled my eyes completely shut, I was accused of “playing up” my symptoms and pretending that I was sicker than I was. My mother’s denial of my medical needs not only caused me unnecessary pain and suffering, it set the stage for me neglecting my medical care: without my mother responding to my needs appropriately, I learned to endure long past the time I should seek treatment, because I was never sure when I should seek it.

The narcissist lives in denial about himself as well as others. To himself, a narcissist is special, talented, entitled, better than everyone else. He may be a short, plain, social bumbler, but in his mind, he is the superior being deserving of a supermodel girlfriend and a rich man’s lifestyle. That he doesn’t have it is not his fault—it is the fault of those who are jealous of his abilities, who don’t like him because of his colour, who won’t give him a chance because of his origins or religion or the school he went to (or didn’t go to) or his parents because they denied him those things that would have given him entrée into that to which he believes he is entitled.

In the narcissist, denial can be applied to any and everything. Laws? For the narcissist, they only apply if he is caught—but you had better abide by them! We must all be predictable so that the narcissist can anticipate what we will do and make his plans accordingly. It’s OK if he fails to return something borrowed—even money—but you have no such leeway. His front yard can be an overgrown mess and his house need painting, but you had better keep yours up or you’ll lower his property values!

James, my N ex-husband, was famous for his denial of economic reality—and when caught out, he was invariably angry with those whom he identified as the cause of the problems that cost him money. He, of course, never included himself among those at fault.

When I met James, he had about $3000 (about $16,000 in today’s money) invested in a company called Bowmar. “In 1971, Indiana-based Bowmar Instruments introduced the first hand-held LED (Light Emitting Diode) calculator. The “Bowmar Brain” was a huge success. Other manufacturers developed cheaper calculators, and when the company could no longer compete, it went bankrupt in 1976.” As Bowmar’s share price sank, James refused to acknowledge the company was crashing and he needed to sell out to minimize his losses. His denial of the reality of Bowmar’s decline—he kept telling me “it will go back up…then I’ll sell…”—caused him to ride Bowmar right down to the bottom. And then he got mad. He got mad at Bowmar for crashing, he got mad at the stock market, and he got mad at me for being right…so much so that when, a few years later, I suggested he buy a new stock called Redken, he got mad all over again and refused to invest a penny. Redken, of course, went on to be a huge success in its market.

The narcissist can sink himself into denial and hold fast to it, no matter how much reality may attempt to batter him. When James and I divorced, I retained possession the family home for a few years (and had to make the mortgage payments), after which we were supposed to sell it. I called in a real estate agent who had worked my neighbourhood for many years and asked her to get a comprehensive report of sales in my neighbourhood against which we could compare my house in order to set a selling price. Considering the age, condition and location of the house, she set the optimum selling price at $215,000, telling me to be prepared to accept offers at $200,000. But when I tried to get James to sign the sales authorization papers, he refused. He wanted to sell the house for $279,000, significantly more than the house was worth, and some $60,000 more than the best house on the street had sold for! And ours was far from the best house on the street.

I couldn’t imagine why he was fixating on this figure and eventually had to drag him back to court to get a judge to set a price and authorize the sale. I took my agent with me and she carefully explained to the judge why she had recommended her price and presented charts and other research of the sales of similar homes in my area over the previous year. When it came James’ turn to speak, he had no supporters, no presentation, no statistics. What he had was this: He wanted to by a house in Colorado, where he was currently living. He needed $90,000 cash to buy the house free and clear. So, he did calculations determining how much he would have to sell the California house for and, after taxes, commissions, paying off the old mortgage and splitting the proceeds with me, have that $90K left over. And the figure the house needed to sell for, in order for James to realize his $90K profit, was $279K.

He was in complete denial of the reality of the property market and sales. He was livid with the judge when he set the listing price at $215K and ordered we accept any offer of $200K or more. He was incandescent with fury when the judge stuck him with my lawyer’s bill and court costs for the hearing, saying if he had been reasonable, the hearing would never have been necessary. He fully expected the judge to side with him despite our research and the figures my estate agent had presented (and all of this had been presented to James before we decided to go to court—he simply denied their veracity). Interestingly, after being on the market for seven months at $279K and not a single showing, when the house was reduced to $215K it sold for $200K within a month.

