The Shallow Pond

"One of the most effective methods of exposing a narcissist is by trying to go deeper and discuss matters substantially. The narcissist is shallow, a pond pretending to be an ocean."
http://www.healthyplace.com/personality-disorders/malignant-self-love/how-to-recognise-a-narcissist/menu-id-1469/

I've been trying to think more kindly of my FIL, even as my husband and I detach ourselves from his life. But it's not easy.

He wanted to have a discussion with me many years ago about a certain point of doctrine from our scriptures. That was a mistake. "Discussions" for him are never give and take; they are opportunities for him to point out others' shortcomings. The discussion ended up being an indictment of the son of my best friend, a young man about to leave on a mission to a foreign country. The young man had quoted a scripture that FIL thought underscored this young man's "pride." I was appalled when I discovered later that FIL had gone to my best friend's house, and instead of offering him support and encouragement on his imminent two-year absence, instead excoriated him for the (misread) "sin" of being like the humble prophet in the scripture.

My friend will not speak to FIL, understandably. I will not have doctrinal discussions with him.

FIL likes to go to farm meetings to bring up obscure or unrelated questions that no one can or wants to answer. Or they are questions someone already answered half an hour before. He thinks this shows how smart he is. My husband and nephew refuse to take him to farm meetings at all.

During my husband's excellent Sunday School lesson a few days ago, FIL raised a question about where something happened in obscure religious history. Then he answered it himself. Although he presents a persona of meek and mild humility, The Humble-Pie Man, he really likes to dazzle people with his intellect. He likes to mention his famous religious forebears in passing. He likes to ask questions constantly and sits in the middle up front so the teacher can't avoid seeing his hand creeping up. My husband handles this pretty well, but I've seen other teachers founder on my FIL's obsessive desire for attention from his church going neighbors. It's where he does his best work.

Another member of the Sunday School class (my best friend, actually) raised her hand and referred to the manual with the proper answer, which wasn't the same as his. He spent the rest of the class time injured, paying no attention to anything else. In the last two minutes of the class he raised his hand yet again and insisted that his first answer was the correct one.

He missed the entire lesson planning on how to stun everyone, but then, this is how it always has been. This is a man who is dependent on others to the point that he cannot plan an outing, much less an airplane ticket, on his own. He cannot keep records, make schematics, or even rationally explain his genius inventions. He cannot manage the navigation it takes to deliver Meals on Wheels. He constantly gets confused trying to provide one meal a month for our local missionaries. He cannot make a dental or doctor appointment on his own. He can't breed cows or do anything that takes advance planning. He refuses to clean up after himself, and will not listen to anyone's opinion that does not agree with his.

A pond pretending to be an ocean.

The Humble Pie Man

FIL is a man of the soil. He wears overalls over stained shirts that reek of working for days in the hot sun. He has a humble air, self-effacing, solicitous, ever-helpful. It is easy to be fooled. As long as you are on a shallow level of interaction, and require nothing of him and only want to thank him for his efforts, you are safe.

But wait awhile, and you will discover that any and all gifts to you from him require a double gift back, whether it is of your time and attention, your resources, the apricots on your tree that he covets and the water in your pipeline that should by rights of entitlement be his. He should not have to ask you for permission, since you have already granted it by accepting gifts from him.

He will get teary-eyed thinking about his sinful nature, since he is a Christian and all Christians need to repent. This is especially so in front of fellow members of the local congregation he attends. A lot of the Humble Pie is meant for them.

But once you get to specifics, the only sins he can really think of are yours. He is happy with his life, he says. He maintains that he knows people who don't need to repent, and he lets you know with a wink that he thinks he's in that company. If he ever needs to repent, he wants to pay the price himself. He doesn't want to ask too much of Jesus' atonement. He doesn't need anybody else--except to keep the Narcissistic Supply coming.

"Question: I met many narcissists who are modest – even self-effacing. This seems to conflict with your observations. How do you reconcile the two?

Answer: The "modesty" displayed by narcissists is false. . . The real aim . . . is intended to either aggrandise the narcissist or to protect his grandiosity from scrutiny and possible erosion. Such modest outbursts precede inflated, grandiosity-laden statements made by the narcissist and pertaining to fields of human knowledge and activity in which he is sorely lacking. . .

One of the more efficacious defence mechanisms is false modesty. . . This way, if (or, rather, when) exposed he could always say: "But I told you so in the first place, haven't I?" False modesty is, thus an insurance policy. . .

With false modesty he seeks to involve others in his mind games, to co-opt them, to force them to collaborate while making ultimate use of social conventions of conduct.

The narcissist, above all, is a shrewd manipulator, well-acquainted with human nature and its fault lines. No narcissist will ever admit to it. In this sense, narcissists are really modest."

http://samvak.tripod.com/faq36.html

Committing to Humility

More from Enough About You, Let's Talk About Me Chapter 8:

p. 144 Humility is the opposite of pride because it reflects a lack of self-preoccupation, a willingness to serve, an acknowledgement that we are limited in our ability to control other people and circumstances, and an understanding that we cannot demand favored treatment. . . . it means being proactive in seeking reasonable treatment but doing so with a spirit of decency. . .

People who truly embody humility are quietly confident and are not prone to irrational outbursts . . . (humility) grounds a person in the realization that life is not always fair, yet it can be manageable. . . Even as they lay down the wish to play God, they also choose not to allow another human to assume the position of a god over them."

He's just annoying

About a year or two before she died, my mother in law kept saying "He's just annoying. He's not really a bad man."

She said this over and over in spite of the fact that she had lived more than 50 years with a man who was annoying at the very least, and selfishly, inhumanly cruel at the worst. Her desire to be a charitable Christian, patient and long suffering, giving up her boundaries and selfhood to placate him, allowed him to become entrenched in his behaviors so completely that great changes took place when the inevitable drying up of his influence began a year after she died.

I say a year because technically, he was her estate Trustee, mistakenly so due to attorney error, although he did no other work than signing his name. The actual work of settling the estate (as MIL had meant it to be) fell to my husband, and to me. FIL got plenty of Narcissistic Supply by having us take him to the bank, and the attorney's office, and having him sign endless documents, tax statements and estate checks. When the year ended, the solicitous attention did too; it was then that he began to rage and shout and lash out, in a futile attempt to get the rest of us back into line with the status quo ante.

My MIL believed him to be ADD, which is possible. I have known and taught ADD and ADHD students and found them to be capable of humility. My niece, who took care of her grandmother in her last six weeks of life, labels him as obsessive, which is obvious. MIL thought his predictable blowups could be traced to a building of need for the adrenalin that comes from runaway anger, so it could serve as amphetamine-like Ritalin, paradoxically used to calm the hyperactive. It's always the backwards reaction with him. Perhaps that's what was happening, I can't say.

But it's amazing how many fewer blowups he's had since she's been gone and his grandiose ego is so rarely rewarded, once he learned the raging and shouting and lashing out resulted in his audience turning their backs on him and walking away. And not coming back. Leaving him all alone with himself for company.

The injury is complete and no one pays attention anymore. His wife is no longer around to compensate for him and make him look good. His daughters make sure he has food to eat and his clothes are clean, but conversation with such a man always has been futile. His expensive and useless inventions sit rusting and crumbling. He locked away his money in an annuity and can't fiddle with it anymore. His biggest claim to fame, teaching a Sunday class once a month, lasted only half a year, since the powers-in-charge realized belatedly that he wasn't much like his son--my husband--who is a superior counselor/teacher. FIL was eased out of the Sunday teaching position that he abandoned family Christmas togetherness and risked his life for, flying and driving at age 83 in blizzard conditions, to make it to church in time for a disorganized and stuttering performance. Other callings, tailored especially for the bare simplicity his capacity demands, were no longer lasting. The large and needy family that so appreciated his garden tomatoes and beans and corn suddenly moved away.

