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.