"The Walls Don't Talk!" - Adventures in Caregiving my Elderly Narcissistic Adoptive Mother

“The Walls Don’t Talk!” 

Adventures in Caregiving my Elderly Narcissistic Adoptive Mother

by Kristy Lee

Shirley is in her 90s and has outlived all of her friends. She is the oldest in her extended family with the least amount of financial security. And after decades of fantastic health, little things are starting to make life more difficult: arthritis in one hand curtailing her lifelong love of sewing and making pies from scratch; an itchy and scaly skin condition; an unruly toenail.

And, she is lonely.

She lives in a building that can hold up to 100 independent seniors where there is always an activity happening or a group of ladies gathering in the lounge area or library. Shirley stays busy maintaining the library; however, she will not join the other residents for a chat. She refers to them as the “ladies who sit on their butts and gossip”. 🙄 

She judges them for having too many children, for being fat and not exercising. This is Shirley’s superiority on display. In her mind, she is too good for the other ladies who live there because she stays active, diets to lose weight and lives her life in a way that she perceives they do not.

Shirley doesn’t like her adopted daughter.  I think it would be fair to say she resents her, competes with her and hates that she is dependent on her. Her daughter never lived up to the delusions of grandeur that Shirley held in her mind.  Her son didn't either, but since he is the golden child, that is not a concern for Shirley.

I am her daughter.

Shirley gets very angry with me when I point out there is expired food in the fridge or her cat’s butt has dried poop on it or when I try to convince her (unsuccessfully) the check that came in the mail is a scam.  

Recently, I escorted her for testing after some concerns with changes in her short term memory. After many tests and a trip to the neurologist, Shirley’s doctor cleared her for continuing to live independently.

Shirley can’t remember where she put her keys or her phone but she remembers everything about her parents and how society “should” run. She has always been rigid, but these days, she could easily snap if the wrong innocent comment is muttered.

The 25 year old neurologist said with the many losses of aging, it’s understandable to be angry. This same neurologist also cut Shirley off when she began non-stop monologuing in response to questions she didn't want to answer directly.  

She was deemed dementia free. (I feel certain none of the medical professionals would actually flag her for narcissism because she is so nice to everybody but me--her favorite abuse victim.)

Go Granny Go!

After a lifetime of running in her car to escape anything stressful, Shirley is also angry because she believes she is “trapped”. Late last year, the collective family decided driving was unsafe for Shirley and others on the road.  

]We took away her “drug of choice”— her wheels. 

After hitting another driver at her independent living facility and denying the driver her insurance card, I received a call from the building manager. Someone needed to pay for the damage to the other vehicle. And someone was refusing responsibility.

I was forced to intervene and learned about the saying, "Hell hath no fury, like a woman scorned."

I knew she would not take responsibility.  Why? Because she never has in the 50 plus years she has been my adoptive mother.

Nothing has ever been her fault. 

Luckily, her insurance company saw it differently.

A year or so ago, there was another car episode at a popular Mexican restaurant when she hit somebody’s parked car and refused to notify the owner.

I tried calmly discussing the matter with her. No dice. She wasn’t paying and her response to me when I pointed out that her large Buick Lesabre may be too big to continue driving was to quip, 

“I don’t see anyone else buying me a smaller car!”

Entitlement.

That has been the noose around the necks of anyone who comes in contact with her but especially my brother and I. He is adopted too. 

In truth, I should have moved away decades ago. I thought I was in the clear when she moved to the east coast around the time I married and put down roots in our Midwest hometown. However, once Shirley retired from her career working with children, she moved back home to be closer to her grandkids. 

Living in the same community with her made it next to impossible to set boundaries. She would 

randomly appear at our house uninvited and expect our full attention.  

However, for a time, she was great with the grandkids when they were young. She was thrilled to babysit, taking them for walks, having them for weekend overnights and driving them to the latest Disney movie.

But when the grandkids hit puberty and began to get minds of their own, the “should,” “oughts” and “Grandma knows best” came out like clockwork.

She began to treat them the way she parented me: with criticism and comparisons, undermining their belief in themselves.

I used to attribute my crappy self esteem to being relinquished and adopted but there was a much bigger influence happening in our adoptive home: I was taught I was never good enough.

As Shirley’s grandkids grew up, and started developing unique talents and interests,

I began to hear how my oldest niece had too big of feet, was too quiet, and never wore the clothes Shirley bought her for her birthday.

Her oldest grandson was favored as he was talkative, handsome and didn’t have a uterus.

It reminded me of how Shirley used to tell me my ears and feet were ugly and how no boy would want to be with someone who “chased them”. "Chasing them" later became a reference to when I was a young adult and my boyfriend lost his license and Shirley used to chastise me for driving to his house.