In self-pity, he pines for his dearly departed wife. He misses the way of life she provided for him, the papering over of family pathologies, the closed mouth about the giant borderline elephants in the room, the passing along of blame to those of us who were sane and uncomplaining. The Narcissistic Supply so evenly handed out, the filling her role of devoted wife by fudging the truth here and quietly edging the burden onto her son, my husband, there. When FIL is happy, everyone can have a little peace and quiet.

He was and is annoying, but more to the truth of it, he is and continues to be pathological. Only now he has to behave better, because nobody rewards the adult temper tantrums anymore.

Enough About You, Let's Talk About Me

I highly recommend Enough About You, Let's Talk About Me, by Dr. Les Carter. Solid examples and clear, common sense writing.

Some excerpts:

p. 4 People with a full narcissistic behavior pattern are so completely, even pathologically self-absorbed that they lack empathy, can be thin-skinned, and demonstrate very low levels of true awareness of themselves or others.

p. 5 A high percentage of the people who come to me for counseling reveal that their problems have been either instigated or greatly worsened by very selfish or manipulative people . . . By definition, narcissists have a very low ability to incorporate someone else's version of reality because they see themselves as the ultimate keepers of truth. They admit no wrong, or if they ever do admit wrong, it is only a matter of time before they convince themselves they are actually right.

p. 10 Narcissists are not genuine. . . They are more interested in posturing for favorable reactions than being known as authentic . . . They enter relationships looking for ways to coerce others to do their bidding.

p. 11 Underlying the manipulative behavior of narcissists is a belief that they are entitled to have others do whatever they want or need.

p. 13 The need to be special is so central to narcissists that they repeatedly lie to themselves about their own importance . . .

p. 18 As narcissists ignore truth and invent their own alternative realities, they are not free but imprisoned by their own falsehoods. Over time, it becomes a prison they cannot escape.

p. 19 Narcissism represents personal immaturity at its worst.

p. 59 When you persistently tolerate others' rude or intrusive behaviors, you are saying that you do not believe that you possess enough dignity to stand up for your needs or convictions.

p. 77 Passive-aggressive narcissists find a perverse delight when they know they have generated strong responses of anger in others. As they witness how others fume or rage in response to their stubbornness, they indulge the thought, "This proves how you are inferior to me, and that means I control you."

p. 89 Narcissists define pain differently from the way the average person does. To them, pain means they are not getting their way. . . for narcissists who feel anger or pain at entirely reasonable demands or decisions, their response can be understood as an adult version of a toddler's temper tantrum.

p. 91 Narcissists anchor on the question, "What are you going to do to make my day go better?"

p. 94 . . . Holding them accountable to the consequences of their actions is one of the few ways to convey the message that you intend to be taken seriously. . . Because narcissists like being in tight control, they are likely to protest greatly when someone applies consequences. They will likely express outrage, but usually that rage is a cover for panic. . . They are so enamored of their own special status that they are convinced that others' lives would be much better if they would give them control. This explains why they can be persuasive, stubborn, and bossy.

Water Supply

I promised to tell this story, although it is a recent one and out of place in this somewhat sequential narrative. It was the capstone of my relationship with a man who claims to be someone he is not, and brought down his wrath on me that he had reserved, until then, for my husband.

He never did understand my attachment to my husband. After my mother in law died, for two years, we had FIL over for Sunday dinner. He always ate a lot. For me, someone who avoids cooking, and my husband, who prefers to graze and then take a nap, it was an extra effort. FIL needed someone to talk to, so after the meal, which he ate with relish, my husband would disappear into his basement TV room and leave me to be the audience FIL sought.

I listened to his ramblings, usually lasting at least an hour, sometimes two or more, about his genius inventions, the books he had recently read on how we should improve ourselves, his financial status (he would go to the bank weekly just to ask the financial adviser what he should do with his money, to which the financial adviser said, "Let me sell you an annuity. . . ")

Plus he would not only make excuses for the Twins' bad behavior, but harangue my husband's actions, and I refused to listen to it. He couldn't understand why I wouldn't sit still for it. My nephew told him that I loved my husband, whom I consider to be my eternal companion, and I didn't want to listen to constant criticism. In FIL's mind, constant criticism is a sign you want to help somebody. After all, he'd used it for years on his wife.

For several years, FIL kept a garden on the rented pasture of the little house next door to our house. He had a garden spot at his own house, but it was too shaded by trees and he had shifted his pipes and soaker hoses and fences to a plot we did not own. After MIL's death we built the new calf pen by his house, and the trees were removed, leaving a large open area for him to return to his original garden. But he did not return to it except for a patch of tomatoes.

Let me add that the pasture garden was positioned over where a septic drainfield ought to have been. Since there was no drainfield for the little house next door, there was human waste floating along the bottom of this garden. He built a little bridge over it, but it was unmistakable that this should not be near produce that would be eaten by humans. He parked the pickup with half of the back sticking into the road, creating a driving hazard. He also drove back and forth in front of my house probably three to five times a day to work on this garden, at a mile a trip, making it a matter of 25 or more miles a week he spent driving back and forth, inspecting my yard for the errant misuse of water along the way.

Since his pasture-garden shared a 2" water pipe meant for my large yard of flowers and vegetables and trees and lawn (my husband installed the pipe from the irrigation ditch 30 years previously, and they had added not only a bib for the neighbor's sprinkler system and pasture sprinklers as well as FIL's garden) I had such little water pressure anymore that I couldn't run my sprinkler system and had to drag hoses with screwed-on sprinklers to keep my yard from dying.

One year my husband and I were overseas, and our youngest son and his wife were staying at our house during 105 degree weather. I asked my daughter in law to water my garden, and she had two sprinklers running. When FIL saw this, he stopped in our yard, ran into MY house, and in front of their young visitors, he reamed my son & daughter in law for using TWO sprinklers at once, because his garden didn't have enough water. An example of the shabby treatment he gave to those who dared cross him.

I was incensed when I learned of this, but I did not do anything at the time, believing FIL when he said he was going to move his garden back to his house. But in the spring he could be seen in the carry-all passing back and forth in front of our house with loads of manure for his pasture garden. He was expanding the garden to accommodate the neighbors living in the little house, who wanted a garden of their own as well.

I confronted him one day on it, telling him that he could not have my water anymore and he needed to tell the neighbors they couldn't have my water, either. He needed to move his garden and he would have all the water he needed.

He refused of course, on the principle that everything he saw was his and for me to even suggest he had been less than righteous about it was an intolerable sin on my part. Still, he tried to give me one more chance: he approached me one day while I was mowing the lawn, and told me he would just use the water at night.

Since water volume is usually higher at night in the ditches, he was making a grab for more than half of my water. I told him he was not entitled to half of my water, and that he needed to move his garden.

Besides, knowing him, this offer was a downright falsehood, since I knew he would not keep it. He would continue to use all the water he wanted, which meant keeping it going full volume every night and day, as he had in the past.

From then on it was war.

This man refused to come to my house anymore on Sundays for lunch. I can't say it broke my heart, since he was not pleasant company. We invited him later to resume coming but he refused, saying he could not talk to me anymore. He told all of his children how awful I was and how unfair and how my mean intentions and refusal to let him have all the water he wanted was going to ruin his garden. He threatened my husband with not watering the pasture anymore (not that he had done it regularly anyway). He now included me in his condemnations of his son, saying that we were both going to end up in hell because of our un-Christian conduct.

