Quotes from Narcissistic Mothers (& support for their victims) Thread 2

[01Name]

Following on from this thread: www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/4610023-to-ask-for-your-quotes-from-narcissistic-mothers?page=39&reply=120137262, started by @itsgoodtobehome as a tongue-in-cheek repository for anecdotes of appalling remarks/deeds from parents/siblings with rampant NPD. It morphed into a place where those of us suffering the effects of such behaviour could share experiences, solidarity, advice and support. I hope this thread can continue the good work of the original. Your voice will be heard; your opinion and thoughts matter. You are welcome and valued here.

Good grief! I’m glad she’s out of that. The damage he’s done must be huge.

Yeah it is, he was abusive in every way you can imagine. She would try and brush off holes in the walls as accidents and marks on her as clumsiness but there's no mistaking a fist shaped hole in the wall is there 🙄

the worst ones gotta be when he went on a night out, called her from outside the front door while she was in bed at 3am. She answered and she was like where are you? And he said. I'll be home soon I'm just fuckinb this girl I met. Hung up. Waited a few minutes then went into the house laughing as if it was a prank and she was hyperventilating on the bed, crying her eyes out, he thought it was hilarious. He's a really evil bastard

That just made me feel physically sick. That’s disgusting. I hope Karma takes him down eventually.

Punched holes in the kids bedroom door the side of a dinner plate, while
the girls were in there sleeping. my sister couldn't afford a new door. The girls made pictures to cover the holes, he's rotten to the core. She's well rid

@Nicola101177 I'm glad you didn't mind me asking that question. I'm also very glad your husband is now supporting you.

It's hard isn't it. I finally went no contact with my mother after she started to show a similar pattern of nasty behaviour towards her only grandchildren that she'd shown towards me all my life. I didn't even go to her funeral in the end (& fortunately it was during Covid so perfect excuse).

Good luck with everything.

I’m gobsmacked there are so very many of us on here.
And so many common threads!

• The obsession with weight. My mum has always ate like a little bird and routinely comments on how big I’ve got or asks if I’ve lost weight. I was a very skinny kid and teen.
• The Churchgoing - for years the Church was a big part of our life. Forced to go every Sunday. Pillar of the community.
• Very intense friendships, many with neighbours, then she’d fall out with them in dramatic fashion and they’d never speak again.
• Childhood trauma and consequently I believe being made the focal point of my grandma’s life - so used to being the centre of attention.
• Enabler in my lovely dad who has been trapped in a coercive controlled relationship with her for 60 years. I have seen her hit him in the past and used to beg him to divorce her when I was a teenager. She is constantly verbally abusive to him.
• The whole hair thing - only in my case it was the opposite. she wouldn’t allow me to get it cut until I was 16 so it grew to my bum. Controlled what I wore until I left school.
• Monologues - really made me laugh in the last thread when someone mentioned getting a cardboard cut out of themselves with an interested expression on it and propping it by her. She fixates on the past so I can repeat some stuff by heart like:

“I was stunningly beautiful but painfully shy. I could have had my pick but then I met your father. “
“Your dad was the Village idiot.”

Never had to work if she didn’t want to and had a nice lifestyle due to dad but nothing is ever good enough.

Couple of things she’s said that spring to mind :

After splitting up with boyfriend ( he dumped me) and travelling home 200 miles on a National Express coach with a single suitcase broken-hearted -
“ I thought it was only a matter of time before he got tired of you and left you.”
Then went back in house and left me on doorstep.

When I was about 14/15, never had a boyfriend and lacking self confidence-
“ The only way you’ll ever get a boyfriend is if you take your knickers off.”

On my very first day back at work from maternity leave after the birth of my first child ( I was going back part time)
“ Well maybe if DH had a better paid job you wouldn’t be going out to work and would be at home with your baby like you should be.”

Oh and also the horrific hypochondria - had me convinced she had cancer more than once.

I feel trapped as my parents are both in their 80s and I love my dad very much. She is frail and he waits hand and foot on her. I’m trying to meet him at mine so I can just see him on his own because the last couple of times I’ve seen her I have felt very down and depressed for days afterwards.

Yes, it’s sad and depressing that these experiences are so common (although remembering that most peoples’ experiences are very different).

