The Mirror Crack'd

My first passport photo was taken for a dual passport I shared with my mother when I was 12 and she was 33. In 1975, the U.S. Passport Office allowed a parent and child to travel on the same passport, so my mother and I went to Europe for a whirlwind 15-day, seven-country guided tour carrying the same drab green passport and staring solemnly out of the same black and white photograph. Since my mother and I were nearly always together in those days, finishing each other’s sentences, answering the phone in voices with identical inflections, and harmonizing perfectly when singing together at the piano almost nightly, it made sense that we’d share an international identity and that our two images would meld into one on our most important official and universally-recognized document.

My mother was a high school English teacher for 37 years. She began at age 23, straight out of Cal Berkeley, freshly divorced from my father, with a toddler to care for and almost no money. She was a very talented pianist and singer as well as an enthusiastic and vivacious young teacher, so she never lacked for friends, activities, or boyfriends. I spent a lot of time with my wonderful grandmother while my mother was teaching, dating, or performing, and Grandma was the infinitely patient and loving influence in my childhood, the gentle hand, the quiet homebody at the center of my world, while my mother was the dynamic, exciting spitfire zooming in circles around me. I adored them both. But while my grandmother was devoted to me and could only see the best in me, my mother was exciting but mercurial, generous with praise but also with criticism, laudatory of my talents yet loudly dismissive of my feelings, quick to embarrass me with her bragging about my accomplishments and with public commentary about what she considered my oversensitivity and klutziness. She saw me as an extension of herself, her talents, her interests, and her public face.

As a school teacher who taught only a mile from her home, my mother considered herself something of a public figure and an example to the community, and she made it clear to me that I must always be above reproach in order to reflect well on her. I was never to correct her before others (or in private, actually), and I had better look good and behave appropriately at all times. She wangled any secret thoughts or feelings out of me and then berated me for having them when they were not in accord with hers. To disagree was disloyal, to tell others of my disagreements with her was betrayal. I learned more of her secrets than is appropriate for a child to know about a mother; it was my job to hear her troubles and bear them with her, build her up, support her, soothe her and humor her. I was there to give her strength during her weakest, scariest moments and then help her present to the world the illusion that she was always strong and happy. And she presented herself to the world with panache; she was an excellent and exciting teacher, upbeat and bubbling over with enthusiasm and warmth for her students, pushing them to work harder and better than was expected of them elsewhere. As long as she was undisputed queen of the classroom and her mastery was acknowledged, she was a generous, bold, and confident monarch and a fine educator.

Mom built me up and took great pleasure in my accomplishments, as I did in hers. She provided me with beautifully tailored clothing created by her own hands, and I received compliments on my clothes regularly from the time I was a toddler until I was in college. I joked with her that my reply to the hundreds of compliments I received over the years on my mother-made wardrobe had become rote: "Thanks-my-mother-made-it." She showered me with gifts at birthdays and Christmas, and she took me with her on trips and to plays and special events. She shared her enthusiasms with me and loved me devotedly, but she loved me as an extension of her own being and expected me to mirror the best of herself back toward her and out toward the world. She took great umbrage at any attempts on my part to express an opinion or taste or feeling that did not accord with hers, and punished me for diverging from her path.

She would not acknowledge her lack of boundaries or her inappropriateness, of course. Nor would she admit to being self-absorbed or insensitive to me when she ran roughshod over my plans or opinions. She would instead tell me how unkind and hurtful I was to question the perfect sensitivity and understanding behind her actions. For her to acknowledge that she sometimes based her actions on self-serving motives and was not always aware of or sensitive to the needs or desires of others would have been on a par with declaring herself to be a serial killer. In her mind, I must agree that she was exceptionally and exquisitely aware of all her motivations and of the needs of others, or, if I were to disagree or challenge her behavior, I must be implying that she was a grasping, selfish, cold-hearted user. To try to discuss with her the pain she caused by her behavior was to be accused of callousness and cruelty toward her. There could be no middle ground: I was either for her or against her.

That is the way of the narcissist.

As I grew older, my mother would come to my home and rearrange my furniture while I was out of the room. She cut me off in mid-sentence when she found my opinions too intricate for her attention span or too tiresome for her mood. She questioned me on my choices of food, clothing, furnishings, and decorative items, and would expect me to justify any opinion that differed from hers, often repeatedly, wondering when I would finally see the error of my ways and see the wisdom in valuing her choices above my own. She refused to refer to a new baby born to a relative by his true name for over a year because she did not care for his parents’ choice, and, even in the presence of his parents, she would only call him by his middle name until I finally insisted that she was being disrespectful and thoughtless and could not rename people at will to suit her tastes.

