Ta-da! The cake!

Goodbye, Jessica

We really did it this time. Kiddo took Jessica into a Mexican Restaurant, and when it was time to go, she was gone. It was a fast-food kind of place, where you order you food at the counter and then take a tray to your table. We searched everywhere, even pulling out the trash cans and poking around. We left a sketch of her and my phone number with the staff, but I don't have much hope. It's a sad night here in central Illinois.

How could we let this happen?

I want this as a poster . . .

To put on my front door:

I love Doonesbury. It's the only comic strip I read. And this just so suits me.

Talking to strawberries

Tomorrow is the Cub Scout Banquet, and there is a father-son cake decorating contest. the guys are making a 14-inch round cake, with a Chinese checker board for decoration. The cake is French Vanilla, with fresh strawberries in between the layers, and M&Ms for checkers. I am NOT allowed to help, only to supervise. So I am hanging out in the office, fooling around on the computer and trying to stay out of the way.



Here are some of the conversations:

Ted: Oh, shit! Help! Help! Oh, oh man! ERIN! Help! HELP! Erin, really, come out here! HELP ME NOW!
Me: What's wrong, honey?
Ted: Oh, man! There's a big f'ing hole in this cake!
Me: Where?
Ted: Oh, never mind, I'll just stuff some strawberries in it. And frosting! Look! Frosting fixes everything!
Me: Yeah, frosting is just like Spackle.


Ted: Fuck! Fuck! You little shit, you fucking piece of shit!
Me: Ted! Cut that out!
Ted: It's OK, I bet everybody swears at their cake.

Ted: Stupid strawberry! I'll fix you! (apparently he eats the strawberry.)
Kiddo: What happened to the strawberry?
Ted: It's being punished, in my stomach. That's what it gets for not co-operating.

The fun part is figuring out how to make the Chinese checker board. It's 2 overlapping equilateral triangles, like a star of David. So how do you make the equilateral triangles? Well, here's what does not work:

• You can't draw them freehand.
• You can't use the steel yardstick you have been using on your train layout.
• You can't stand there and cuss at them, hoping they will get their shit together and become a star.

What do you do? You turn to Mom, who understands how to apply A^2 + b^2 = c^2.

Then you decide Mom's paper pattern doesn't work, scrap everything, break out the steel yardstick, and try to draw the damn things freehand, while attempting to cuss the cake into submission.

So I can sleep tonight

I have to get this out, so I will be able to sleep tonight.

My mother does not love me.

It dawned on me earlier today, as I was driving to work. (And yes, I've been reading more about narcissism lately.) She really doesn't love me. She does not act the way a loving mother acts. She never has.

This is a weird feeling. In a way, it's sort of liberating. I mean, look, I'm not crazy. I always sort of knew this, but I didn't really accept it because, well, who wants to accept a shitty thing like, My mother does not love me. And then, she always said she loved me. And she did a lot of surface stuff that seemed like stuff a loving mother would do. And mothers are supposed to love their daughters, for goodness sake. Who would have ever thought that an ordinary suburban mother who quit work to raise an adopted child, would provide the child with a clean pretty house and clean pretty clothes and and private school, would somehow fail to provide the child with love? It just makes no sense.

But there it is. She used me for her own purposes. She showed me off, and showed off what a great mother she was, but she never loved me. I was just a thing to show off. A possession. An object. I always knew it, and now I have my evidence. Narcissists use people. It's just what they do. I always knew it, and I was not crazy or deluded or selfishly looking after my own issues. I knew it, and I was right.

In a way, its a good thing to know that not only am I not nuts, I am also not character disordered, ungrateful, or hateful. I am not deficient in any daughterly virtue. There is absolutely nothing I can do to change the fact. The woman does not love me. She never has, and never will. She is unable.

She is the one who is deficient, not I.

It's her problem, her issue, her shame. It is she who is the pathetic, lazy, cowardly, selfish individual living in a fantasy world, not I. I bust my ass in the real world, attempting to make as real and genuine a life as I humanly can. I am not deluded in thinking that I am an honest and genuine person. She is the deluded one, thinking she is better than everyone else.

So it's kind of liberating, knowing that I am not nuts and I am not wrong, and there really is nothing I can do to make her love me, so now I can stop trying.