After a relationship that was very important to me ended (largely because of her interference), mine said sneeringly “I always knew they didn’t really care for you”.

Oh God, this really made me shudder. What an awful bitch. Many similarities with my mother . The obsession with the past. The ‘ I was so beautiful and thin you know, I could have had my pick, but your father wore me down and I gave in’.
The conviction that no woman should work but be at home with their baby, even if they are a crap mother like she was.
Husband cheated on me and I threw him out. Her only comment was ‘ your father and I have been waiting for this’. No comfort or support She didn’t even come round to see me.
Phoning home once from Uni I wanted to come back for the weekend as I was struggling. ‘ We’re too busy ‘.
When I got married not a single member of my family said anything nice to me . The night before my parents took the whole extended family out for dinner leaving me alone.

Phoned me on my sons first birthday but didn’t mention it was his birthday. When I reminded her she said ‘yes I know that’ in an irritated voice. Then changed the subject to herself as usual.

Again so many similarities.
My mother commands conversation, no matter the topic she will turn the conversation around to what is in her mind within seconds. She loves to re-tell stories ad nauseaum, especially tales about the past, but if I try to contribute she cuts me short with a " why do you want to talk about the past, it's all over".
She is an expert on world travel, despite being to France and Australia ( to visit my sister who emigrated at 16 to get away).
If there is any mention of warm weather, insects etc she will start off the tale of seeing a big spider, and ramble on about her trip.
That used to bother me a little, as I have travelled a lot, including many visits to the tropics, spending a year in SE Asia, so have seen a lot of wildlife and interesting things. I may say- "oh yes, I saw some really huge spiders in Java " or whatever, but she brushes that off " Will be nothing like the ones I saw in Australia", so now I don't talk at all, because I know it is a waste of time, I see her shutters go down and her ears switch off when I speak.
It's not that my mother is lonely- far from it, she has activities most days, and live with me and my family.
She attends a day centre for elderly on a Saturday- bliss for me and OH, she is picked up at 9am, and spends the whole day there, morning coffee and cake, quizzes, bingo, lunch and an entertainer, usually a singer in the afternoon.
My mother has been going around 9 moths and she comes back bright eyed telling us that she is the "light in the room", how everyone's face lights up when she arrives, she is the first to start dancing, and always gets others up too.
Except last week she had a phone call from one of the organisers who was very polite, but asked her to stop pulling the guests up from wheelchairs to get them to dance. That they weren't being "party poopers "( as my mother had called them) but had mobility issues.
My mother was indignant after the call, saying the people didn't mind being encouraged, and that she was often older than them, and she was dancing, so they really don't have an "excuse". She knows everyone in the room looks to her to start the fun.
Where do you start with that? How thick skinned and unseeing can you be.
I just gave a " Oh right".
I am that cardboard cut out, my mother prefers if I don't speak during a conversation.
I work from home, and my mother talks a lot when she is in the same room.
As I have said my earbuds are my escape, I can work and listen to music, audio books, TED talks, podcasts. I can see her mouth move but I can't hear the words.

Yes I didn’t get a nice comment on my wedding day got a rude comment and eye roll about the reception venue, didn’t come to my graduation just got a rude comment about heaving taken no interest for 3 years managed to go to both my brothers though and regularly tell me how great they are for doing a degree, stopped being interested in their grandchildren when they were 7 never ask about them , but tell me about other people children, any good opportunities I have they try and sabotage if not they criticise and ignore. No longer speaking to me I just feel a sense of relief 💐to everyone

They’re all so grim. Mine sounds tame compared to these. She’s covert narc, full of self pity and victim hood but also manages to make everything about her. Grand daughters baptism? ‘I think I’m having a stroke’ daughters wedding ‘make scene about seating arrangements’ granddaughters communion, turn up late start fight make inappropriate comments leave. Yet she literally waltzes through life believing she’s done nothing wrong.
my mother in law is very critical, she dotes on her sons and always claims she’d have loved a daughter but the comments she’s made to me over the years it’s a blessing she didn’t. She also absolutely slates my SIL whose a full time senior nurse because her house isn’t immaculate. I joke when she’s coming ‘better get the duster out’….our wedding venue was looked down upon too, invites weren’t good enough, guest list was interfered with, cash donation was given on the basis ‘you make sure everyone knows I paid for the buffet’…..my dress ‘thank god it’s vaguely like a wedding dress I’ve been terrified you’d just turn up in jeans’ (like literally wtf I do occasionally wear jeans but that’s all) breastfeeding…’you’re not doing it right, I was a natural at breastfeeding you just look uncomfortable’ three hours after me first DD was born after 3 days labour MIL arrives at delivery suite walks in says hello walks straight over to me literally TAKES the baby from my arms, literally just takes her, walks to the other side of the room and says “here’s grandmas baby!” Bloody insane man the lot of them

