I put this drawing up on twitter It is about my mother and her mother and the ways in which they make everything about themselves. But of course, it’s also about Trump and so many of the rich and powerful, the white people, the men, the people who continue to vote for people who will take away their healthcare, their rights, because they’d rather lose it than have one person who isn’t like them have access to the same.
Narcissist is a diagnosis but it is also a descriptor. Like every other psychiatric diagnosis, it is about a spectrum. All of us are a little narcissistic, a little borderline personality disorder. It’s when that particular trait becomes dominant, when its effects on the person and their family, their friends, everyone else, becomes destructive that it becomes an actual diagnosis. But of course, for that to happen, the person involved and their family and friends must recognize it as such even when they’re in the middle of a story that is telling them that this is normal or that they must find a way to see it as normal because everything indicates (biological mother, daughter, son, biological father divorced) that it is. Family, according to this story, is two parents (one cis het man married to one cis het woman) and their children. Any other arrangement is diagnosed as dysfunctional. When we see this arrangement, it takes something catastrophic to convince us the story we know isn’t true.
Diagnosis is a story we tell about a certain group of symptoms happening to a body just like a family is a story the culture tells us about a certain group of bodies and it’s a story that we tell ourselves as we live inside or outside it. Identity, that shifting flickering thing we think of as a solid, is also a story we tell ourselves even as the world tells it to us, tells us what’s possible and what those identities should look like. A constant negotiation.
Since my father told me about my mother moving into assisted living, there’s been a new diagnosis or multiple diagnoses: COVID19, coronavirus, pandemic, multiple racist names for a virus that infects anyone and everyone. There are also anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers, and those who believe the virus and its pandemic are a government-generated hoax. What is their diagnosis?
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I began to unearth the problems in my relationship with my mother when I was researching empathy. I was researching empathy because I had noticed a lot of slippage in the usage
of the term, especially the ways in which it is often substituted for, or its definition
switched with, “sympathy.”
I struggle with empathy because here’s the thing: I am one of those people who generally assumes the best of others and I have finally learned that this can be dangerous. I assume everyone just wants the best for everyone else like I do. Unfortunately, to people with low empathy, people who are malignant narcissists or sociopaths or BPD, this can mean that I’m vulnerable to manipulation. My empathy, my niceness, means that I’m weak and therefore deserve whatever I get. It’s my own fault. I shouldn’t have been so nice. They’re just trying to teach me a lesson, they’re just trying to toughen me up because the real world will be so much worse.
And right now, I am thinking about how she split on me in the past. The times she became obsessed with some new religion or pseudo-religion — astrology, wiccanism, Eckinkar, transcendental meditation, shamanism, etc., — — only to abandon them months or years later without a thought or any sort of nostalgia or regret. Her relationships with everyone seemed to be stuck in that toxic mean girls way of turning friends against each other to ensure she is always centered.
Other things that run in our family: migraines, thyroid problems, gifted athleticism, farming, anger, early baldness in the men, queerness, celiac disease, poverty, insomnia. But that’s just my mother’s side of the family.
Right now, I miss her and I’m so angry I could punch through the wall. The COVID19 pandemic has made the boundary I drew between us, more painful, electrified. I assume my father will tell me if she gets covid, if she dies. But I don’t know. When he drove me to the airport last time, he told me that every time she talks to him on the phone, she manages to fake cry about how “my only daughter won’t even talk to me.” I told him I didn’t want to hear about her again, please. Please. Please. He nodded and looked back to the highway.
I do know that it’s the perfect line to ensure that she is the one who gets sympathy. Poor G, she is alone and I have my wife. There is always a reason. There is always an excuse. Besides, it wasn’t that bad. It’s not like she beat you.
This is another story about families that I consumed and allowed to shape the way I thought about my own family: abuse is a parent beating or burning a child, raping a child, something terrible done to the body of a child by a parent. There is always room in this story to say, well, they didn’t do that to me so it couldn’t have been that bad.
What runs in families is the damage we’ve done to each other, the damage we have always done and had done to us. What runs in families is stories. The stories we tell each other, the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we choke down and swallow. The stories our bodies pass on as truth, as reality.
