I’m not much of a holiday or birthday person, and I generally don’t care all that much about receiving cards or gifts in celebration of such said occasions. In fact, my husband and I rarely “exchange gifts” in a traditional way for things like Christmas or anniversaries. Typically, we do something - like go on a trip, or buy something together that we’ve always wanted. Or we do what is most important to both of us: spend time together.
I realized recently that I’ve spent much of my adult life avoiding participation in holiday events. One way I accomplished this was by choosing a vocation that forced me to work on important holidays, like Christmas. For many years, I was a church organist and musician, so I always had gigs on holidays. This enabled me to avoid having to interact with my family on holidays and gave me a very convenient excuse for not being able to be present for Christmas or Thanksgiving. Plus I made money!
Today, I understand that the real reason I’ve avoided holidays - and that I have never really enjoyed holidays - is because of my experience growing up with two narcissistic parents. My parents were champions at sabotaging holiday cheer of all varieties. The main way they did this was by setting the bar so high that no one would possible ever be able to fulfill all of their expectations. Unfortunately, I was always put under a great deal of pressure to accomplish this task, despite the fact that it was never feasible.
Let’s begin with birthdays. In my home, birthdays were about gifts, first and foremost. If I didn’t give a gift to my parents (let alone the most thoughtful gift imaginable), it was an unforgivable sin. If I was late with a gift or a card for a birthday, this too was a horrible crime. I remember the spring of my first year of college, which was a tough year for me; I caught mono in my first semester, and was incredibly sick for much of that year. I was taking over a maximum number of credit hours, trying to work on a double major in music and Latin (in order to please my parents since I wasn’t allowed to just be a music major), and I was very busy with classes. I was also trying to stay healthy. My father’s birthday is at the end of April, which coincided with the end of the semester. A couple of days before my father’s birthday, I woke up in a panic: “Shit! Dad’s birthday is in two days!” I scrambled immediately to the bookstore and bought him a silk tie emblazoned with my college’s logo along with a nice card, since I knew how “proud” he was that I attended a fancy college with a good football team. Then I went to the local post office center to overnight express-mail the package to the other side of the country, where my father lived.
None of this was a small expense. I think the tie cost around $40, and the cost of shipping overnight was something like $20. For a freshman in college, who worked over every break and holiday to earn spending money for the year, this was substantial. I remember calling home on my father’s birthday, and I asked him if he liked his present. Instead of being happy that I had remembered his birthday, he was incredibly angry with me, as was my mother. The package I had sent overnight had never arrived! I was in the doghouse for months after this, and my parents even as recently as a few months ago have reminded me about how I “forgot” my dad’s birthday that year...back in 1995!!! They even accused me of lying about mailing the package in the first place, which I remember hurt my feelings a great deal that first year of college, when I was just 17.
The whole focus on gift giving in my family extended to every holiday - Christmas, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Easter...even St. Patrick’s Day, despite the fact that we were Protestants, not Catholics! When I was a little girl, my mother would go overboard with decorating the house, and would spend scads of money on trinkets and ornaments related to every holiday theme one could imagine. Outsiders often thought it was “cute” how she would give outlandish gifts to me for things like Valentine’s Day. The crux, however, is that the gifts she would give would be gifts that she would have wanted to receive, or gifts that she thought I should have. I remember being given incredibly juvenile clothing as a teenager (to try and keep me as a young girl) when I was in high school; I’d go to school at age 15 or 16 wearing things like pink polka-dotted coveralls, and then change in the bathroom into a pair of jeans so I wouldn’t be totally mocked for looking like I was 8 years old. As an adult, I would receive sensible business-casual attire from places like Talbot’s, even though that’s never how I actually dressed. In fact, Talbot’s was my mother’s favorite store. There would also be occasions where Mom would come to visit over holidays, and she’d want to take me shopping. If I picked out something that I liked, she would look at it and say she wouldn’t buy it because she didn’t like it: “Ugh! That’s ugly. I’m not paying for something like that!!!” I always felt so damned guilty about all of this, like I was ungrateful for not liking Mom’s gifts to me over the years. Now I realize that the gift-giving had to do more with my mother than it ever did with me. Narcissists are apparently notoriously bad gift-givers from what I’ve been reading. They either don’t give meaningful gifts, or they give gifts that they would want themselves. In my parents case, they were definitely of the latter variety...buying me business casual attire as a woman because they didn’t approve of the fact that I had become a rocker-musician type.