I had been demoted. I was shunned. He no longer came to visit me at odd times when my husband was working. I was no longer his financial adviser. I was a bug to be squashed, my eternal salvation of deep and abiding concern to him, meaning that I was now the subject of constant criticism as well.

Initially I started digging around where the feeder pipe was supposed to be, hoping to shut it off, but I gave that up and just let him use whatever water he wanted. I made do with what water there was as I had done before. He was greedy and entitled as usual, and whenever the volume of water decreased (usually by his own mistaken actions) he would complain loudly to my husband how unfair we were to poor innocent tomato gardener. It was a demonstration of narcissism up close, a clinical case.

Eventually his complaints, falling on the deaf ears of the sane sisters, became a determination to move his entire garden to the spot next to his house, which was a far superior place to garden, since he was able to divert manure water onto it. Eventually the story would change that he'd always wanted it that way and never really argued about water, but that I was ungracious anyway. We never asked him back to Sunday lunch, knowing he would use it for some other reason to deprive us of his divine company.

Early the next year, the absentee owner of the little house next door died, and his heirs promptly sold the property out from under the renters, but not before they put in a septic drainfield. They warned my FIL to move his pipes and fence and soaker hoses, and he had to do it in a hurry. The field is clean now, there is no human waste, there is no scrambled, weedy, overwatered garden. I love my neighbors, they plan to trench a pipe from the irrigation ditch and allow me all the water in the 2" pipe without having to share it with anyone.

And I can run my sprinklers.

My husband's mother

My MIL was not a tall woman, and when I met her she was twice the weight she should have been. She was a brilliant, observant, tender hearted person who had suffered more in her life than anyone ever knew.

She grew up in one of the country's big cities, with a mother who was widowed when she was two years old. Her mother, with ambition before her time, wanted more than to be a secretary at minimum pay, and became a medical researcher for a doctor's office. She never remarried. She traveled the world extensively. She sent her young daughter to stay with her parents in a rural town each summer.

When my MIL was nine years old, a teacher wrote a note to her mother that she was evasive and not very smart. She may have been evasive in self defense, but the teacher missed something major. MIL graduated from high school when she was 16, and from U.C. Berkeley in chemistryf when she was 19. Along the way, she spent a year in a sanatorium after being diagnosed with tuberculosis when she was ten or 11 years old. There are signs that she was most likely abused somewhere along the way.

When she was 19, she met her husband, a Marine paratrooper come home from the war. They had a whirlwind courtship, and she was swept off her feet. He can be charming. They married and he went to college to get an agriculture degree. They began a life that set the standard for the next 30 years: one step ahead of subsistence living. She had two children while he was at college, an older sister and my husband, and then they drove toward what they thought would be a better life farming. They didn't get to the coast like they planned; they stopped somewhere along the way, found the soil was good, that there was water, and land for purchase.

With $3,000 borrowed from her grandparents, they bought their first 40 acres and a basement house. It was a long hard grind from there on. They had a small derelict dairy and could not support themselves with it. FIL and MIL both worked off farm to make ends meet. Her ownership of the checkbook began here; it meant the bills were paid and nothing unnecessary dared show up on an invoice.

She never did get along all that well with her determined and independent minded mother. While it was a relief for her to be married and away, it was a struggle all her married life to keep from depression. After what I have learned, I can understand it. In her papers after her death were copies of a number of articles on dealing with depression. She fought overweight, and finally gave up; it was only in the last year of her life that the cancer that killed her brought her down to her pre-marriage size, and her extra weight probably gave her more time.

Her children remember her differently. It surprised me to discover that the sister most like her mother in many respects got along better with the father. This sister learned at an early age how to handle him by standing up for herself firmly and kindly, and by living a life otherwise above reproach (making him look good). It was a shock when this sister eventually divorced her own husband, who cannot be observed without the label of narcissist being applied as well. It may be that she learned her lessons too well, and attracted a man who tried to live an inauthentic life as a straight husband and father and then finally gave up on it. At least he can be considered more honest than his former FIL.

The other sisters remember their mother as being aloof, overwhelmed, resisting society, lacking in warmth and self-respect, with some quirks and oddities that were amplified by her isolation and poverty. She had no one to turn to but herself, and she kept her own counsel for many years. My husband remembers her as being ineffectual in controlling her children, but someone you could converse with in a way his father could not. In her brilliance, she must have been very lonely with a husband like that. It was only in the later years of her life that she realized she actually was valued by the rural community at large, gained the friendship and admiration of her children, and was beloved of the youngest sister, whom she loved in a way she had earlier been unable to express.

When she brought her mother home to die, after several years of caring for her, MIL inherited a great deal of money. After many years of poverty it took her years to come to terms with spending it. She didn't go crazy and waste it, but in fact lost track of some of it, which we found later in executing her trust. She began to contribute to her grandchildrens' college and missionary funds, and other causes, mostly educational and religious, that were beneficial to those who received them. Very few people ever knew how much money she had.

But her husband did. She purposely kept from him the value of the farm property they held together, so he imagined that only she had money. He tried to wheedle money and property out of her, but the damage was done; their relationship was irrevocably changed. He knew she was no longer dependent on him. She bought a car (which he made fun of until she died and then claimed as his, although he never drove it) and spent many weeks and weekends visiting her grown daughters. She drove to church without him and let him be as late as he wished; he started arriving early for the first time in his life.

After executing her mother's estate, she arranged for her money to be put in a trust. While the farm partnership provided FIL with a retirement beyond his wildest dreams, she kept her mother's money from him so completely that he never saw any of it, although he tried to circumvent the terms of the trust and then complained that he had been hoodwinked and someone had forged his signature on the documents.

I videotaped her in a question-answer session a year before she died. The sisters told me she would only have answered those questions for me, an in-law. What was interesting, was that as she brought up experiences and memories, she completely left out the narrative of how she met her husband and the kind of marriage they had together. Romance with the man I love is central to my life, but not everyone is so lucky. I had to bring her back to this narrative, so she could fill the story in. For her there was no romance, but a recital of facts: a part of her difficult life.

When she died, the last thing she told her husband was a very interesting choice of words: "I love you, and I forgive you." I doubt he knew what that meant, and he has never tried to live up to it.

She got what she wanted, at the last.

The 10th Commandment

"Narcissists feel that, unless they are better than anyone else, they are worse than everybody in the whole world." - Joanna Ashmun

I didn't realize the depths of desperate envy and covetousness running like a dark undercurrent in my husband's family for many years. This was because I did not experience it in my own, and I did not recognize it, except to feel sorrow and grief from the stunted family relationships and the failure of maturity that I could not understand or explain.

Dante's definition of envy and covetousness is "love of one's own good perverted to a desire to deprive other men of theirs." In our case,the envy began fairly soon, since my husband from the moment we moved back to the farm, was successful materially and given the reputation and respect that his father and brother craved and rarely received.

It explained why FIL loved to dress down my husband for perceived slights and disobediences in front of strangers. It explained why he encouraged and exploited the envy of Brother and Sister Twin for the rest of the family, why he reveled in hearing them recount unforgiven childhood slights magnified into adult competition of the worst kind. It came close to giving me understanding that FIL's own relationship with his own parents and siblings was less than ideal, so the failure of his own children to live harmoniously would not be a reproach.

It also explained the weird sense of ownership and gratification FIL got from the bestowal of certain coveted church callings on my husband. It actually made life temporarily better for everyone, since the reflected glory he got from his high value son now fed him narcissistic supply that protected MIL and my children and me from the worst of it for over a decade, until the calling came to an end an another assignment given that was not so visible or valued.