And it's kind of sad, too, knowing that, no matter what I do, my mother will never really love me. So depressing to think that she has made such an emotional cripple of herself, she will never be able to love her own child. She will never feel for me what I feel for my son. There is nothing left to try, to hope, or to dream. Nothing.

You just can't get love out of an empty shell.

So this is what's happening

This struck me:

For one thing, narcissists don't abuse anyone they fear retribution from. They typically go to great lengths to make a lover totally dependent on them, financially and emotionaly, isolating the victim from his or her family and former friends before the narcissist's mask comes off and the abuse begins. Count on it: narcissists are brave enough to abuse only someone they already have over a barrel.

This explains why, the first time I raised my arm to protect myself, the hitting and slapping abuse stopped, and manipulation became her main tool.

The narcissist Sam Vaknin says the same, though in an abstract way:

I compared Narcissistic Supply to drugs because of the almost involuntary and always-unrestrained nature of the pursuit involved in securing it. ...The narcissist rates people around him according to whether they can provide him with Narcissistic Supply or not. As far as the narcissist is concerned, those who fail this simple test do not exist. They are two-dimensional cartoon figures. Their feelings, needs and fears are of no interest or importance.

This explains the weird way she has been acting lately. She does not even speak to me unless she has to, usually to tell me to do something. Like, yesterday, she called me up to tell me that a family friend has just been diagnosed with cancer, and then she proceeded to tell me that I should send a card and I should call her and when I should do these things. Then she hung on the phone long enough to deliver a few more barbs, to ask me what I had been doing and then pointedly ignore all my news of work, home school, the science fair, etc. Finally she rung off with a simpery remark about how I probably had SO many other, better things to do than talk to her. I was left holding the phone and thinking, "Well, that was weird." But now I get it. She has apparently figured out that I am not going to play into her shit any more, and so now she has given up even the pretext that I have any inherent value as a person. I always suspectd that I did not matter to her. Now I guess I have my proof.

It's about control

I have been reading a lot of Anna Valerious over at Narcissists Suck. I agree with a lot of what she has written, except that I can't really relate to her experiences with her own mother because that woman is so different form my own narcissistic mom. Her mother was outwardly, overtly cruel. She was sadistic and not afraid to admit that to herself. Mother Valerious was out to hurt people. She got a thrill out of it.

My Mom, OTOH, is just the opposite. She is not, I think, out to really hurt any one per se. She really does not care one way or the other. Having no apparent genuine feelings or inner life, she is utterly unable to comprehend that other people do have feelings. Even if she did get that, she would not care. The only thing she wants, as far as I can tell, is to control people, to make them do what she wants. It doesn't seem to really matter what the outcome is half the time; she just wants to make people do stuff. Maybe she wants everybody to do her bidding so she can feel special, or maybe she is trying to establish her "specialness" in order to get her way. It's probably a chicken-and-egg thing by now.

This is how it works: Mom wants something. And, it never seems like what she says she wants is that big a deal, until you look at it carefully. For example, she says she wants to take Ted and me out to lunch. That seems nice. It seems altruistic. It would not take a rocket scientist to figure out that it is a way to get us to pay attention to her. But then, you have to start thinking of the hidden costs of this lunch. Say she wants to go out to lunch after church. This will involve a pokey-slow restaurant with a big crowd. It will take up most of the afternoon. Then there will be an invitation to come to her house, which will be hard to refuse since she did spring for lunch. There go a couple more hours. When it's time to leave, she will stonewall us with "one more thing," and then "one more thing" so that from the time I tell Kiddo to put his shoes on, to the time we leave, can be anything from an hour to two hours, depending. As soon as it's time to go, Mom starts guilt tripping us, talking about how afraid she is of her imaginary prowlers. Then she wants Ted to change some light bulbs, check the basement for prowlers (prowlers are the new boogie-man), and so on. Once we get out of the house, it takes more than an hour for us to drive home. Ted gets up early for work, and has to be in bed by 9 pm at the latest. So that is our entire Sunday, shot to hell.