Christmas was the ultimate holiday for my parents. When I was young, my mother started amassing a crazy collection of themed Christmas trees with coordinated ornaments and wrapping paper to match. She had a teddy bear tree, a cat tree, a family tree, a star tree, a fruit tree...any kind of tree theme you can think of, she had. If you brought packages to the house for Christmas, you couldn’t wrap them ahead of time because they wouldn’t match the stupid tree. I think at one point she had seven or eight of these elaborately themed trees in the house. Decorating the trees was a lengthy ritual that began each year around Halloween. Every weekend would be consumed with putting up yet another tree, and making sure that it and all of its coordinated ornaments and ribbons looked absolutely perfect. And the trees did look perfect - so perfect, in fact, that I was afraid to touch any of them, like they were each some kind of sacred museum piece. The weird thing was that my mother never really seemed to enjoy the trees. Neither did my dad during the process of putting them up; he’d bitch and moan like crazy about adding the hundreds of lights that the grueling job demanded. Yet he would beam with pride anytime any neighbor would pop over during the holiday season; he would talk about how wonderful all of the trees were, and how my mother was so talented and creative. To an outsider, maybe it looked pretty...but I would guess some probably thought it was kind of weird or even creepy because this was really over the top. You can’t even imagine...
The day of the holiday itself was as equally regimented as the tree ritual. I would be forced to wear some frilly nightgown on Christmas Eve (which always made me feel horribly uncomfortable), and wake up before dawn. We’d have the same breakfast every year and ooh and aah over mountains of packages underneath every perfectly trimmed tree. Then it was lunch, and then Dad would sleep for the rest of the day. This sounds innocuous enough, I suppose. But these are the weird parts: 1. I was never permitted to share a holiday with anyone else. No other friends, no neighbors, no other relatives. Holidays were “for family only” so there were no phone calls (beyond the scripted approved ones to grandparents) or contacts with the outside world. 2. I would have to “model” all of my clothes that I received for my father; this continued until I went to college. It totally creeped me out. I’d go into the bathroom and try on one infantalizing outfit after another, come out and walk around in front of my father, who silently nodded his approval. 3. There would always be some kind of crazy argument, usually between my mother and father. My mom would get angry at my dad for spending too much money on something (usually a big ticket item like a car or a piece of diamond jewelry), then proceed to yell at him, and then they’d both pout silently for the rest of the day. Sometimes the arguments would be directed at me, especially if I wasn’t as enthusiastic as I should have been about something, and then I would be told that I “ruined the holiday” that year for both of them.
Invariably, the holiday would almost always end miserably due to one of the above. Mom and Dad would be upset that none of the other family members cared enough to drop by (even though they made it clear that we were “an island” during the holidays). They’d be mad at me if I didn’t like an outfit that I was purchased. And they’d often end up at each other’s throats about something. I remember this heavy vibe every Christmas, just dying for the day to end already so we could move on and so that awful pressure for the “perfect day” would go away. Strangely, though, the next day, Mom would be crying about how sad it was that this beautiful holiday was already over. We’d take down the trees in the days following New Year’s, and she’d be positively despondent in her apparent grief.
As an adult in my twenties, I would approach every holiday with a feeling of dread. I even made the mistake on numerous occasions of inviting my parents to have holidays with myself and my husband. One particular year, when we were both in graduate school, we decided to host a Christmas party and dinner on the day itself for many of our friends who didn’t have a place to go (we knew a large number of international students who couldn’t afford to fly home, for example). I thought it would be fun for my parents to meet all of our friends from school! However, my parents sulked in a corner for the duration of the entire party, and barely spoke to anyone. They would only speak if spoken to, and even then, would offer one or two word responses.
I didn’t make that same “mistake” twice, and in later years, would reserve those holidays for just my husband, myself, and my parents. Yet even then, they’d never be happy, no matter what I did to prepare for their arrival, how much I decorated, or what gifts I purchased. Nothing was good enough. And why? Because “it just wasn’t like it used to be” when I was a little girl. Those days were apparently the glory days of all holidays and could never, ever be surpassed no matter to what ends I went to make things enjoyable for them.
So why am I talking about Christmas on the first day of May? I’ve realized that holidays in general are a huge trigger for me, and last week was my father’s birthday. For the first time in my life, I didn’t drop everything to buy him some kind of thoughtful gift and card. I was actually out of town for a few days and ran out of time. It probably sounds terrible to someone (who doesn’t understand NPD or the effects of a parent with NPD on a child) that I’m proud of myself for not dropping everything to acknowledge my father’s birthday. But I am very proud. For once, I’m acting normal! Gosh, my own in-laws are frequently a day or two late with my birthday card and I don’t get upset. My in-laws don’t have panic attacks at the thought that a gift for me for my husband’s and my anniversary might be - gasp! - a day late! (I don’t accuse them of not loving me!) I’ve acted this way in the past due to my parent’s behavior, because if I was even one day late with a card, I would be told that I didn’t care. “You don’t love me, otherwise you would have remembered and been on time with your card.” How many times did I hear that growing up?
I’m at a point in my recovery now that if I hear this phrase, I’ll be irritated, but I won’t be angry with myself. I’m human, and I can only do the best I possibly can. And I’m OK with that!
0 comments:
Post a Comment