My narcissistic parents were positively obsessed with looks. Both of my parents always dressed “to the nines” during my growing-up years. It was the 80s, when women frequently matched their purses to their brightly colored shoes. My mom took it to the next level. She had matching shoes, purses, and earrings perfectly coordinated to each of her outfits, and she dressed in a formal way to do even the most casual of activities, such as grocery shopping. My dad was the male equivalent; it was almost like he was the stereotype of the quintessential 80s yuppie-type, even though he worked in public education instead of on Wall Street. He wore business suits, shoes with tassels, expensive matching belts. Sure, some of this was dictated by his career...I get that. However, I don’t think I’ve ever seen my father in a pair of sweatpants or a T-shirt, not even to mow the lawn. Even on the most casual of days, like my mother, he’d be in a collared shirt and perfectly pressed and creased slacks, with those omnipresent tasseled shoes.
Many of my own earliest memories involve feeling like a living doll. The family weekly “schedule” revolved around dressing for various occasions, like school and church. As a schoolgirl, my mother had rules about what outfits I could wear on each day of the week. I was required to wear skirts two times per week, as Mom said it would make me feel comfortable wearing dress clothes later in life. Usually I tried to get this out of the way early in the week, as I was a tomboy to the max, and I HATED dressing up. This particularly sucked during the winter, because Mom never relaxed the rules, and we lived in a part of the Midwest known as the “snowbelt.” It was cold, and I’d freeze walking to school with only tights over my bare legs! I was only allowed to wear jeans on Fridays to school, and most of my jeans consisted of colored denim, rather than the basic blue jeans that almost all of my schoolmates wore. On Sunday nights, my mother would come into my room, and make me pick out all of my outfits for the week; this included not only the clothes, but all of the appropriate matching accessories like shoes, colored socks, and plastic jewelry. She made little tags with the names of each day to slip over the appropriate hanger so that we could keep things organized.
Our weekly schedule additionally involved purchasing clothing to be worn, and my parents were extreme shop-a-holics. To this day, their favorite hobby is going to shopping malls to purchase clothing, and they usually rate the virtue of a particular city or town based on the quality of its malls (or lack thereof). I get that a lot of women in particular like to shop - as do I on certain occasions, usually with girlfriends - but in my parents’ case, we went to the mall every weekend, usually on Friday nights. I have to admit, this was incredibly embarrassing as a teenager, because even in high school, I was never spared this ritual. We would have to have a family dinner (at the same restaurant each week) to which friends could never be invited and then go to the mall, following an elaborate ritual in which we would slowly wander from one side of the consumerist mecca to the other, looking at sales, and with me trying to hide my face from my peers as I was restricted to walking between my parents, my mother on one side and my father on the other.
In addition to a weekly shopping schedule, my parents had other shopping schedules that either revolved around Dad’s frequent conferences or my school year. My father traveled frequently for work to conventions geared to school administrators. Mom and I used to come along, as we could get out of the “small town” where we lived and go to the “big city.” Yet we didn’t sight-see, take walks, try unusual restaurants, or go to museums. We’d always go shopping at whatever mall was closest.
Other shopping trips were scheduled for fall and winter, at the beginning of each school semester. I looked forward to these trips, but not because of getting to pick out new clothes. I used to get SO excited for these trips because my mother would bring along my aunt, who was the one relative I felt like I could truly be myself around. (She died several years ago, and I mourned her death greatly, as she was my best friend even as an adult.) Today, my mother thinks my excitement had to do with the clothing, even though that wasn’t the case! My aunt, mother, and I would go to the mall in a nearby city, where my mother would “suggest” outfits to me. My aunt would dutifully follow us into the dressing room; she always just sort of kept her mouth shut through the process. I’d have to model everything for approval to both her and my mother. It was an excruciatingly long process for a child - the picking out of the clothes, trying on outfit after outfit in endless combinations, and then locating the perfects coordinated accessories.
The worst part about the shopping process happened right after we would arrive back home. My mother would make me model each and every outfit, complete with shoes and accessories, in front of my father. He would nod his approval for her taste in picking out such nice clothes, as befitted the daughter of an “important public figure” as himself. I felt invisible, standing there in ridiculously formal clothing, that was nothing like any of the other children wore in my public school. And I knew in my gut that those clothes would set me apart from those children...resulting in yet more bullying. But I couldn’t complain...NEVER. If I did, I was selfish and ungrateful. After all, my parents always discussed how “spoiled” I was, since they bought me “everything I ever wanted” and “never said no” to anything. It made no sense to my young mind - the feeling of guilt, being torn between gratitude for having clothes but not liking any of them because they weren’t me or expressive of my own quirky personality. In addition, I had this feeling of just being an object, something to be possessed and stared at by my father. Today just remembering this feeling makes my skin crawl.