@speakout Oh yes, “The light in the room” thing.
Mine used to always talk about how popular she was at work and how all the ‘youngsters’ wanted her to go to their parties because she was so popular and entertaining and how, when she was retiring, the company kept begging her to stay because she such an outstanding and irreplaceable employee.

According to her, people also used to regularly stop her in the street to tell her how beautiful and well dressed she was - never seemed to happen when I was with her! - and she always talked about how she knew her friends’ husbands secretly desired her too.

I never worked out whether her ego was so huge that she really believed her own hype (because she repeated fictional stories so often that they eventually fact in her mind) or she was so deeply insecure she had to keep convincing herself and her audience that these things were true.

Mine is an inveterate fibber too, from my childhood onwards. I also wonder whether she has convinced herself these things are true, or is simply (simply!) using these fibs to gain some sort of (non-existent) advantage.

My mum was like that, I call it extreme embellishment. As I got older I started calling it out. One time she drove into a supermarket car park and hit a pedestrian. He rolled slightly on the hood of the car, fell off got up said sorry and walked off. I was there in the passenger seat. I saw it happen.

in her version of events, he rolled over the top of the car, fell off the back. Came to her window apologised and offered to pay for any damage to her car but she told him not to worry about it.

💐 to all of you

So much of this is really familiar here too.

The hair brushing! I’d sort of forgotten about this to a degree. Isn’t it strange that so many of them did this? I have wavy/curly hair and my mum used to insist on dry brushing it sort of up and over my head so it was this huge puffy cloud of frizz. Absolutely hated it. All the other girls at school had neat plaits or alice bands etc. Weirdly she never bothered making us look neat or helping us with our hair when we were small, other than the brushing. Personal hygiene was also not a thing, we were never shown how to wash and I still get a crippling fear now that I’m dirty.

Also making everything about her, even when it wasn’t. I was picked on at school for being quiet and probably a bit strange (maybe because I had cripplingly low self-esteem, also see above, looking like a right scruff). When I managed to tell my mum, she burst into floods of tears and made it all about her. Similarly when I went to a uni interview (a prestigious one, so it would’ve ‘looked good’ for me to go there) and didn’t enjoy the campus/setting, she told me she knew that I’d deliberately failed the interview and that she’d cried and cried all day at work about it.

She did actually attempt to go to at least one counselling session (with the school counsellor where she was chair of governors). This was when I was probably 22 or so, and was trying to put some boundaries in place which she was reacting very badly to. I think the counsellor advised her to write to me about her feelings, because I then received an email saying that she ‘might walk in front of a lorry tomorrow’ and then I’d be sorry.

I can also echo what PPs have said about having a lovely dad and wishing when I was younger that they’d split up. She’s actually mellowed a bit in the last few years but I feel awful for him and what he’s been through in their marriage.

The fibbing thing is unreal- and as WaggledMyAerialAndWolfedMyCustardCreamsothers say and others my mother has actually come to believe her own lies and is mortally offended if I catch her out.
My mother has a hoard of "valuable antiques" given by older deceased relatives.
A few weeks ago she showed me an antique soap dish in the shape of a lilly pad with a frog.
She told me her aunt had been given this as a wedding present in 1905.
It looked plastic to me and when I turned it over there was embossed lettering which read "A Gift from Blackpool 1978"- she was aghast and said her cunning late sister must have swapped it over somehow.
Most of her hoard has been bought from chaity shops in the past few decades, but have somehow authenticated themselves as family heirlooms.
The thing is she really believes these stories, no question or hesitation in her mind.

