Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [24]
My mother rolled her eyes and exhaled such an exasperated gust of air that it almost caused all the clothing on the racks in the women’s sportswear department to sway. Then she muttered bitterly, as she handed her Visa card to the cashier, “This is the last time I am doing anything like this. I get no pleasure from buying you something I don’t happen to like.”
A few minutes later, as I followed her out of the store, carrying my “present” in a garment bag, she could barely look at me. Somehow I had gone and done it again: ruined Christmas for my mother.
How had it all gone so horribly wrong?
Some of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned in life are the small ones. For example, someone once told me, “When you have your picture taken, smile. If it turns out to be a bad picture, at least you don’t also look like an asshole.”
And then there are big complex lessons. Comprehending the mechanism of the narcissistic personality was one of those for me.
The subject was brought to my attention after I made an appointment to see a shrink, seeking, among other things, an explanation of the aforementioned Christmas mystery, which was really just one of many bafflingly similar incidents that had cluttered my life for years. I had begun to notice that my parents and boyfriends had similar complaints about me. For example, the boyfriend I had at that time would become enraged if I stayed up to watch a movie by myself instead of going to bed at the same time he did, whether or not I was sleepy. He felt that my actions, unconcerned as they were with bearing witness to the innate majesty of his slumber, proved that I cared only about myself. “Why does everything always have to be done your way?” he railed.
This puzzled me because it didn’t sound like what was going on from my perspective. Staying up late didn’t feel like an act of teenage rebellion. I wasn’t refusing to follow orders because I was competing with him for the title of sleep captain. I was only staying up because I knew that something boring on television would eventually put my brain to sleep. Few things in life could be predicted with more certainty.
There had to be, I said to myself, something I was missing. It couldn’t be a coincidence that people in two totally separate areas of my life were hammering me for being “combative and contrarian.” As far as I could tell, there was no common denominator in these very different relationships. It seemed to behoove me to put myself in the shop for repairs.
So I signed up for therapy. At the top of my list of problems was how to make all these fights stop. “I hate fighting,” I said to my shrink. “My mother insists that I intentionally provoke her. The boyfriend says I pick fights with him. Obviously, I’m not totally innocent. If I’m causing all these problems, I need to know how to knock it off.”
“It is not that their opinion of you is the same. It is that they are the same,” said the shrink, turning all my assumptions upside down, while at the same time demonstrating why she was able to charge so much money. “Your parents and your boyfriend are narcissistic, so they cannot tolerate that you are separate.”
I had no idea what that meant.
My parents were a middle-class man and woman who dressed in complementary-colored permanent-press clothing. They were bound to each other by their twin passions of criticizing their offspring and picking fights with waiters. In what way could they be considered similar to my weird, offbeat, creative boyfriend in the cowboy shirt and motorcycle boots?
The shrink gave me a pile of books on narcissism to read, and when I was finished I became obsessed with buying more.