James saw himself as a victim—he was my victim in the divorce, the victim of sandbaggers and backstabbers at work, the victim of the police who gave him citations for doing things (like speeding, running red lights, driving on the shoulder during commute traffic) that he considered harmless—speeding was OK because he was “in control”; blowing a red light was ok because he “looked and no traffic was coming”; driving the shoulder was OK because there was plenty of room and why should he wait with all those other morons who weren’t smart enough to take an opportunity when it presented? He was the victim of my “rapacious attorney” for taking him to court every month and sticking him with her bills—even though we only took him to court when he was in violation of court orders for things like support and maintenance costs for the house. He simply could not face that the trouble that were costing him so much money were of his own doing. So, instead of making his support payments on time, instead of paying half the bill to fix the furnace and the roof, instead of giving me half of the joint tax return, he viewed the situation as him being victimized by a greedy ex-wife, her voracious attorney and biased judges. Had he not been mired so deeply in denial he would have seen that on-time payments of both support and household repairs and refraining from forging my signature on a government check would have kept him out of court and my attorney’s fingers out of his wallet. He was so invested in his victimhood that he spent four years creating situation after situation that forced me to drag him back to court for redress...and every one cost him money and left him feeling further victimized.

My mother was no less in denial about most aspects of her life. When I was about 10, she told my father that she was going to start “seeing other men,” and that she might bring some of them home with her…and if he didn’t like it, he could leave. This was the 1950s and she was in complete denial about the moral strictures of the day. She didn’t need to adhere to a moral code she didn’t like (although the rest of us damn sure had to!). One of the clearest examples of her denial was how she treated my growing, developing body. As my breasts grew and my height increased, instead of taking me shopping to buy me appropriate undergarments and school clothes, she took my little girl dresses (size 12 or so) and let the seams out as far as they could go, let the hems down and even stitched a band of lace to the bottom of the dresses to lengthen them. I just thought she was cheap, but my stepmother remarked that she was doing an awful lot of work just to be cheap—it was her opinion that I was becoming competition for male attention and by keeping me looking like a little girl, NM could not only deny her own advancing age, but keep me a child and not a rival. In context of the way she lived and thought, it made perfect sense.

Denial is always self serving. There are a lot of people in America who are unwilling to admit even to themselves that they are racist. Rather than admit, for example, that they simply do not want what they secretly consider to be a sub-human to dictate to them as the ruler of their country, they will come out with incredibly outlandish ways to try to discredit the black guy in the Oval Office and get him evicted, without dirtying their reputations by revealing their closet racism. Chief among these are the “birthers,” those who refuse, no matter what kind of evidence is presented, to believe that Obama is a natural born American citizen. His birth certificate was released from the state archives of Hawaii—and they called it a forgery. The governor, who was personally acquainted with Obama’s parents at the time of his birth, has attested personal knowledge of the man’s birth in Hawaii—they refuse to believe him. Not even the fine point of law—the technical meaning of “natural born”—sways them from their denial (there are two kinds of citizens—natural born and naturalized; if either one of your parents is a US citizen at the time of your birth, it does not matter where in the world you are born, you are a “natural born” US citizen). Their denial of the incontrovertible facts of Obama’s citizenship serves them—it gives them hope that they can remove this person from the presidency and allows them to avoid accepting that their leader is a man of what they secretly consider to be a member of an inferior race.

Denial is a peculiar thing but it always serves the denier. My daughter, despite authentication from half a dozen people in the family who were—or became—aware of my mother’s plot to steal my children and give them to her brother for adoption, has consistently refused to believe the truth. NM told her that I had abandoned her, that I didn’t want her anymore and as proof, cited that I did not make any attempt to contact her for the whole eight years she was gone. No amount of logic or proof to the contrary has swayed my daughter from believing that despite knowing that I didn’t know where she was, despite a large kraft envelope of cards and letters I sent to her and her brother over the years (in care of my grandmother), despite my father, my uncle, and even my grandparents telling her I did not abandon her and that I had made regular attempts to locate her and they blocked me.