My parents were not only obsessed with the clothes that I wore, but also with what I ate and how my body looked, especially as I grew from a child into a young woman. There was no privacy, and no tact, related to the typical things a girl may encounter during puberty being raised in a healthy family. The first sign of my changing body was, strange as it may sound, rapidly growing feet. By the time I was only 12 or 13, I already was wearing a size 9 in women’s shoes, even though I was not quite five feet tall! My mother and father used to refer to my feet continually as “gunboats.” They made frequent jokes about how clumsy I was, and how I always tripped over my enormous feet. They would point out my feet to relatives, at occasions like family reunions, and to complete strangers...even in restaurants. I remember one occasion where I tripped walking into a Big Boy, and my mom laughed, announcing to the entire restaurant what size of shoe I wore. If I protested, or acted like my feelings were hurt, my parents would tell me that they were just joking and that I was being overly sensitive.
The second thing that started changing as I began to enter puberty was my appetite. I was hungry ALL the time, and by this point, I had started to run cross-country, amplifying the phenomenon since I was training. My parents started making jokes about how much I would eat. I remember one time on vacation in Florida when some of their friends brought us freshly caught swordfish steaks and I ate the whole thing (I was 11 years old at the time, going into the 7th grade). My parents thought it was positively hilarious that I was able to eat the whole steak, and told their friends, who found it equally hysterical. Their friends started calling me “Miss Piggy,” and for years following this, they’d send me little pig trinkets and gifts...things like pig figurines, pig slippers, and socks. I never realized how much this impacted me until relatively recently, when I confronted my own eating disorder. I began starving myself not long after the Miss Piggy incident, and by the time I was 15 and five foot four, I weighed only 85 pounds, limiting myself to about 500 calories a day, much of which was in the form of rice and Gatorade. I also became a vegetarian at this time - also a connection to the steak/Miss Piggy incident. But what has hurt over the years, more than the name calling, is that my parents would never recognize that I had “issues” with eating after this. In a letter from this past January, my mother told me that I never had anorexia, and that since she had training as a social worker, didn’t I think that she would have put me in therapy if I had really needed it? (Ouch!) Hmm. So my patterns of starvation diets as an adult, randomly dropping 30-40 pounds on 1000 calorie a day diets over just a few weeks, came out of nowhere, right? It’s all my fault, of course. That’s right, I’m the crazy one.
The third big change in puberty, was of course, my body’s evolution into that of a young woman. This is scary and exciting all at the same time for every girl; in my case, it was scary and embarrassing, as my parents would focus on each new change with utter fascination, humor, and dread simultaneously. “Don’t dress like a woman, you’re too young,” on one hand. “On the other hand, oh your hips! They’re so big!” (cried aloud to a store clerk at JC Penney’s on a Friday night shopping trip) on the other. “The boys must really have a crush on you,” one day. The next, “Don’t talk to the boys...don’t give them the wrong idea.” And then another, “What’s wrong? Why aren’t any boys into you?” I couldn’t win, no matter what.
Today, the memory that brings up the most revulsion about my body is how my own father would refer to it. When I became a young woman, I evolved from the scrappy little tomboy that used to accompany him to football games and who would play “horse” with him on the basketball court. I think it must have freaked him out to some extent. When I started “developing,” Dad gave me a lovely new moniker: “Huckleberry Twin.” This was in honor of my new, tiny little breasts. I was already incredibly self-conscious of these, as I was a year younger than all of my classmates at school, and I was slow to develop (probably partially due to starving myself?). As a result, I was tiny and child-like in comparison to the other girls, and it was so embarrassing for me, especially in the context of things like the locker room during gym class. The kids at school called me “mosquito bites” because I was so flat-chested. Again, I couldn’t win. At home, I was teased by Daddy, and at school, I was teased as well. No place was safe from my body, an entity completely foreign to me, completely out of control, and completely weird and gross and scary.
As an adult, I’ve always been self-conscious about my body, more so than most women. My last therapist (prior to my current one) diagnosed me with body dysmorphia, a disorder where you perceive your body as being completely different from reality. A good example is that I’d always see myself as a fat cow in the mirror, even though I might weigh about 130 pounds of solid muscle (I’m a distance runner, and regularly compete in events of 50-100 miles in length, so I’m in shape!). If I went shopping, I’d always have to take a close friend with me, because I literally couldn’t tell if something fit or not. By default, in my head, everything made me look fat and ugly. I never saw the connection to my childhood and my family until recently. As narcissists, my parents saw my body itself as an extension of themselves, and so by necessity, it needed to be controlled. When it did something of its own volition - like develop into the body of a young woman with curves - it was weird, strange, odd, and needed to be laughed about, since they couldn’t handle it not being able to be easily controlled. It made them uncomfortable...me becoming an adult out of their control...that is the bottom line.
Just yesterday, I had a crazy experience that has never happened to me before. I was heading out for lunch with two of my friends, and I stopped to obsess about my appearance in the full-length mirror in my bedroom. This is generally a daily ritual - looking at my appearance anytime before I leave the house, and obsessing about how fat and ugly I am, and what I need to change, how much weight I need to drop off of my massive ass, my sagging gross breasts, my frizzy hair. But yesterday was different. I took a look and saw someone unfamiliar. She was pretty cute. She had curves, wore a stylish outfit, and had pretty, wavy hair.
When I waved at her, she waved back at me. “Welcome home,” she said. “I’ve been here all along.”
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