Then the dressing downs resumed, and the glee at bad news of any kind. Still, he can't compete; he knows I and others are disappointed that he is so little like my husband, his son; and the desperation and fear and green violence just under the surface waiting and hoping to be catalyzed into destructive action erupts now and again to demonstrate the truth of that.

Contrary and contradictory

"The most telling thing that narcissists do is contradict themselves. . . They will contradict FACTS. They will lie to you about things that you did together. They will misquote you to yourself. If you disagree with them, they'll say you're lying, making stuff up, or are crazy." http://www.halcyon.com/jmashmun/npd/traits.html

The first time I became aware of the depths of FIL's contrary nature was when I began to fear for the safety and health of my MIL, and I went down to talk some sense into him. I brought a quote from one of our spiritual leaders who said treating your wife with love and concern is the most important thing you will do in your life, and that I worried about his eternal salvation because of the way he was treating his wife. He didn't believe that, he became outraged, he outright denied he had ever mistreated anyone, and not only that, I was mistreating him and needed to repent for thinking such cruel things about him.

I was young and perhaps foolish, but I was taken aback. It was like talking into a tornado. I began to wonder about his sanity. I felt someone needed to call him on his bad behavior. I genuinely feared for my mother in law. She had had a series of accidents including a possibly fatal car accident, a broken arm tripping over a rug, and another car wreck. Following each of these accidents her husband treated her kindly, for awhile.

No one else dared call him on what he did. My MIL told me he "perceives" things differently than other people. I told her with a young person's confidence that what was real and true ought to stand on its own.

I've thought about that conversation since, and although it's true we filter our lives through our experiences, I've come to realize that some people's self-promoting perceptions often come at the expense of those living in the real, true world. MIL fed her husband's fantasy in order to protect her and other family members from his wrath. This has resulted in distorted relationships and entrenched his perception of himself as someone he was not.

The youngest sister overheard my aborted conversation with her father, and told me that I was the only one who could talk to him that way.

For some reason he wanted my good opinion of him, and he behaved well around me until an incident came up which I will comment on some other time. As I mentioned earlier, my ability to intimidate him came from my background and education. I had sufficient intuition to avoid getting myself into any sort of dependence on him, any request or favor, although he still tries to press "gifts" on me such as produce from his garden, tomato plants he raised from seed, skinned rabbits, skinned chickens, skinned turkeys, shopping trips in place of Christmas presents, in order to elicit a supply of thanks or to get me in his debt. At this point in my life I will accept nothing from him if I can help it.

I have had conversations with my FIL which are bizarre and ventured into the realms of the absurd. You could get whiplash trying to make sense of the verbal exchange, (it couldn't be considered a conversation,) especially when he feels threatened or belittled and is trying to reassert his favorable image of himself.

It was only when our nephew came to work with us and comment on his grandfather's lack of truthfulness that my husband began to realize that his father wasn't just contrary and contradictory by nature, he was deliberately and manipulatively mendacious. It isn't a conclusion one wants to reach, and one which his family resisted for too many years. My nephew used to look up to his grandfather, and now he avoids him.

The Biggest Mistake

We had not been farming ten years when my father in law got a hip replacement. He was otherwise healthy and the bone grew back properly, so he was eventually able to work again. But when you are over 60 years old it is never the same kind of physical work, even if you do stay out all day and come home dirty.

The year before, the year during, and the year following his hip surgery, my FIL did little outside work of any kind. My children were barely big enough to push bales in front of the cows, and they did that, and fed the baby calves, too. I helped my husband with some of the other work. I am not big or strong, so I never was much help. But we did it all without Grandpa.

When he was feeling better, he finally reasserted himself, or at least believed he was in charge again, although it was evident to any outsider that he was not managing the farm but puttering with his hobbies. I believe in hobbies, but it doesn't mean you're participating in income-producing work that is supporting your family.

The year before he had his hip operation, FIL and MIL signed papers with the Brother Twin and his wife to put their trailer on two acres at the top of the hill, a very nice spot for a house. They couldn't own the two acres, not only because there was no public right of way, but because in our state you can't just build homes on farm land unless you're actively farming. For those ten years the labor of my husband and children paid the mortgage and the taxes on this property, the digging of the well, the pump, the electric lines up to the property edge, and laying the bridge over the ditch. FIL was laid up and did not contribute much financially. But we were not consulted in the signing of the 50-year lease. It went without saying that MIL and FIL would leave at least half the term of the lease with my husband and me to be landlords to. Maybe they thought they would never die.

Brother Twin had been asked by FIL to farm two years previously. He worked for six months. The youngest sister remembers it, how he wanted banker's hours and for no one to tell him what to do. Finally my husband told his father that he would no longer work under those circumstances. Brother Twin began working for someone else. All of the misfortunes that befell him and his family in the next twenty years were blamed on my husband.

After a dozen years they moved a nicer mobile home to the top of the hill, paid out of Brother Twin's wife's inheritance (since Brother Twin quit working for two years when he got his own inheritance) and as the children eventually left home, they came back again to live as unmarried adults with their own fatherless children. My in laws would not let the married children and their families live there, but the other grown children and moved in even as their mother, now educated and employed, moved out. Brother Twin simply refused to function as a leader in his home.

After more than twenty years of unsightly and unsanitary waste, misery, legal problems and unhappiness at the top of the hill, my mother in law admitted that signing the lease was her biggest mistake. But they did not make him live up to it.

What I didn't understand was that for all the bluster and braggadocio, the rebellion and resentment of the Brother Twin was a cover for a need for safety under the shadow of his father and his older brother. Fear still keeps him, now a grandfather, from wanting to have a life of his own and to lead his children into independence.

When MIL passed away, and the ownership of the property came to my husband and me, we asked Brother Twin to abide by the terms of the lease, which resulted in accusations of our lack of Christian charity.

There are some standards that must be upheld, or you are in the hole digging. Because this has been allowed to continue for 25 years, does not mean it should continue for another 25. The sane sisters are in agreement, and the lease is terminated, to the dismay and bitterness we expected, but still in the hope that some day they will realize they have been set free from too many decades of living in slums of spirit of their own creation.

Rube Goldberg Part II

(Continued from previous post)

I told him I really didn't want him blowing himself up with a lightning machine, so he promised to make it small to begin with. I told him he could get into trouble with Homeland Security for trying to manufacture toxic gases, but he said it would be safe under water. I pulled dozens of examples of similar inventions off the internet, demonstrating the prohibitive cost of energy and the knotty problem of pressure in the production of nitrogen fertilizer, but all he did was get giddy with narcissistic supply that I should care so much about his idea. I told him he needed to keep records and charts, but his attempt to draw a simple diagram resulted in confusion and was abandoned.

All the books he borrowed from the library were thirty or forty years old, and he wouldn't believe that engines nowadays are so well designed and tuned that nitrous gases were vastly diminished. He tested his prototype and bragged that the litmus strip turned the right color in the water. It could have been from anything, and the change was infinitesimal. Then he found out how much it would cost to put up a new power pole to provide enough energy to make the litmus strip darker, and he hasn't worked on it since.

The discussion about A.I. was circular and pointless. I remember what a mess the herd was when I first showed up, and how many breeds he had mixed together, how baggy the udders were and the splayed hooves made it hard for them to walk. How milk production went up substantially after my husband began his own A.I. program and got rid of the Jerseys and Brown Swiss and yes, Simmentals. The neighborhood joke was that it was a Rainbow Dairy, with all the different breeds mixed together. Someone even painted the mailbox with a rainbow and the Rainbow Dairy title.