How did this denial serve her? It gave her a safe target for her anger: if she got mad at NM or some other family member, they might reject her but since she believed I had already done so, there was nothing to lose. By siding with NM and becoming virtually her only ally, she became NM’s new Golden Child. When she needed a fat loan for a down payment on her first house, Dear Daughter approached her grandmother (who was flush with cash inherited from her own parents) for a loan. Several years later, when NM wrote her will, she told DD that I was being written out of it in her favour, a fact DD could not wait to impart to me over the phone.

“Do you think that’s fair?” I asked.

I could hear the dismissive indifference in her voice, “Well, you and Grammi never got along, anyway.”

Not only was she in denial about whether or not it was fair for my mother to disinherit me in her favour, she saw nothing at all wrong with her two brothers being disinherited right along beside me. Her denial netted her a fortune…literally…and then she lied to her brothers about it, saying Grammi had left the money to all three of them but she was to administer it.

Like the trusting idiot I can be, I believed that foreshadowed her intent to split the money with her brothers. Since this is what I would have done in my own will—split my estate evenly among my kids—I was somewhat mollified at the money having gone to her. If she was sharing it her brothers, then I could go along with that. But it didn’t work out that way—when my oldest son, who was disabled, approached her for the money to buy a car, she refused because she had already spent it all buying herself a new house—a McMansion in a neighbouring town, a huge overgrown monstrosity of a place for her family of three (she had empty rooms that she had no purpose for!). And when asked why, she denied any intent to share with her brothers—it was her money and she could do what she wanted with it.

Denial is at the absolute core of narcissism. Without the ability to deny one’s own feelings of inadequacy and shame, without the ability to deny how one’s self-serving actions affect others, without the ability to deny that one is part of a whole rather than an isolated entity, narcissism is simply not possible. When you deal in reality you hear the note of hurt in another’s voice and respond to it viscerally, you wince with another’s pain—even today I cannot watch my husband inject his insulin without feeling a little twinge in my belly as the needle pierces his flesh, and he has been a diabetic for a decade.

Denial is at the heart of every narcissist, it is at the centre of their being, it is what allows them to live conscience-free, to truly believe in their superiority over us lesser mortals, to be blameless in all things. Without denial, narcissists simply cannot exist.

Next up: Selective memory

Moving Day

At first she hadn’t liked the little room above the bar, but it didn’t take long to discern the advantages. Mother slept downstairs, in the rooms behind the bar, and because the bar was open until two in the morning, Mother was still sound asleep when she slipped into the makeshift kitchen for a quick breakfast and scrounged something to take to school for lunch. The downside, of course, was that Mother was there when she got home from school in the afternoon, but ordinarily she could quickly escape upstairs with the magic word: “homework.”

The room was tiny, dingy, shabby, and sparsely furnished. When they moved from the little flat, Mother had brought all the furniture, but she had crammed everything except the cot and a small chest of drawers into what was meant to be a storeroom behind the bar, and moved into the space herself. The bar had a sink and toilet for patrons, so Mother only climbed the steep, rickety wooden stairs that clung precariously to the outside of the weathered old building when she wanted to use the shower upstairs. It had turned out to be a heavenly arrangement, for although she spent most of her time alone, without even a television or radio, it was blessedly silent and solitary. She had her books and even though the room had no heat and it could get a bit chilly, being only half a block from the ocean and its brisk winter breezes, she could fold the blankets in half and snuggle beneath them to read. It was the most relaxed she had been in a long while.

OK, the noise from the bar downstairs was sometimes a bit loud and annoying, but it kept Mother well occupied, and that made the noise almost welcome. She stayed “out of sight, out of mind,” as her Grandpa liked to say. She would show up punctually at suppertime and make her way into the short-order kitchen to partake of whatever Mother had cooked up as the “Daily Special” for her customers, wash the accumulated pile of dishes, then unobtrusively melt out the door and back up the stairs. It was a peaceful time and she had come to almost look forward to the end of school each day, rather than to dread it.

Spring was in the air, the sharp nip of winter beginning to give way to warmer days, even while the mornings were still quite frigid. It was difficult to choose clothes appropriately, for that which was warm enough to withstand the chill ocean blasts at 7 am while standing on a street corner awaiting the school bus, was sweltering hot by midday, and heat stroke-inducing by afternoon. Her wardrobe was spare, but adequate, her thin cotton shift dresses working well in a layered arrangement to provide warmth in the morning and an armload of clothing to drag about in the afternoons. It could be a bit awkward, trying to carry an armload of books and another armful of jackets and jerseys, but she made it work. She needed the clothes for warmth, the books to while away the long, blessedly solitary and silent evenings, and having always been something of an outsider, she was inured to the sometimes odd looks she got from her peers as she carried around what looked to be the better part of her closet.

