Burdensome Bother

“I wouldn’t think you’d want to come home.”

I’ve not written in a while. Stories are easy when there’s a clear beginning, middle and end. What I realized about narcissism, though, is that most survivors have little shot of making sense of their world while they were under the spell of their abuser.

We don’t know what’s up or what’s down.

A narcissist’s main objective is to scramble your brain. They know how to take everything you think, say or believe and transmute it into guilt, shame or illusion. What you thought was yours becomes theirs. They swallow large chunks of your identity so you don’t know where you start and they begin. They squeeze you out so there’s no room for you, while simultaneously insisting you go nowhere. They do a perfect job of convincing you that you won’t survive without them. And as a kid, you have to believe that because isn’t this the most important person in the world?

I believed that about TWIM. When I was little, I admired her talents and thought she was beautiful. I was proud when people mistook us for sisters when I was a teenager (and she could barely contain her own pride when it happened.) I wanted to be her before I realized that was by design. Since I wasn’t allowed my own interests or independence, all I knew was her.

And at the same time, she couldn’t get rid of me fast enough.

I moved out of my house when I was 17 because she married another alcoholic. He would tell me horrible things about my father or pick me up from work drunk. I didn’t feel safe and she made it clear there was no room for my needs or voice. She relentlessly defended him like she did the man who beat her on a regular basis. The men were always prioritized over the daughter. Always.

I recruited a friend with a truck to help me move some of my things while my parents were at work. I loaded what I could and moved into housing provided by the hotel I worked for at the time. I was sad, lonely, confused, lost. Instead of offering me comfort or counseling, my parents responded by having a yard sale and putting everything else I owned on the front lawn.

I went back before graduating high school. My stepfather got me into a college, but I had to pay for every dime myself. By the third semester I wanted to be as far away from them as I could get. So I quit, my stepfather took back the car he bought me to get to school, and I was officially on my own.

I moved to the city and once lost everything I owned to a fire. I was legitimately homeless and living in my car. TWIM never once told me to come home.

When I got married, she hugged me and said, “Your his now.” I’ll never forget her words because if she added the word “problem” after “his” it would have sounded the same. I brought this up during one of our last phone conversations, a last ditch effort to find some healing and make sense of the things she did to me. I said to her: “You never said, ‘Come home.'”

She didn’t deny it. She didn’t say I was wrong or that was nonsense (like everything else I would say to her.) Instead, her only response was: “I wouldn’t think you’d want to come home.”

As though I preferred the four doors of my 1987 station wagon parked on the streets of an inner city in the middle of October.