Did you have a “difficult mother”
or
was she really a Narcissist
and
you didn’t really know it?
Henriette does a wonderful job describing the differences between the two in her post,
The Narcissist and the Difficult Mother.
Fortunately, I had a marvelous mother…she would give until it hurt and it sometimes did…although not always around because she worked, when she was present, she seemed beautiful inside and out.
Now…my father was a completely different story…he was a Narcissist and I never realized it until a few years before he died, but by that time the damage had long been done.
In his eyes, I simply did not exist apart from him.
In many ways, it was lucky for me that my parents were divorced when I was very young, so my exposure to him was limited but still very confusing.
It is even too emotionally painful to record here. He was not physically abusive but emotionally, I remember always being on a roller coaster, wondering, “how do I please you”…never realizing that this was an impossibility.
Simply put, I always wished and was full of hope that when we got together even for the very last time when he was quite old and I was an adult and a mother myself, that he would be Robert Young, in “Father Knows Best” and call me “Princess”.
He never did…
The narcissist is clothed in a kind of emotional Teflon….
Her fury at my ideas was so intense and so pure that I saw it was fueled by more than a simple disagreement with my point of view. This was rage at the notion that I could have a point of view. I didn’t exist apart from her, so I couldn’t think anything she didn’t think. I saw then that I didn’t really exist except as part of her identity.