It was Friday, the Friday before Easter Vacation. She had gone to school chilly this morning so as to free her hands up to carry extra books on the way home. She had secured permission to visit the public library on the way home from school by saying she had to do a book report over the holiday and the book she needed as not in the school library. Not entirely untrue, as she had intentionally selected a book that was too new to be carried in the school library, her actual mission being to have access to the public library’s greater selection and bring home books from both libraries in sufficient quantity to get her through the week-long holiday. She struggled to carry the tall stacks of hardbound volumes from the bus stop to the stairs, reckoning she would have to make two trips to get them all to her room.

Her first inkling that something was wrong was that the bar was silent and the doors were closed. The bar always open in the afternoon and never, ever closed on a Friday…Friday was payday for a lot of folks and Mother wanted them to cash their pay checks in her bar and spend the proceeds before they went home. The sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach told her something was wrong.

She put the books in two piles at the foot of the steps and climbed the swaying stairs two at a time. Her key still fit the lock to the hallway…it still fit the lock to her room…but her sigh of relief was premature, for when the opened the door, the room was bare. Everything was gone, the empty closet door gaping open, even the thin, faded curtains gone. She felt tears prickle the back of her nose as her breath came in short, sharp little gasps.

“You’re 16, you’re not a baby” she chided herself as she raced down the stairs and headed for the back of the bar. “Maybe something awful has happened and Mother needs help…”

But her mad dash through the alleyway ended at the storeroom door, padlocked as usual, with nothing appearing to be amiss. Except the curtain over the window in the door was askew and she could see that Mother’s quarters were also empty. Her stomach squeezed tightly and she gasped for breath. What on earth had happened? Mother, she who could pinch a penny until Lincoln screamed, would never close the bar on a payday unless something awful had happened, would she? Surely, if something had been planned for today, she would have been told before she left for school today, right? She hurried back to the front of the building and cupped her hands over the glass, trying to see inside. It was dark, but as far as she could tell, things looked neat and normal…and empty.

Puzzled, and growing more alarmed by the minute, she went to the side of the building and sat down on the steps. The clock on the parking lot entrance across the street gave the time as 3:30…she would ponder her options until 4:00 before taking any kind of action.

And then what? she asked herself. She had no money, not even a dime for the phone. She wasn’t allowed to have money except for her bus fare and six cents for milk doled out to her daily. And even if she did have money, who would she call? The whole family, except for her father, lived more than a thousand miles away. And her father? Would he help her? Yeah, he would, but calling him would just open up a whole new set of conflicts between the two of them, and she had seen the inside of the juvenile court enough times. She had no intention of going back.

Four o’clock. Still no word from her mother. She had walked around the building again, thinking that maybe, in her initial panic, she had missed the note that Mother must have left for her. Maybe the note had been blown away by the brisk wind…or stolen by some prankster? A few bar patrons came by, puzzling at the locked doors, but she could not answer their queries as to when the place would open and refused to respond to their less-than-proper queries otherwise. By five o’clock tears had begun to leak from her eyes, despite her efforts to withhold them, and she began changing her mind’s occupation from where was her mother to where was she going to spend the night. Upstairs, in an unfurnished room with no bed, no blankets, no heat? Definitely better than sitting outside in the cold. Her stomach rumbled. It was nearing time for dinner, and she was thirsty and needed to use the bathroom, but if she ran upstairs, even for a minute…well, what if her mother drove by and she wasn’t there? She squeezed her muscles, wrapped her arms around herself, patted her feet, and waited, wiping her cheeks on her shoulder every few minutes for the tears simply would not stop flowing.

