Raised by a Narcissistic Mother
A tale of growing up with a textbook narcissist for a mother and an abusive alcoholic for a father.
My mother was a narcissist. Everything was always about her, and I mean everything. It just took me 22 years to see it, because my father was an abusive, violent alcoholic. I was too busy hating him to see her constant manipulations and gaslighting.
My father was awful, to be sure, and often beat me with his belt when I misbehaved (and sometimes when I didn’t) but my mother was almost as awful in her own way. She would always tell me we were going to “run away” from my father, but of course we never did.
Instead, she would drive me to all the bars in Carthage, Illinois, where I grew up, and the surrounding cities, looking for him and his various girlfriends when he didn’t come home at the end of the day from his job as a cop. She even dragged me into more than one of those bars, to confront him, never for a moment considering what that might be like for a scared little boy.
She shared too much information with me, knowledge I certainly didn’t need at a young age. I was her emotional support, and I shouldn’t have been. It’s called emotional incest or enmeshment, which happens when a child is required to take on an adult role in their relationship with…