My mother’s need to have me mirror her tastes and thoughts, and her fear of my disagreement with her (even when I was silent), led to my feeling great internal conflict at an early age, and to fearing that I had only two choices: I could be true to my mother and have her on my side, or I could be true to myself and be seen by her as betraying her, and be punished and lonely as a result. Since I had been her astonishingly apt protégée and had basked in the glory of her approval by being as agreeable, hard-working, supportive, academically successful, talkative, and mature as I possibly could throughout my childhood, I had endeared myself to her and grown exceptionally close to her at the expense of fitting in with my peers. I had to choose her over them, to fit in with her needs and to see the world through her adult eyes, and that had made me ill suited to the job of appealing to other children. I had to choose whether to be loyal to children, whose tastes and behaviors were nothing like those of my mother and her friends, and who were more directly nasty to me than my mother was, or to be loyal to my mother and her needs. I had no siblings, and my only nearby cousins were either significantly older or much younger and showed little more than tolerance of my company. My vocabulary and interests set me apart from other children, and my physical ineptitude and love of food made my body feel unwieldy and traitorous, and other children who envied my ease with schoolwork and comfort with the teachers latched on to my failings and would not let go. The more they tripped and taunted me, spread lies about me, hurled wet newspapers at me as I walked home, spit in my hair, or broke into my locker to steal my books and ruin my gym clothes, the less I wanted to be a child, and the more I wanted to be an adult and in adult company.

Though my mother berated me regularly, she also praised me often. She humiliated me before others but she also told me how exceptional I was, how bright, how kind, how talented, and I felt needed and important to her happiness even as I feared not being good enough to merit her approval. I fought to keep her wobbly spirits afloat and her mood high enough to avoid being berated again as she felt into a funk. I felt frightened but valuable when called into service as her therapist while she wept on my shoulder about her very grown-up personal problems. I hid my own depression from her to try to avoid bringing her down, and out of fear that she would not buoy me up as I did her.

Over time I came to believe that a nightlong migraine was an unfair and extreme price to have to pay for an afternoon’s visit with my mother, and that it wasn’t actually my job to look after her anymore at the cost of my own health and happiness. To recognize the pain she had caused me by forcing me to run interference with the world on her behalf, and to have her refuse to acknowledge what she had done, made it hard for me to forgive her for putting me into such an inappropriate and damaging role. I tried to discuss it with her, but her defenses and fears were such that she could not acknowledge any error without feeling she must take all the guilt of the world on her shoulders. Those with narcissistic personalities share this trait: for them to acknowledge any chinks in their armor is to see themselves as completely unarmed against the world; to apologize for any error is to accept responsibility for all the world’s suffering. There is so much fear that a bit of empathy with others will flood them with more suffering than they can handle that they put up intricate barriers against such feelings. I could write her ten-page letters and have her ignore the eight pages in the middle entirely, or, worse, have her put them away unopened, or throw them in the trash if she didn’t want to see what I had written. I hedged my feelings with kind words, praise for all she had done well, gave careful and lovingly reasoned explanations of why things she’d done were problematic, and offered hope about the future happiness we could share once she chose to discuss our history honestly, but she would ignore my every expression of difficulty or desire for discussion or acknowledgement, talk around the problems, or, more frequently, refuse to engage with me in any discussion of them.

Right up until the sad end of her life when she died of lung cancer, there were still some days when we meshed wonderfully, finished each other’s sentences, laughed loudly over shared memories. There has never been anyone else in my life with whom I could toss out favorite lines from plays or poems and know they would be recognized and enjoyed. Nobody else has swooned over and stood crying before beloved paintings with me, or sung a duet with me with great passion while sight-reading an intricate Leonard Bernstein score and accompanying me on the piano at top speed with barely an error. On those days I loved feeling like we were extensions of each other, cherished having had so exuberant and expressive a mother with such lavish tastes and grand talents. I miss having been so important to someone of such intensity. I still grieve my difficult childhood, the fear I learned from knowing too much about the world and its sorrows at too early an age, and the sadness that came with feeling I could not count on anyone else to prop me up when I was sad, or keep me safe from loneliness and humiliation. But I also miss those glorious days I shared with my mother, our shared history, and the feeling of being connected with another human being on so many levels. I grieve what I lost when she died, and I grieve what she could never give me while she lived.