As dusk began to fall and she could no longer read the clock across the street, the wind from the ocean picked up. She curled herself into a ball, huddled against the side of the building, and pulled her skirt down over her bare, goose-fleshed calves. Her hands were tucked up into her armpits for warmth and she had tried to construct a little wall with the books to deflect the brunt of the ocean wind, but to no avail. She was shivering in earnest now, hungry, and thirsty…but still did not know quite what to do. “I’ll wait until dark,” she promised herself, “Then I’ll go upstairs because it isn’t safe to sit out here after dark…”

Wiping her cheek against her shoulder and turning her face to the wall, she sighed and closed her eyes. Was she an orphan? Had someone killed or kidnapped her mother? What about her stepfather? Where was he? Should she go to one of the neighbouring bars and beg a coin or two to call her father? What was she going to do if her mother never came back?

Her ruminations were interrupted by the blare of a car horn. “Hey,” bellowed a familiar voice, “Miss Priss! Cut the daydreaming and get your ass into the car. I don’t have all night…”

Mother!

She leapt up, scooped up the books into a single precarious armload, and bolted for the car. Without a word, she took the passenger seat, the books spilling from her arms onto the floor and the seat space between them, causing her mother to give her a glaring look in the waning light. One look at her tear-stained face and Mother’s lip curled with disgust as she rolled her eyes skyward.

“Oh, Christ, bawling again. What is it with you, anyway?”

“I didn’t know where you were,” she said, a little catch in her voice.

“And so you were sitting out there on the steps bawling for everyone who came by? For Chrissakes, you have more attention-getting devices than Carter has little liver pills. You knew I’d be here eventually, didn’t you?”

She was silent a moment, pondering the consequences of either possible answer.

“Well?” her mother repeated, a menacing note having crept into her voice. “Didn’t you?”

She nodded her head quickly in assent, prepared to hear yet again the litany of her never-ending sins over the past sixteen years…which was seldom accompanied with slaps, smacks or punches, making it an infinitely preferable form of punishment.

“Where are we going?” she asked, hoping to put off the inevitable just a few moments longer.

“Home,” her mother said, and put the car in gear. “We moved.”

Lost and Alone

She was confused.

Obediently, she huddled silently under the scratchy woollen blanket, breathing shallowly through her mouth so she didn’t have to smell the musty stink of the itchy thing. The muffled sound of giggling filtered through the wads of wool over her head, and the frame of the little trailerhouse jiggled with all but the slightest of movements. She schooled herself to lie very, very still so that she would be almost invisible.

She was drifting off, caught in that amorphous state between waking and sleeping, when a sharp jolt brought her unconsciously to a sitting position. The blanket fell from her head just as she heard a man’s shouting and a woman’s screaming. It was dim in the little trailerhouse, dimly lit and everything seemed a kind of green colour. She thought she saw Mommy at the other end of the trailer, sitting on a bed, wearing her bra. Who was the man in the white undershirt beside her? Why was Daddy wearing his lumberjack jacket indoors and why was he shouting? What was he saying? She could hear his voice but she couldn’t understand his words.

She was scared. Mommy had told her to be very quiet, so nobody would even know she was there, but she was scared. Unbidden, her mouth opened into a little round “O” and a wail welled up from someplace below her belly button and emerged fully formed and in full voice. The activity at the other end of the trailer came to an abrupt halt and three pairs of eyes were instantly fastened upon her.

Cacophony reigned. Mommy was screaming at her to shut up, the strange man was asking who the hell was she, and Daddy was cursing loudly. He took the two strides necessary to make it to the bed on which she was howling, scooped her up itchy blanket and all, and without a further word, strode out of the stuffy little trailer and into the crisp night. Over his shoulder she could see the little green trailerhouse in the pool of white flowing from the yardlight at the top of the splintery wooden pole. She didn’t recognize the place at all.

“Where are we, Daddy?” she asked, twisting around to see his face set in an uncharacteristically grim visage. “Where is this place?”

Daddy pressed her head down to his shoulder and threw the blanket over her so her vision was blocked and Mommy’s shrieks from the trailerhouse were silenced. “Hell,” she thought she heard him say.

…*… …*… …*…

She didn’t want to take a nap. She wanted to go home. She wanted Dolly. She wanted her Daddy. She even wanted her Mommy. But she did not want to take a nap.

The bed sheets were stiff and scratchy and the bed was much too big. The blankets were heavy and smelled like camphor. The pillow was hard and lumpy. The bed was tucked so tight that she could barely move beneath the covers. She was wearing only her panties and undershirt and she felt funny trying to sleep without her pajamas. And she wasn’t sleepy, anyway. She didn’t like this place and she wanted to go home.

