I'm so done with her. She's the most narcissistic person I know.
Narcissism will be no longer be a disorder as defined by the DSM-IV.
As it turns out, narcissism is trendy:
Well, whatever. This post is going to be all about me and I'm going to skip flogging myself. If that makes you a little bilious already, better to head on over to etsy for some pouncing instead.
Christmas vacation started with our usual romp to visit our families of origin in the Clara City area. The holiday always begins this way for my sons, with a weekend trip to exchange gifts and enjoy visits with grandparents and aunts/uncles and cousins. It was a quiet, warm gathering with in-laws but all was not so well with my own family. Without sharing all the gritty details, I can share what everyone shares about these situations: it wasn't my fault.
The specifics don't matter. What matters is that Mom died, and with her was supposed to go all the drama and emotional butchery of decades of alcoholism. And then there was a stepmother and that was something new and dreadful to adjust to, and yet it worked out. This year was supposed to be the year that things would be good again. I missed Dad and anticipated my delightful nieces with feverish anticipation. And yet I found myself, half-jokingly and half-wishfully asking him, "Are you sure they are my brothers? All these years I've wanted that old joke about being adopted to be true but damn it, we all have to look so much alike." I was trying to joke my way into comforting him, but it sounded as sad as we both felt.
Tonight I listened to a podcast of NPR's Fresh Air and heard Terry Gross asking Carlos Eire about his experience as a Cuban-American refugee. Eire was a child and in one foster home he suffered from malnutrition that caused his back to grow askew. He discussed how he never saw himself in a mirror and didn't realize anything was really wrong with his physical form until long after, when his aunt arrived in the states and said almost immediately, "What happened to your back?" He later was shocked to see himself in a picture and only then understood the extent of his physical malformation. He still has the picture, Eire says, and looking at it still upsets him.
Visiting home last weekend and having this typically bellicose experience with my brother and finding myself defending my father and wondering to high heaven if I was doing the right thing and examining and re-examining my actions and motives--all of this left me looking at a picture of us for the first time and realizing (suddenly and too late) that with or without her, we are malformed. Horrified, I realize that we are significantly, at our core, irrevocably and without question, damaged. We will never walk normal. We will never be normal. We are broken, ;ike a back that is bent from malnutrition. It makes it difficult to look at one's self straight on without shuddering.
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