You couldn't convince him of that, though. As my husband always says, Don't waste your breath. So when my husband and I were on a long-awaited trip half way around the world, and I was checking FIL's bank account on someone's personal computer, I found a check for $11,000 waiting to be cleared on insufficient funds. Yes, he bought overpriced Jerseys while we were away, and yes, I transferred money to cover it. The Jerseys are almost all sold off now, since several of them never calved. My nephew, who can do embryo transplants, refuses to get involved.

The milking machine was supposed to be based on the human hand instead of on suction, as dairy milkers are today. So I found dozens more similar patented inventions from one hundred years ago. The problem was, that the pressure from a rolling milker, if not calibrated properly, could tear the teat from a cow's udder, and no dairyman was willing to have these machines tested on their herds. Since this invention was third on his list, and he abandoned the other two due to lack of interest on the part of everyone he knows, he hasn't yet attempted to resurrect this one.

He also invented a teat dip that decreased the somatic cell count and mastitis in our herd--or was it that my nephew had taken over milking and kept the barn and animals spotlessly clean? He won't admit to that possibility, and he wants to patent his teat dip, but he didn't keep any records.

He has spent years and years and tens of thousands of dollars not only on these inventions, but on others such as the labor-intensive manure system (most of the labor spent unplugging pipes), feeders, a novel barn design (the barn collapsed after 30 years, the most inconvenient building I've ever been in), feeding programs with acidophilus and that magic elixir, iodine, etc. etc.

He may have occasionally come up with good ideas, although it's hard to tell since I have seen him take credit for things he strenuously objected to, to begin with. One example was working on installing generators on the local dam when he was on the board of directors, but like I say, it's hard to tell if it really was his idea. In later years he convinced on of his sons-in-law to take him to visit the Indian tribes at the headwaters of our watershed and tried to sell them on the same idea, as only the obsessive can do. The Indian tribes did not respond to his idea, regrettably.

His most useful development was an open pollinated variety of tomato he planted year after year and which locally bears his name, although gardener reviews of heritage tomato varieties noted the following: "Flavor was not overwhelming. Could have just been a bad year but I never grew it again." "Planted about 3 plants and got quite a few from them til the heat and stink bugs set in. I didn't note anything special about them except that the 'big red' notation didnt fit the tomato." Reviews are from several years ago, and the seed is difficult to find, if at all.

In all cases, the reason he did these things was for the good of humanity, for posterity, for the entire community and the larger world. From his perspective, one of the great tragedies of his life, no doubt, is that no one recognizes or responds to his sacrifice for all our sakes.

Rube Goldberg redux

". . . (It) doesn't matter what the work is, if he's doing it, by definition it's more important than anything you could possibly do." - Joanna Ashmun

As I mentioned before, my father in law once told me he was a genius. He really believed it, even though he would sometimes refer to his "Rube Goldberg contraptions" in a fit of false modesty. He had the expectation that if he wanted you to share in his work and triumph, you would be happy and willing to spend hours every day making sure his contraptions somehow made it out of vision into reality under his divine guidance.

When my husband realized how much of his time was being used up this way, he stopped letting it happen. My nephew, too, realized that all that talk never led anywhere, and stopped listening.

So FIL went elsewhere to get feedback--to engineers who told him it wouldn't work (which made him more determined), and engineers who told him it was an "interesting idea" in order to end the conversation, which gave him great hope; to machine shops in town, where he spent thousands of dollars having ancient engines "customized;" to friends he invited to participate in his great triumph, who now don't come around anymore; to college faculty members who must not have rewarded him with sufficient encouragement, since he didn't go back after the first visit.

I've mentioned already the manure communitor and the two embryo transplant Herefords, but that's just a partial list of his grandiosity coming to fruition.

After MIL died and FIL realized he had money, he asked me (captive audience at the time) to "advise" him on how he should spend it. He had three things in mind: (1) a "lightning machine" to trap nitrous oxides from engine exhaust as a fertilizer for his garden and pastures; (2) a perfect milking cow in one generation of embryo transplants, since artificial insemination really hadn't done anything to improve the Holstein breed, and (3) an alternate type of milking machine modeled on the human hand.

(Continued in next post)

FIL leaves home

My father in law gets teary eyed talking about his older brother (he had one brother and six sisters) and how wonderful it would have been if they had been able to work on the family farm together.

But I find out from his sisters that FIL was the family's black sheep. The father was sick and died young, but ornery until then. The mother depended on her sons to keep a high altitude, short-season farm going. FIL didn't finish high school until he got back from the war. Then he went on to get a college education on the GI bill.

What discipline he got was from spending time in the military during WWII. Even then, his stories of those years are of a willful young man who took risks without worrying about the consequences. He does tend to live in the present, and he still takes risks.

When the war ended, he discovered he liked living in warmer places, and to his credit, left home so he could grow warm-season crops. He never looked back. From what his sisters say, they didn't think he'd make much of himself, and were later surprised when he and his wife managed to raise a family of decent hard working children and hang on to the farm long enough to see it prosper under their son's management. I must add here that in talking to an old-timer friend of ours, who worked in a local retail shop and knew most everyone in town for decades, referred to my husband's family as poor. "Everyone was poor then," my sister-in-law said. "No," this sweet little lady protested. "Your family was poor."


Poor as in, the farm, all 320 acres and a 50-cow dairy, was never enough to even pay the bills, until my husband came back and took over the work and management.

Sometimes risks do pay off, in this case buying land as it came available without a single thought of how it would be paid for or who would do the work. My FIL has been a lucky man.

Producing Income

There were many "a-ha" moments when I first read through Joanna Ashmun's compassionate observations of narcissistic people. One of them was Strange Work Habits.
http://www.halcyon.com/jmashmun/npd/traits.html

"Narcissists can put in a shocking amount of time to very little effect. This is partly because they have so little empathy that they don't know why some work is valued more highly than other work, why some people's opinions carry more weight than others'. They do know that you're supposed to work and not be lazy, so they keep themselves occupied. But they are not invested in the work they do -- whatever they may produce is just something they have to do to get the admiration and power they crave. Since this is so, they really don't pay attention to what they're doing, preferring the easiest thing at every turn, even though they may be constantly occupied, so that narcissists manage to be workaholics and extremely lazy at the same time. Narcissists measure the worth of their work only by how much time they spend on it, not by what they produce. They want to get an A for Effort. . . . "

My husband is known for being able to work most men under the table. He likes to keep himself busy, but more importantly, he knows how to work smart, most efficiently, and to direct how it gets done by using peoples' best talents.

When we first started farming we were under the impression that my husband's father had a good work ethic. FIL did stay out from morning until night and was exhausted at the end of the day. He would always show up late at meetings. His children remember being embarrassed weekly from always arriving late at church.

There is something to be said about someone willing to go out and do something, even if it isn't very productive. It's better than trying to get a couch potato to get off the couch. My husband knew after years of practice how to direct his father's labor so that at least some of it was productive. As the farm began to generate more and more of an income, MIL directed more and more of it to FIL.

It came to the point that he was being paid a very high sum well into his seventies, even though they were both collecting Social Security and she had a tidy income off of a big inheritance from her mother. I finally went to talk to her about how the expenditure could be justified.

She said it was because he worked so hard, for so long, every day. I knew from my husband and children, who helped him milk the cows, that he wasted a lot of time and resources at the task, to the point that I told him my children would be coming home at 7:30 pm whether milking was done or not.

Then I proceeded to outline his day to her. How much time he spent in his garden, how much time he spent in his non-productive hobbies such as "fixing" the manure ponds for the last 30 years, and his crackpot inventions. Milking the cows had been underwritten for 20 years (since my husband stopped doing it) by a hired person who could do the job alone; in effect, subsidizing the enormous amount of money he got for doing the same job. Not only that, but many of their household bills were taken care of using the farm checkbook.