The door cracked open and The Lady looked in on her again. “Poor little mite,” The Lady would say, and then quietly close the door. The Lady was nice, she guessed. She gave her cookies and milk in the middle of the day…between meals!…and told her it was not her fault and that everything would work out just fine. What wasn’t her fault? And what was everything? And where was her Mommy? And her Daddy? Where was Baby? She wanted to cry, but The Lady had said “tears are not necessary, dear,” and then rushed her off to this unwanted nap. Where were her clothes? She felt especially vulnerable without her clothes. Where were her shoes? How could she find her way home if she had to walk barefoot? There were stickers in the dirt and the tar road could get awful hot when you didn’t have shoes on.

She was too hot. She struggled with the tightly tucked blankets until she could take one leg out from under the covers. She sighed and tried closing her eyes, but the silhouette of The Lady intruded as soon as her eyes closed. She smelled like powder and old perfume and wore her steel-coloured hair in a tight bun at the back of her neck. She wondered if it hurt to pull your hair back that tight. Restlessly, she sighed again and tried to roll over, but thought better of it. What if she got in trouble for messing up the bed? What if she got in trouble for not being under the covers? She quickly tucked her leg back under and turned on her side, curling into a little ball. She began humming snatches of songs that she remembered from somewhere and, arms crossed over her chest and legs tightly drawn up, began rocking herself. She began to feel calmer, less frightened, even less aware.

When had she fallen asleep? Someone was calling her name and shaking her firmly. She didn’t want to stop humming and rocking. It felt good, curled into a warm little ball like this. But the intrusion would not stop and finally she opened her eyes. The Lady was standing beside the bed, her arms crossed over her chest like Mommy did when she was mad, but a different expression on her face. Someone was sitting on the bed, stroking the damp sweaty hair back from her face. Nana!

“Nana!” she cried, unfolding her arms and throwing them around her grandmother. “Nana! You came for me!” it was a statement more than a question. She saw a look pass between Nana and The Lady, a look she didn’t understand, and then The Lady nodded, ever so slightly.

“Yes, sweetie,” Nana said, and she saw that Nana had been crying. “I’ve come for you. Let’s get you dressed and we’ll go home.” Her heart squeezed at that. She had been hoping to go to Nana’s house, but at least she would be away from here. The Lady was nice, but she was afraid in this big, muted, oppressively clean house with all the dark curtains drawn. There was nothing she could do or touch without the risk of messing something up, and she had no idea what the rules for living here were.

“Why are you crying, Nana?” she asked as she settled into the front seat of Nana’s new car. It still smelled new. It was a funny colour of pink, almost skin colour, and it had soft, velvety seats in a kind of ribbed tan fabric…almost like her corduroy pants, but much thicker and deeper. The soft fabric felt good on her bruised legs. “Did something happen to make you cry?”

“I’m just very happy I found you, dear,” she said. “Gramma Janssen called me early this morning and I have been trying to find you ever since.”

“Was I lost?” she asked, not understanding. She wasn’t even sure she remembered how she got to The Lady’s house…most of today was actually kind of blurry in her memory.

“You could say that, sweetie,” Nana said, her nose and eyes turning suspiciously red again.

“How did I get lost?” she asked. She was genuinely puzzled. She remembered sitting for a very long time in a strange room full of people who ignored her, sitting on a hard wooden chair, waiting for Mommy to come back, and somehow she ended up at The Lady’s house. So she did get lost, but she wasn’t sure how it happened. “Where’s Mommy?”

Nana didn’t answer her. Instead, she seemed to bite the inside of her lips and her nose turned redder. She was making Nana cry! What was wrong? Her stomach rolled. Was she going to get into trouble now?

She ran her hand over the velvety ribs of the car’s upholstery. The car still had that brand new smell, and, like all of Nana’s cars, it had the leather armrest that folded down and was the perfect height for her to sit on and be able to see the sights as they drove along. She rose up on her knees to pull down open the armrest and noticed they were almost to Nana’s house. “This is your house, Nana!” she exclaimed. “Where’s Mommy?”

