My very own Mommy Dearest - through the bottom of endless glasses darkly
A true story of life with a narcassist
Blanche lived under a tyranny of self-punishment and she liked it to flagellate all those around her. She was primed to go off in the midst of those little but cataclysmic moments that puncture every day.
At those moments she would transmute from a small frail, bony, scrawny bird into a snarling trapped alley cat ready to lash out with its chipped ruby-red claws.
And then she could take you on a roller-coaster of a trip of her choice, bouncing down the many thunder roads in her topography of misery. Anything went, accusations flying, finger-pointing, rapacious attacks on your pysche and sensibilities…
But, come what may, it would always end in buckets of crocodile tears and Judas-sounding protestations of love and caring.
A form of peace would descend.
Until the phone rang for instance. It could be a hapless double-glazing salesman for instance… “Hillo? Yes, this is she, Blanche Aofie… how may I help you?”
And that salesman must have thought his birthday had come early – a little old lady had picked up the phone.
It wasn’t his birthday. This wasn’t some old lady waiting to be duped over double-dealing double-glazing by a salesman!
No! This was Blanche!
Seventeen minutes and 43 seconds later he cut off his own cold call. The dole! Homelessness! Drinking cider on a park bench! Anything was preferable to facing Blanche in full-flow a second longer.
He already knew all about her glaucoma, cataracts, impacted tooth joint, frozen spine, broken elbow, hearing difficulties, stents, vulnerability to Omicron, how the taxi she used to take her to hospital to get her bunions done for free, smelt like sneezes, how her doctor had let her down by retiring early, her low-blood pressure tablets didn’t work well with her high pressure ones and how she couldn’t have a Stenna Stairlift put in because she’d ‘have to have the leaded-lights on the landing removed’.
Oh then there is her shrunken mammorial gland …
It’s not right is it..?
Anyway Blanche was the reasons the man laughingly called my father drank like a drunken trout and she was certainly a contributing factor in my head-long plunge into decades of headonistic destruction.
Now she is gone.
And all that’s left of her is a big fat question …
Why would a women who flaunted her career as a carer, somebody who bragged she worked to change the pyschology of drunks, addicts and others damaged by their disfunctional families… who was a school governor, who worried about victims of child sex abuse publically…
Why would she betray her own family, behind her own closed doors, with her secrets, lies, manipulation, agendas and undermining fury and accusations?
She was never diagnosed as mad or mentally ill, although everybody had known she was for at least forty years … but Blanche came across right. She was very working-middle class, had an empathetic voice and good manners towards others. She seemed to care - she’d done a lot of book learning.
And cried copiously at films about horses and dogs.
But if she wasn’t mad or mentally ill, then she was just a twisted vicious narcassistic betrayer who was so busy eating away at the hearts, souls, confidence and happiness of those she was so desperate to claim she loved, that she never once had the courage to take a look at herself and the damage she was doing.
And do you know, the last thing she said to me before she died was ‘you, yes you - you have ruined the whole of my life…’