If you asked him, he would tell you it was his "genius" (his word, honest,) that made the farm what it was, and thus deserving of not only respect but lots and lots of money. This is what happens when someone's imaginary, grandiose world is encouraged and supported by his enablers, who are then rewarded with a more peaceful life. It is a devil's bargain and a distortion of reality.

It finally got through to MIL that her husband's dirty, smelly clothes were a result of hours and hours of time spent in activities that had never and would never produce income. I even had arguments with FIL in which he insisted that his importance was above producing income (such a petty subject); his importance was related in some way to the concept of research and development. (See above paragraph about "hobbies.") Having one person in a three-person operation devoted to R&D is very, very expensive.

MIL was finally convinced that they had sucked enough out of the farm (I discovered at her death it was approximately half a million in about a dozen years) so they didn't need to take quite so much anymore.

The proof was when our nephew, who joined the partnership a year following MIL's death, took over the milking. It was a fight, of course, and they had to threaten FIL to keep him out of the barn. It wasn't his love of milking; he was constantly exhausted, and had been saying for more than a decade that he wanted to retire. What was really happening was that he didn't want to be proven unessential, which was what he had been for many years; he didn't want to give up his "control."

My nephew wanted several years of records of dumped tanks of milk because of high bacterial count or antibiotics, due to his grandfather's essential lack of cleanliness and attentiveness. My nephew and I came to believe that FIL's contribution was oftentimes a deficit, since someone else had to take time out of their day to clean up after him and compensate for his poor judgment. Besides the income lost from dumped milk and wrecked equipment.

He is good at vegetable gardening, but more on that later.

We threaten to leave

Ten years into it, we were raising our children in the house we built. I quit my job when my second daughter was born, and times were pretty lean, although we had plenty to eat. We grew a big garden and I canned hundreds of jars of tomatoes and beans and jam. On a dairy, at least, you can subsist. We survived a time of high inflation and paid off the bills that had earlier threatened to overwhelm us.

FIL had one leg shorter than the other, blamed on something that happened with horses while he was growing up. He walked with a decided limp and had one shoe sole built up. They wanted to do a hip replacement but because he was so obviously willful that it would be a mistake to let him pull it out by trying to push himself harder, they decided to let him suffer a few years more to get him to believe he needed time to recover.

He could hardly walk the year before his surgery, and he would have been in a wheelchair the rest of his life without it. By this time, my children were a great help to their father, so they did most of the work without any help from their grandfather at all.

Once when his parents were out of town, my husband dug into the financial records hidden under the landing. In an inspection of these, it became apparent that not only were they paying off the debts in their name with money my husband and children were generating, they were paying themselves half again more than we were getting.

It was all too much for me, and even for my husband, who had thus far been extraordinarily patient and unwilling to discuss things. But his legendary patience sometimes runs out. We had a meeting with them, and we threatened to leave.

In looking back over the meetings we had trying to set things right and fair and honest and open, it occurred to me only many years later that this was not how a partnership was supposed to run. Financial decisions were made arbitrarily and in secret. My MIL was so untrusting that she would not give us information we needed to do what needed to be done.

She obviously did not want her husband to know much of anything, even though in financial discussions his eyes glazed over and all he wanted to know was how much cash there was on hand. He was not interested in the financial consequences of decision making, or tax matters, or estate matters. All he was told was that there was no money, and not to ask.

It would take another fifteen years to gain MIL's trust. My husband talked to her daily, and eventually she and he became a decision making team that allowed things to progress in a way that never could have happened otherwise. This was only after the baleful effects of Sister Twin's taking up residence nearby, and the attendant and merciless criticism of my husband and his supposed manipulation and deceit in trying to take over the farm, were shown to be projections of her own desires to do so.

Still, I was worried about FIL's temper when it came to these meetings. I need not have feared. We geared the meetings unconsciously, it seemed, toward flattering his importance, something he could not resist. He responded by agreeing to everything we said. He couldn't help himself.

So they gave in to our ultimatum. Unless they wrote up partnership papers and provided some sort of estate plan that gave us eventual ownership of the farm, we would sell our house and find employment elsewhere. Of course it was my MIL who followed through on the legalities, since FIL's time was spent more importantly with other things, like trying to get someone else to unclog his Rube Goldberg manure system.

We were the gravy train, and when faced with their secure future pulling out when FIL couldn't even walk, they finally agreed to go to the lawyers and did what should have been done years before.

The youngest sister

My husband's youngest sister was a change of life baby. She was one year old when we were married and came to farm. The next sister was 16 years older, a senior in high school when we got there, and soon gone. So the youngest was raised as an only child, except for her older brother, my husband, 24 years her senior, who for all intents and purposes was not only a brother to her but who gave her a father's wisdom she has called upon all her life.

My MIL was able to raise this baby with all the enjoyment, love and affection she had not been able to give her earlier children. As the youngest sister, she was petted and coddled and expected to be the glue that helped keep the wayward parts of the family together. It was a weight this beautiful girl, smart and sane and sensitive and loving, never should have had to bear, and it nearly destroyed her before she was able to get away, following her through therapy, Prozac, and finally to a happy family life of her own.

A few years after we started farming, the Sister Twin moved up the road into an abandoned basement (now condemned) with her husband and several young children. She was married at 19 to a shy, academic, local young man. He had grown up farming and even with a college degree believed that all he could do was farm, even though he was allergic to alfalfa and disliked livestock in general and working with his father in law in particular. He never really was very successful at it, finally finding other sorts of work that suited him better before he was killed at age 39 when his pickup was hit by a train.

But the Sister Twin wanted to farm, mostly because we were already there and didn't deserve to be. Sister Twin would go every morning to her mother's with her children and stay all day, even into the night, so that when her husband came home for dinner, it was to his mother in law's. My MIL, who had never learned boundaries, was helpless once again, and the pattern continued for years.

Eventually Sister Twin and her family, now with six children, moved about 20 minutes away, which was not far enough. We found out later that every day after school she would call her youngest sister and complain about her life, that she shouldn't have to take care of so many children, and that the youngest sister didn't deserve to be happy without her and should come help her.

Our oldest daughter was 2 1/2 years younger than the youngest sister, and they were like sisters to each other. With one problem: my daughter was asked by her young aunt to accompany her often, but when these trips ever included the Sister Twin, I could count on the fact that my daughter would never, ever be home when I asked. It was sometimes half a day late, and it came to the point that I refused to let her go anymore. I didn't realize at the time whose fault this was, but the youngest sister was caught, unhappy, and afraid of my anger.

I know now how it happened. After MIL passed away from cancer, my husband and I began to realize the ferocity of Sister Twin's hostage taking, and since her mother, her original hostage, was gone, she would now start on the youngest sister and her oldest daughter. This, in fact, happened very quickly. Our warning to the youngest sister's husband, a protective and straight-arrow male, helped put a stop to it.

I've apologized to the youngest sister for the tug-of-war over my daughter, who I realize now was her thread of sanity when she was forced to spend time with the Borderline sister. She has forgiven me, as she does everyone, although she has not yet let the Sister Twin visit her family home in spite of pressure from her father to not be so unforgiving.

She does let her father come, out of respect to the memory of her beloved mother; he believes himself to be a good father, even though he threatened and bullied her all of her life and had continual arguments with her mother. For a year after she left home, until she had therapy, she wished and dreamed he would die, to her great and understandable mortification.

Getting Awards

My husband has an aversion to getting recognition for what he does, with one exception: He wants the farm to look good, and it does. He has an artist's eye and an understanding that something that is efficient, well run and organized is usually appealing and attractive.

I've discovered that some of his behaviors are a reaction to the excesses of his narcissistic parent.

