Parenting with a Narcissist

Okay, so he’s feeling sorry for himself. I made the mistake of suggesting I get her a couple hours early today so I could give her some educational instruction before taking her to dance class, and he emphatically refused. He wasn’t giving up one hour of his time with her, even though it’s Tuesday, and a school day.

I could hear him puffing up his chest as he said, “I’ve sacrificed a lot of my time with her for you. You’ve had her a lot…”

For me. I’ve had her a lot. Does our child factor anywhere into this?

What kind of a world does a narcissist live in? That he can give her up for his own reasons and resent me for helping him out by taking her and then expect her to sacrifice her education to make up for his lost time is beyond me.

You know, you have to steel yourself when your ex is a narcissist. There’s no other way. You can’t not have contact with him, because of your child. And you can’t reason with him or expect him to be anything than he is.

I had my say with him, but I didn’t lose control and I didn’t get all freaked out within myself about it.

I’m resigned.

Not in a defeatist way, but in a “I got to save my sanity way.”

I think I get the angriest when I assume he’s normal, when I expect him to be normal and then his behavior just blows me away.

But his behavior is normal for a personality disordered individual. This isn’t shocking. It’s to be totally expected. And I get the most upset, when I say, “How can he……?”

Well, the answer is because he’s a narcissist and that’s what narcissists do. Period.

End of discussion. Forget all the logic in the world, all the reasoning, or the why’s and don’t you see’s. It’s irrelevant. Truth doesn’t matter, logic doesn’t matter, reason doesn’t matter and God, responsibility sure as hell doesn’t matter.

Forget about wasting any energy on trying to understand or being incredulous. That’s it. Would you be incredulous that the crocodile eats animals it ambushes or can crack your leg in half with its tail? That’s the nature of the beast.

Maybe if I can be at peace about that, maybe I can get into the practice of letting his remarks roll off my back. He is what he is. I need to focus on what I can do, not what he does, and put my energy into doing what is best for myself and my child under the circumstances I’m dealt.

I don’t want to be a reactionary. I don’t want to jump and dance at the tug of his strings. I want to make him insignificant to me emotionally, which means he doesn’t push my buttons anymore.

I’m tired of being outraged at his behavior. It is an outrage. Narcissism is a disease of the outrageous. Not being able to care for anyone means not being able to care for anyone, including your own child.

He’s going to say what he’s going to say, and there’s nothing I can do that will ever change that.

Thick skin. Thank God, it’s not something I have to put on every single day of my life. If it hurts to have to deal with this contrast of sweet freedom, when I’m not with him, and then having to deal with his stink again, just imagine what it’s like for my daughter. She’s healthy enough to know just how abused she is when she’s with him.

It may sound weird, but that’s a consolation to me. I’m not happy she has to suffer like this, but I’m grateful she doesn’t think it’s normal and she isn’t deluded into thinking this is love…like me when I was as a child.

Oh, hell, like me a few years ago. Better late than never, but better early for my DD.

…because I’m being more myself.” That’s what she told me last night.

That’s really sad, but it’s not to be unexpected. More and more, during each day I have her, she has to express some anxiety, some resentment toward her father and distress at having to be with him.

She says she hates having to be another person when she’s with him.

I hate it, too. But I’m grateful she’s consciously aware of it, and aware that she is healthy enough to where having to wear a different face for him really grates on her.

But he’s just a jerk. I can’t believe he’s…well, I guess I can…but I can’t believe he’s on this “She’s (me) using schooling her (our daughter) as an excuse to keep her away from me” kick again. But he is. DD told me she overheard him saying that to someone on the phone.

He’s said it to me too.

Can you believe that? Not that wanting to see to it that she gets her educational instruction during the weekday would have anything to do at all with her educational benefit. No, it’s my diabolical plot to keep her away from him. I’m infringing upon his entitlement to have her and her reason for living – to keep him company…we’re talking about the inconvenience of a two hour session, folks…oh, and the 15 minute drive to and from.

Now, if he has a poker party to go to, or a poker night at some bar, or a really great social event, or extra work he wants to do to make more money, then that’s okay to give her up, to sacrifice his time with her for. And he has no problem expecting me to have her, which I’m always happy to. BUT to place her in the hands of someone (me) for the benefit of her education? What an injustice!!!

I mean, he has to make up for the time he doesn’t have her, doesn’t he? Her education for his gratification? That’s a fair trade.

You know, I can deal with his nonsense. It’s annoying and irritating as hell, but as long as I can tend to, at least, some of her needs, then that’s just what I have to do. But what really gets me is the growing emotional abuse she has to go through when she’s with him, and the anguish it causes her.

She loves being herself. She loves being with me, because she can be herself. The contrast is tortuous to her.

It’s the way it has to be for now. If so, then I have to help her develop the tools and have access to them. Today she goes in to see her counselor. It’s a start beyond me.

It’s been a while…living or dealing with a narcissist can be draining. I’ve been very busy lately, but more than that I’ve been trying to cope with the periodic and unpredictable outbursts from my Ex, and I had gone through a doozy of an assault just a while ago. It’s taken me this long to even be able to write about him again.

We had had a pleasant conversation in the morning about pick up time, and how I was going to tutor her for the afternoon. I came walking out of the center seven…count that, that’s seven minutes late, and asked if he’d go in while she finished up a task, so I could leave for work (which I was going to be a little late for).

He flew into a rage – his face, his voice, that look, that used to make my breath grow shallow and fast – and started ranting about how I said 4:00 and he expected to be here and leave at 4:00, and now he has to go in, and I’m always late, always late.

And he’s saying all this stuff as he’s angrily getting out of the car with his rage face on, and I’m stunned and disorientated and I don’t know what to say and I don’t know what to do and like a fool, I start to reason with him, as if he’s a sane person who’s just misunderstanding something or having a bad day, and once he realizes what a mistake he’s making, he’ll suddenly change his tone because facts actually matter to him.

Which of course, is pure fantasy, and the kind of stuff that keeps you glued to a narcissist for years and decades – that assumption that they’re normal and just don’t understand and if they only did then they’d change, because the truth really matters to them.

But it doesn’t. So of course, he just hurled one unreasonable accusation after another at me, and none of it made sense, because none of it had to. Because it had nothing to do with me being seven minutes late. Because it’s so much easier to hurl false accusations against someone or take one innocuous incident and blow it up into a major outrage, than to admit you feel entitled to lounge around all day with your child rather than meet your responsibilities as a home schooling parent, and feel put upon that your ex would be so selfish as to sacrifice her hours off in the day to drive way out of her way to tutor your child in your stead.

That would make you look like a jerk, which you are, and you can’t have that. So…let’s throw all the rage you feel at this affront to your entitlement at the target over her egregious offense and make her offender.

I know, I know…I know I have to deal with these things with him, but what really, really took me aback and sent me back a few notches in my healing is that it was so sudden, so out of the blue. Sometimes I can see it coming, and even though I know he can change on a dime, it hadn’t happened in a while, and the viciousness and intensity of his hostility was so great and such a contrast to his earlier friendly demeanor, just a few hours earlier, that this whole sudden appearance and experience with Mr. Hyde over something I couldn’t have even imagined would have been a trigger, just floored me.

I screamed in the car on the way to work and tried to call someone, almost anyone to vent to.

I was mad at him, but I was mostly mad at me. I had lost my center. I wasted precious time arguing with him. I set myself up trying to reason with him, which just gave him opportunity to take more cheap shots. Read more…