Ha yes there re-writing of history 😂

Ok here's another one. How good are your mums at buying birthday gifts?

Do they:

a) buy something thoughtful that you love or
b) buy something that they would love themselves
c) buy a generic present with no thought.

Mine is a b/c You basically either got slippers/dressing gown or she would buy items for the home (cushions/pictures etc) but it was all her taste or stuff she would like.
I thought she was just a bad gift giver, but as I got older I realised it's basically she doesn't listen to what you say, isn't interested in your life or has any clue over what you like or dislike. But if she gives you a gift and you are not fawningly grateful holy hell she loses her shit.

I offer option d-

something they think you need or should have:

-make up when you don’t wear it, or a “nice, classy” neutral palette when that’s not your style.

-clothes- “nice, classy” blouses or on the knees skirts from M&S which you can “wear for work” when your work is very casual and you’re a jeans/trousers and t shirt person.

-vouchers so you can appear more “groomed”, eyebrows, nails, spa days, leg waxing etc.

-a nice “winter jacket” to replace the “old thing” you always wear. Bonus points if they then take the old thing to the charity shop because you don’t want it any more now you have the new thing.

basically gifts to make the point that they don’t approve of your appearance. You can’t object because it is reasonably thoughtful and often expensive.

reesewithoutaspoon - b or c.

And lots of them! It's like a random trolley dash through the B&M store- she spends hundreds of pounds.

Two years ago she bought me a toilet seat because "my" old one was a bit wobbly.

Other present fails is a prosecco gift set for my SIL ( she is a recovering alcoholic) and a sign for my adult sign saying "You don't have to be mad to live here but it helps" ( he struggles with severe mental ill health and can't work).
Luckily she showed me the two latter gifts before she wrapped them and I was able to confiscate them.

@Cileymyrus oh yes you're right. I forgot about that one

My heart used to sink when she would phone and say "I got you a present" because it was like handing you a bomb. Because she would sometimes spend a lot of money, it would be totally unsuitable or unwanted. But it was her reaction if you didn't immediately prostrate yourself before her in gratitude
It took years to get her to stop randomly buying household items/clothes for people because she would buy them for her taste and style and then get indignant and offended if they didn't use or display them.

The funniest though was the time she bought Teen DD a sparkly pink lurex cardigan for her birthday (dd was an emo/goth). We knew she couldn't refuse, but it was such a waste of money so we said oh could we have the receipt as it's the wrong size, thinking we could exchange it for something else. Instead, she refused to give us the receipt and went back to the shop herself (at great inconvenience as she never stopped telling us) only to find there was no correct size, so she got a refund and bought 3 cans of Elnett hairspray and gave them to DD. who said very politely "Oh I don't really use hairspray" to which my mum snatched the bag back off her, burst into tears and stormed out of the house. She then later sent a text about how she had given the hairspray to a neighbours daughter and how very grateful she had been.
To this day she never got a birthday present.

I have a Narc father on my side (NC) and Narc MIL (very LC).

Gifts from my dad for years have been random bits of what I can only assume are a hamper gifted to him that are wrapped and sent in a cardboard box to my house. If you think a box of breadsticks, some Italian chutney, a box of dark chocolates and a bottle of balsamic you're on the right track. My brother receives what looks like the rest of the hamper.

MIL every year without fail buys me a houseplant or something for the garden and makes a big show of coming to our house to hand it over in person. More often than not this on my birthday when I'm WFH and they arrive unannounced. I have a talent for killing houseplants and having not done the necessary work on our garden for 3 years any outside plants will sit in a pot until they inevitably die.

Last year we took delivery of my father's box of tat, re wrapped it on the spot and added it to MIl's gift. We can't regift the plants in return being no contact but it gives us huge satisfaction handing over our unwanted, unthoughtful gifts from Narc pa to narc MIL

Reed diffuser from a bargain shop sent via my brother in law, this year as punishment for being LC. Generic card that she couldn’t even bear to write my name on - again, the punishment. Passed it next door they loved it. Felt much better after that.

mine tends to buy stuff without any thought plus the one thing you have said you didn't want or she knows you'd hate. Either that or use presents to play us off against each other. So I would get designer luggage and my sister would get a bag full of charity shop clothes