One of his father's excesses is a need for external recognition that is sought oh so subtly. This is a common behavior of narcissists. I noticed it when my MIL kept asking me to type up applications for awards on the computer. She never learned to use a computer, believing she might become addicted to it (she was probably right in that) and had an old, impossible Royal typewriter that was painful to type on.

So I typed up many of her hand written applications for her husband's years of award-getting. I now understand why she did this: to pacify him, to provide him with Narcissistic Supply, to make life more livable for herself.

Some of these awards he had little to do with, but gave no credit to my husband, who as I said, had no interest in being recognized. There were environmental awards for keeping waste water out of the irrigation systems, awards for milk production, a Golden Years award for being 50 years in the dairy industry, and picture after picture of him in the newspaper. All carefully preserved in scrapbooks, or framed and mounted, lining the walls of his house. It makes him look like he was admired and appreciated and has made such a difference.

The strangest thing he has hanging on the wall is a 4H contributor thank-you plaque. Anyone who pays premiums for 4H activities gets a thank you card and a pressboard plaque.

When our children started out with their first baby lambs in 4H, we wanted to contribute back to the 4H County Fair program by sponsoring other peoples' children by buying their livestock at auction. FIL refused, however, saying we could spend our own money if we wanted, but not the farm money. As far as I know, he has never contributed to the County Fair as a sponsor, even though his own children showed animals at the fair for years.

As soon as we got hold of the checkbook, we began participating in fair auctions annually. Sometimes we had neighbors buy for us, and we would send the check in later. We always got sweet signed cards from the young people we bought the animals from, usually with a picture, sometimes with a wall plaque.

FIL has one of these hanging on his wall. It was most certainly not addressed to him, except by mistake. He most certainly did not write the check out, and would have objected to writing one. But he still hangs the plaque on his wall thanking him for participating in the 4H Fair auction. Perhaps if he realized he could have had more plaques lining his walls, he would have participated all that time ago.

It's an award, after all, and he deserves it.

Spending Money

My mother in law kept the books in an obsessive, secretive way. I was only able to figure out her motivations after her death. She never let her husband have cash in his pocket, which caused problems when we drove him places he wanted to go and we had to pay for everything. After her death, the money she had saved and invested became the object of his obsessive admiration.

Because of how she told her husband only part of the truth, (for example, how much money was in the farm accounts,) the farm was able to survive. To her credit, she was as honest as she could be under the petty tyranny she lived under.

My father in law is not only appallingly greedy, he loves spending other peoples' money and is very tight with his own. He has only a rudimentary clue of how economics work at all, thinking of budgeting as something someone else should take care of.

Whenever my husband and mother in law were gone more than 24 hours at the same time, it was a standing family joke that my father in law (FIL) would go to an auction and put too much money down on useless equipment.

I remember one thing he bought for $7,000, a comminutor, a machine that breaks up solids so you can run it through a manure system. He thought he was inventing an earth-shattering new process that would revolutionize the industry (much, much more on his crackpot inventions later) so he spent hours and hours of time and thousands and thousands of dollars pursuing this while leaving the day to day grind to others.

Needless to say, the comminutor was a bust, never used, and he sold it discounted to the next person. Someone made money on the deal, but it wasn't him.

He also bought two Hereford cows (not dairy cattle) for breeding purposes. The first was named Pansy and the second Pansy 2. Both were undersized and bought for more money than they were worth. This would have been funny if it wasn't such a waste. He was going to use egg implantation to carry forth the Holstein breed using Hereford surrogates. My husband would have refused, except that FIL can never figure out how to do anything by himself. He never called anyone to do the implanting, never prepared the cows for implantation, etc. etc. He usually just expected my husband to follow through on all this for him so he could take credit for the miraculous results.

Consequently, the Herefords had regular calves by regular bulls and were sold soon thereafter, for no profit, naturally.

Three years before she died, MIL took her husband's farm checkbook away from him because he would write checks on invoices, which messed up the bookkeeping, (which by then was my responsibility,) or wrote checks for personal items, etc. etc. The Sister Twin got wind of this and told everyone that I and my husband had taken away his checkbook and wasn't it awful and how mean we were.

Immoral and Bad

It became apparent early on that some things were important to my father in law, including the need to be obeyed immediately and without question. Anytime you disagreed with him, you were to considered reprehensible not because you were seeing things in a different way, but because you were immoral and a bad son for not adopting his view. This in spite of the fact that the way he did things was often unproductive and lacking in efficiency and common sense.

It is characteristic of narcissists that they do not ask questions unless they have to, because this means they are vulnerable and need something. It also means you have failed in your duty to read their divine mind. Instead of "Will you please pass the sugar?" they will make the audible statement, "This cereal needs sugar," and then expect you to run get the sugar bowl for them. In this way they assert their divinity and your subservience.

If he said something like, this portion of the pasture isn't being properly watered, it meant that he was not only giving you responsibility for all the pastures being properly watered, but that he would take credit for everything you did right. And blame you for anything that went wrong, even if it was his fault.

A pretty sweet way to get through life, to be justified in everything you do, and always have someone handy to blame things on when anything goes wrong.

It's Not Their Fault

When it comes to family dynamics, a parent has a difficult balance in giving each child individual attention while treating all the children with fairness and equanimity.

When a parent is narcissistic, nothing the parent does or says makes sense until the child realizes that the family dynamic is all a sacrifice to this parent's ego. The family direction and resources are not dedicated to the education and promotion of the children; the resources including the mother's time and efforts and the children themselves are to be expended for the benefit of the narcissist.

In this family, a set of twins, a boy and a girl, was added to three older siblings, two girls and a boy. These three older ones were cheerful and obedient and helpful.

What I have been told is that the twin girl was sad from an early age, and the twin boy negative. This is how they are now. Their neediness and dependency put great pressure on the growing family, especially since the mother, an only child whose father was killed when she was two, and whose mother never remarried, was unprepared for the challenge of a large family, especially since she got little help from her husband.

It was obvious that the twins were the problem children in the family. The excuse was that they grew up in the sixties, so it wasn't their fault.

They are a year younger than I am. I grew up in a very large city where the sixties were a full-blown force to be reckoned with. It was not easy, but I did not grow up sad or negative. These two grew up on a farm, isolated by time and space from any sixties radicalism to be spoken of, and even now their struggles and never ending needs and complaints are explained away by the surviving parent as the result of their growing up in the sixties. It's Not Their Fault.

Family gatherings

When I was growing up, most of my father's extended family lived close by. He had two brothers and one sister, and our cousins were a joy.

(My mother had one younger brother who was a fighter pilot in Viet Nam and ended up living in Oklahoma and then getting divorced. We were never close to those three cousins, two boys and a girl. One of the boys and the girl eventually took their own lives. My uncle remarried happily but then died in his 60s of bone cancer.)

We had the 4th of July at our house, which had a big back yard across the fence from scrubby hills. An uncle would take us on walks try to scare us along the way with his stories. We had a barbecue and lit fireworks until everyone had to go home.

For Christmas Eve, we crowded into my grandmother's little apartment and had a family buffet. My father's family was smart and funny and quiet, so you would hear murmuring with punctuations of laughter. Such a nice atmosphere. My grandmother wouldn't give it up even when she was near the end of her life.

It took roping and hog-tying to get my husband's family together. There was no gathering of family except on Christmas Day at my in-laws, and that was sporadic and disjointed. So we started the 4th of July and the Christmas Eve traditions at our house. We had 35 or 40 for dinner, except for the sulky adults who felt slighted for the evening and either sat in a parked car in front of the house or stayed in bed at home daring someone to come get them.