Nana turned into the driveway and drew the car to a stop near the back door. She was suddenly miserable, afraid, and her stomach turned over. “Nana!” she cried. “Nana, I’m sick!” and before she could even attempt to wrench the heavy door open, she leaned slightly forward and vomited all over Nana’s new car.

She nearly fainted with fright. Nana looked at her with tears in her eyes as she instinctively flinched away, throwing up one hand to ward off the anticipated blow. “I’m sorry, Nana”’ she cried out. “I didn’t mean to! I didn’t do it on purpose! I’m sorry!”

Nana was crying openly as she reached across the seat and pulled her sweaty, vomit-covered little body into her arms. “I know, baby,” Nana soothed, rocking her gently, “I know you didn’t. Let’s get Grandpa to come out and clean up the car and you and I will go inside and clean you up, OK?”

She nodded slowly, clinging to Nana desperately as her sobs quieted into little hiccups. “Where’s Mommy?” she asked in a tiny voice. “Mommy will spank me for messing up your car.”

“Let’s forget about Mommy for now, shall we?” Nana asked, easing the car door open and slipping out of the car without letting her go. “How about you just be Nana and Grandpa’s little girl for a while?”

It ain't just a hobo...

“My word!” The lady said, bending over to envelop her in a fetid cloud. “Aren’t you Georgia Decker’s girl?” The lady’s voice didn’t exactly sound friendly, and her breath was awful!

“Look here, Madge,” she warbled to an unbelievably large lady wearing a painful shade of lime green. “Look! Isn’t this Georgia Decker’s girl?” The old lady looked back to her and, capturing her chin in her cold, bony hand, she bent way down to peer sharply into the upturned little face.

Madge waddled up and, after a moment’s perusal, nodded in agreement. “Where’s your mother, girl?” the one called Madge demanded, looking around with intent interest.

She wriggled uncomfortably on the hard chair and shrugged, wishing Nana would get done trying on her slacks and come rescue her.

“You don’t know where your mother is?” Madge asked. “Did she leave you alone here?” Turning to her thin companion, Madge said behind her hand, “That girl abandoned her before, you know. Took her into the city and dumped her in the Child Welfare offices, signed papers to have her adopted, and walked right out!”

The skinny woman’s eyes were wide with incredulity, a bony hand pressed to her thin bosom. “You don’t say!”

Madge nodded her gray curls confidentially. “She always was a bit wild, that Georgia, sneaking out at night and making a spectacle of herself.” She shook her head in rhythm with her clucking tongue. “And running off to get married to that Janssen boy and having those babies didn’t settle her down one bit! Why, I heard her husband caught her red-handed…”

“Good morning, ladies,” a familiar voice interrupted the gossiping. Nana!

The thin one started suddenly, then turned with a smile on her lips that didn’t reach her eyes. “Why, Blanche Decker!” she cried. “How nice to see you! We were just talking about you! Isn’t this your granddaughter here?”

Nana nodded with the same cold pretence of a smile on her face. “One of them,” Nana said, her voice very cool. “I have two, you know.”

“Of course,” said the skinny lady. “But this is Georgia’s child, if I’m not mistaken, not Gerald’s. Is she back in town, then?” The woman’s dark eyes glittered like sharp little shards of obsidian.

Nana smiled very sweetly…too sweetly…and shook her head. “No, she’s out of town and was kind enough to let us keep our darling grandchild with us. Such a wonderful cure for the empty nest, now that Pete has gone off to Annapolis.”

The skinny woman’s face suffused with colour, remembering how her own son had competed for the coveted appointment but lost to Pete Decker. “How wonderful for you,” she smiled again. “You should join us for canasta some Thursday afternoon and we can all catch up, isn’t that right, Madge?” She turned to her companion, nodding.

Ever gracious, Nana gently declined the invitation. “I’m sorry, but I don’t want to miss any time with my precious grandbaby,” she smiled back at them. “I’m sure you’ll understand when you have your own.” With that, Nana bent down and lifted her up from the hard chair, balanced her on one hip, and headed for the cashier to pay for her slacks.

“Evil-minded old cows,” Nana muttered under her breath, placing the slacks on the counter and withdrawing her wallet from her purse. “You just don’t pay any attention to them, ok?”