Or, since we are on the subject of lunch, let's say I need her to watch my son for an afternoon while I work. I don't do this too often, since it is an hour or more out of the way, no matter where I work. In order to be dressed and on the floor at 4 pm, I need to leave her house by 2:30 AT THE LATEST. If I want to get to Mom's house by, say, 1 pm, I have to leave my home by 11: 30. All the lessons for the day have to be done, because Mom will not so much as help Kiddo finish a work sheet. I could take him to a sitter in my neighborhood for those couple of hours until Ted gets home, and it would only cost me $10, less than the extra gas I burn taking him to Mom's. So this is a lot of extra driving and pre-planning for me, which I was actually happy to do, so that Kiddo could have his Friday afternoons with Grandma.

Now, I am always dieting. I have no need or desire to eat in a restaurant more than once every couple of weeks. I would be totally happy to visit with Mom at her house for an hour and a half, drop off my kid, and split. I would be back to pick him up by 10 pm or so, and we could have coffee and visit for another hour then. Since I see my mom frequently (or at least I used to) I think this is fine. But we can't just have a light lunch at home and call it good. We have to go out to eat. Once again to a pokey-slow restaurant that has nothing fit for a dieter. Then it's a rush to eat our food and race back to the house to drop off Mom and Kiddo, so I can then break a land-speed record getting to work. This got to be such a problem that I was consistently late for a good Friday show, and consequently lost that account. (I am an independent traveling dancer, which means I get my own accounts and then am responsible for showing up to them on time.)

No matter what the activity is, Mom tries to structure the whole day so that it revolves around her, and I am actually unable to leave. She uses a whole arsenal of sneaky weapons. First she employs the the guilt-trip. ("Do you really have to go so soon? I hardly ever see you!") Then she plays the fear card, often in conjunction with the guilt trip. ("I hope I don't have any prowlers tonight. Oh, I'm just so sacred!") And then it's the helpless act. ("Can you please change the lightbulbs/sweep the walk/take these things downstairs/etc.? I can't do it by myself.") Sometimes she carries the helpless bit even farther by refusing to drive to meet us anywhere, like she did for Kiddo's talent show. Then of course it takes even more time from me, having to chauffeur her around. Before you know it, a couple of hours or more have slipped away. Sometimes she will pretend to be concerned for me. ("Oh, it's so late. Why don't you just spend the night here?") Then she has the nerve to pretend she is worried about my driving so late, when I could have left hours ago.

I don't get what exactly my Mom is trying to accomplish with this behavior. The obvious effect is, when I spend time with her, I have little control over my own time (can't leave when I plan to), my eating (a continuing battle between her and me), my work life, and my money (because I lose money when I am late for work). Frequently, the time I spend with her is time I could have spent with my husband, who I really don't see enough of. So, whatever she is attempting to do, the result is she has alienated me. (Oh, yeah, let's add to that, since she so adamantly disapproves of homeschooling, and of my working in a bar, I have almost nothing to say to her that won't quickly devolve into icy silence.)

The really sad thing her is, I would spend more time with her if I could do so without all the drama and manipulations. If I could drop off kiddo on Friday and know that he would get his work done, I would get to work on time, and we could have a pleasant visit, I would so do it. If I could have a relaxed Sunday luncheon with her and then go on with my day, I would do that. I used to invite her to my home all the time, but she won't come. (She does, however, spend up to two weeks with my foster brother and his family in Ohio, when she can sucker somebody into driving her.)

I keep wishing there was some way to remedy this. Every time I try to establish a boundary, it creates a problem. She called me today to tell me Kiddo was upset that she didn't watch the Super Bowl with us at Ted's Dad's house. The truth is, we didn't invite her because we didn't want to drive her home after the game. It would have added an extra hour to our drive. If she would just drive herself, she would be welcome to come. I think from now on, I will tell her "You are welcome to come, but you will have to drive yourself. We can't do it." She still won't drive herself, and therefore won't come, but at least the invitation is out there.

I'm feeling sad today because I wish things could be different. Although I know this is not my fault, I still regret that I can't make things right. I keep thinking I could do something to make things go more smoothly between us. The only thing I can think of is to continue setting boundaries so that we can have at least the framework of a normal relationship. *Sigh*

For now, I have given her enough control over my mind, by letting this problem prey on me for the last two days. I'm done for now. If anybody has any helpful advice, I'm glad to hear it. Peace, out.