What she didn’t understand and I have never told her to this day is that people acted like normal humans over there and any chance to be out of her orbit was bliss for me. 

It was a taste of freedom!!

When my son hit his independent teen years, Shirley proclaimed that he spent too much time on his computer and predicted he would never amount to more than a bus boy after he started working at a popular local restaurant. The slam was really about me, though, as it followed Shirley's pronouncement, "you never really had a career!".  

Shirley needs to dominate anyone in a room and have the final opinion. She doesn’t really listen to anyone else and changes the subject when you point out anything that differs from her agenda or beliefs around a topic.  She also tries to act like she hates conflict when in reality, she IS conflict-driven and on her bad days, isn't happy unless she is provoking someone.  

If Shirley ain't happy, ain't nobody happy!

Shirley is stuck in time and believes society should interact the way it did in the 1950s. There is never any reason for sex before marriage. And everything is the fault of people with uteruses. The other half get a pass.

The exception would be my husband who has been nothing but kind to her yet she bashes him behind his back every chance she gets. That is her in a nutshell: talking behind people’s back rather than direct discussions about problems.

The reason? She doesn’t want to solve problems. She either wants to create them for attention or for the sheer enjoyment to watch everyone around her get upset. I have heard her laugh long and hard at someone else’s tragedy. 

And she was emotionally incapable of attuning in any way to the tragedies closer to home, including the untimely death of her husband.

It’s called narcissistic supply.  Instead of getting supply (attention) from her friends and many interests and hobbies, her life has shrunk to her apartment, her cat and church on Sunday. Since there is nothing really dramatic happening organically, it takes bigger and bigger dramas (tantrums) to get the attention she believes she deserves.

Everybody is getting divorced so pay attention to me!

Probably the worst time in my relationship with Shirley was when three couples in Shirley's family were going through a divorce at the same time. She vilified the spouses of her family members, throwing them all under the bus, every chance she could. She was feeding off the pain and drama of it all and became visibly “high” when discussing the latest gossip she heard through the pipeline.

I made a rule back then: no divorce talk. 

Of course she did what she always does, ignored my rule and continued to discuss what I asked her not to discuss.

So I set the ultimate boundary: I stopped talking to her.

Bye bye.

The audience left the building. (*door slam*)

It was a year and a half of grieving our toxic relationship and peace for me.  I called her when I was good and ready.  And she received no explanation until a year or two later when I felt healed enough to tell her why.  

Nothing changed.

"I love my things!" 

Shirley has an unhealthy love for her material things.  

Over the years, Shirley would bombard our family with unwanted things. Magazines, articles, flyers and invitations for her church would mysteriously appear on our dining room table; furniture and knick knacks would be randomly moved.

She had a weird obsession with curtains.  

Every house I ever lived in, she insisted she sew new curtains for me.  I was never allowed to just be like a normal human and just buy some at the store.  No.  We had to go pick out the material and then she got to sew them.  

She never taught me how to sew, cook, do laundry or bake. And any object she gave my family came with strings attached.  Long, thick and tangled strings.

When she downsized to her current smaller apartment, I found unidentified things inside my garage which had been dropped off when we weren’t home.  

Shortly thereafter, my husband changed the garage code.

I want it cuz it's free!

Nowadays, she collects free stuff from the other residents in her apartment building and insists I come pick them up or deliver the unwanted items to other family members.

Explaining to Shirley that I am a minimalist and do not want any of the multiple collections of knick knacks in her apartment triggers her rage.  

She cannot understand why I don’t care about her things the way she does. (by practically worshipping them).

She thinks I am the problem when in reality it's her lack of empathy and refusal to accept my boundaries that is the problem.

What therapists and people without a narcissistic parent fail to understand is that kind requests do not work. In fact, if you want something, often they will work extra hard to do the opposite. If you don’t want something, they will be sure you get more of it.

Any request I made of Shirley was ignored or purposefully violated. 

Shirley does what Shirley wants and it doesn’t matter to her how it affects anyone else.

And I think that may be one of the cruxes of those with a narcissistic personality style. They just run roughshod over anyone who is close to them, all while looking like a kind and helpful, "normie" to those outside of the family.

My husband’s grandma called this, “Home devil, 👿👼street angel”.

Shirley repeatedly says to me: "The Walls Don't Talk!"

But I think what she really means is, "The Walls Don't Mirror Me."

Kristy Lee was born and adopted during the Baby Scoop Era. A multi-ethnic child passed as a white baby, she didn't learn of her true identity until she was in her forties thanks to DNA.  

If you can relate to this essay, I highly recommend the book "It's Not You" by Dr. Ramani Durvasula, Ph.D.