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.