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.