She looked up and realized Nana was speaking to her and solemnly nodded her head. She was not in the habit of disobeying adults.

The cashier was a friend of Nana’s and because there were no other customers, they lingered and chatted about Nana’s passion, gardening. Restless, she wriggled to get down and Nana obliged, telling her to stay close. She could see Madge and her skinny friend at the hat counter, fussing with the veiling on the smart little hats and trying them on their dowdy, frizzy curls. Even at three years old she could see the fashionable hats and the frumpy ladies were just not meant for each other. “You know, we used to cross the street to avoid having to pass her on the sidewalk,” the skinny lady was saying. “That kind of taint can rub off on a person!”

Madge nodded, the wattle under her chin flapping back and forth, the pale loose skin on the backs of her arms swaying as she lifted a tiny red satin confection trimmed with red veiling and glossy ceramic cherries atop her head. “Do tell,” Madge said, turning this way and that to admire herself in the mirror, apparently unaware that the bright colour of the hat gave her ruddy complexion a somewhat boiled look. “I certainly hope she has not influenced the other young girls in town with her wild ways!”

The skinny lady snatched the offending chapeau off Madge’s head and handed her something a bit more subdued in a dark blue straw. “Well, no one in town will have anything to do with her, and if her father wasn’t the president of the Lion’s Club and a member in good standing of the Elk Lodge and a deacon at Hilltop Lutheran, I doubt anyone would talk to any of the Deckers, either. That girl is just a disgrace, I tell you! It’s scandalous the way she ran off like that!”

“And spiteful! Just spiteful!” Madge chimed in. “Emily Johnston…her son is a friend of Eddie’s…told me that Georgia didn’t even tell that poor child’s father that she had dumped the child off at the Adoption Bureau! One of the girls overheard it on the party line and told Pansy Janssen, and she called Blanche, who went and got the poor little thing.”

“Why didn’t Pansy go?” the skinny lady asked, head cocked to one side to admire the reflection of a fussy little white straw wreathed in navy felt-dotted veiling perched precariously on top of her head.

Madge shrugged. “You know those Hill People…it probably wasn’t her day to go to town or she had some chickens to pluck or something. I can’t believe Georgia lived out there all that time without running water or anything! I can certainly see why she wanted to leave, but she went about it in the wrong way.”

“Very wrong,” the thin woman sniffed, shaking her grey curls and putting down the hat. “She made her bed when she ran off with Eddie Janssen, now she should have to lie in it!”

“Well,” Madge inclined her head towards the child who was silently examining the cherries on the red satin hat, “Her mother seems to be getting away with it. I hope for the little girl’s sake that the blood doesn’t run true.” She sucked her teeth in a clucking, “for shame” kind of sound. “It would be so tragic if poor Blanche were to have both a daughter and a granddaughter branded the town tramp.”

“Tragic,” the other woman agreed, shaking her head in sympathy. “Poor Blanche!”

“Poor Blanche what?” came Nana’s voice from behind them. Abandoning her examination of the scarlet hat, she ran to Nana’s side and slipped her soft, plump little hand into Nana’s larger, work-roughened one.

“Oh, we were just commiserating at having your time taken up with a little one again, so that you can’t join us for cards or anything,” the thin woman improvised, her neck reddening. “Do call us when you can get away!” she said with a toothy smile, then turned and hurried away, Madge’s lime green bulk waddling after her.

“Gossipy old biddies,” Nana said, watching their departure. She looked down and smiled. “Let’s go down to the Dairy Queen and get some ice cream, then surprise Grandpa at the shop, shall we?”

“Ice cream!” she crowed, delighted. “Banilla!”

Nana nodded. “Vanilla it is.”

Sitting in the car a few minutes later, carefully keeping her eyes away from the telltale stain on the carpet on the passenger side, she watched the pedestrians strolling by the storefronts. She fixed her eyes on one woman who was crossing the street in mid-block. Quickly, tensely, she looked to the direction from whence the woman had come, expecting to see Mommy. Seeing only strangers, she heaved a gusty sigh of relief, attracting Nana’s attention.

“Goodness,” Nana smiled. “That was quite the sigh. What was that all about?”

She looked up at her grandmother, puzzlement on her pink-cheeked little face. “Nana,” she queried. “What’s a ‘town tramp’?”