For the 4th was barbecue and homemade raspberry ice cream(the raspberries were ripe and I had plenty of cream) and fireworks. It was often cold, windy or even rainy, and more than once we lit fireworks in the driveway while we sat bundled in the carport. For Christmas Eve we had a Nativity scene, complete with sheep and camels and angels, and there were children running up and down the basement stairs, and food scattered in all the rooms. Until eventually, everyones' family grew old enough that they started their own traditions.

My mother in law added a Midsummer Eve's pancake dinner on the wood stove outside by the grapevines in her yard, and a Thanksgiving clam chowder open house in her kitchen. Everyone behaved themselves (except for the sulky ones sitting in the car) and surprised themselves by having a good time.

At events like this my father in law usually sat quietly by without offering to do or say much of anything. I found out decades later from FIL's younger sister that in growing up, their family did not have any holiday traditions, either, and it was apparent that my MIL and her widowed mother were a stranger to them as well.

My instincts serve me well

I never thought of myself as an intuitive person, being by nature logical, but I had to develop my instincts as a mother. When you have five active children under the age of nine, it is an essential skill to develop. It is a constant listening, a reconnoitering, knowing where your children are at any given moment, at least until they are old enough to watch after themselves.

We knew of a young family where the parents were both killed. The sister and brother in law flew immediately to where the children were, put them on the plane, and took them home. It was proximity that eventually gave them legal guardianship of the children.

Early in our marriage, before they were all born, I knew that if anything happened to my husband and me, I did not want my in laws raising my children. I did not like how my youngest sister in law was treated by her father, I did not like the stories I heard about how he beat his children with whatever was at hand, and how he said things to them like, "Your best isn't good enough." I didn't want my children to ever be devastated by hateful things coming out of a parent's mouth, although they heard such things from their grandfather. We were able to mitigate and turn these into life lessons.

I did not want my children to have the same experiences I heard about. I wrote a holistic (handwritten) will giving the guardianship of our children to one of my sister's families or one of my husband's sisters. I hid it in my desk drawer for many years.

Fortunately it was not used, and I finally told my husband about it. He nodded his head and said it was a good idea.

We raise five children

We had five children in nine years, two girls and three boys. They have been a revelation to me. My husband and I are constantly amazed and gratified by the lives they live, their talents, the people they married, and the way they are raising their children. I don't know how we were so lucky, but we are.

I remember the years we spent with little children and no money as full of sunshine and hard work, swimming and canoeing in the pond, sliding down the ditches in the hot sun, setting up tents under the trees in the back yard, hoeing in the garden, canning hundreds of jars of tomatoes and beans and grape juice and jam. I knitted and sewed and quilted and wrote in my journal and played with my beautiful babies.

Twenty five years after my last baby was born, I don't have as much time any more, even though my children have grown up and gone. Maybe it is because it was mostly before computers took over our lives.

Our children were raised within a stone's throw of the narcissist grandfather and the personality disordered aunt and uncle. The grandfather they learned to avoid as much as possible, since they had to milk the cows with him once a week. As adults they endure him with a certain exasperated constraint. Their grandmother was like an interesting character out of a story book, whose excruciating 55-year role was to mitigate the strangeness of their grandfather. She showered all her grandchildren with affection and good conversation. The aunt and uncle twins are (then and now) understood to be wacky and irrational.

One thing for certain, my children can handle knot-headed people they come across in their lives.

We build a house

Where I grew up in the big city it was considered bad form to live in your parents' neighborhood after you got married. Where my husband grew up in a rural area, you had to be careful of what you said because so many people were related to each other, and they knew everyone else's business. It was small town entertainment.

When we built our house, it was about 1/2 mile down the road from my in-laws. I felt desperate to establish ourselves independently. There was no legal agreement; my husband just went to work as he always had, and the work was hard and physical. My father in law was headed eventually for a hip replacement, so he was unable to do a lot of hard physical labor. The milking parlor was a wreck. The cows were all different breeds, and they were still using milk cans, siphon tubes and bucking bales by hand.

The place wouldn't have lasted much longer; it wasn't paying its own way, and the free labor of the six oldest children was coming to an end. There was a change of life baby who was one year old, and she wasn't going to be much help for years. So there was my husband and his limping father. We were paid enough every month to cover our mortgage with $20 left over. Fortunately we had enough to eat, and we didn't get sick or injured.

We paid someone to frame the house, with a down payment earned by my husband during a good year of leasing someone else's land before we were married. I wired it for electricity, and my husband put up sheet rock and did the plumbing. We hired the laying of the cinderblock basement to two retired bachelor brothers, and got a loan to put in a well. As a wedding present, my in laws paid off the mortgage for the one acre we lived on. We hired the roof done and moved in. It took us another 25 years to finish it. My father in law built a set of stairs going into the basement, and my brother in law helped me put in the electrical panel. My sisters in law helped install insulation in the walls.

I went to work at the local county court, and later for the community college.

No one would talk to me about finances, including my husband.

We take up residence in the mouse hotel

My husband found a little place for us to live in that hadn't been inhabited for two years and was torn down following our nine-month stay. It had four tiny rooms, including a living room with an oil stove and a broken down couch; a bedroom the size of our bed; a bathroom, and a kitchen that was not conducive to either cooking or eating. The place was overrun with mice and was a haven for spiders. I made new curtains to replace the green shower curtains in the kitchen, and I built a book shelf out of 2x6's. I tore the contact paper that served for wall paper off the walls, and tried to clean the embedded grease. I was not successful.

I had to go to my mother in law's to do the washing, and I helped with the garden. We didn't have a telephone for three months. My husband was gone 10-12 hours a day. He got a job running a sweet corn picker for the local food processors so we would have some cash to live on. I was desperately homesick and isolated.

My husband's parents were good to me, but they were about to go under. Farming wasn't what everyone did anymore, and it wasn't easy to stay in business unless you were businesslike, which my father in law wasn't. His real love was gardening, and the farm was too big and too complicated for someone trying to make a larger living.

My mother in law kept the books so well that the place stayed in business until my husband returned. But she kept the decision making, as well as the bank statements, hidden. I found out why much later on. There was no discussion as there ought to be between business partners, but I didn't know any better, and my husband accepted it as he had the excessive responsibility of his youth to keep his father's farm going.

I meet & marry my husband

I met my husband when I was 18. I was a university sophomore in a Spanish class that was mostly girls. He ended up living on the same block I did. He sat next to me in class and was my Sunday School teacher. I never could resist him, although it took three years and some growing up on my part before I finally said yes. We were married in the big city near my family, and for our honeymoon made the long drive to the rural dairy farm near his family.

My family is warm, harmonious, helpful, communicative, musical and artistic. My husband's family of five daughters and two sons is warm, loud, mocking, determined, and some of them hold mighty grudges. It was not only culture shock for me, it was the type of shock that made me determined, on my part, to establish our own little family's independence even though we lived close to his parents and eventually to the brother and sister that never really grew up.

The four sisters-in-law I loved best knew better than to hang around, so they married and moved far away. I've never forgiven them. Although what has happened to change the family dynamics in the past few years could never have happened without them.

We lived in an abandoned farm house several miles from the dairy. I had no idea how isolated and poverty stricken we really were; I was in love and that carried us through the first few years. My father in law regarded me as something special because I 1) came from a well-off family; 2) My own excellent father was well respected in the church and community; and 3) I had a bachelor's degree. Plus, I constantly rewarded his solicitations of attention with the unthinking admiration he craved.

This protected me for quite awhile.

I try to make sense of what has happened

I'm starting this blog to review the 35 years of my happily married life, overshadowed by the pathology of a narcissistic father in law who we are tied to legally and financially and who lives close by.

I want to start at the beginning with what I have learned and am still learning.