Ina Chadwick shares a painful story about growing up with a narcissistic mother and a father who tried his best to protect his daughter.
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When my father drove dead drunk up the Bronx River Parkway with his hat pulled over his eyes, while the passengers trembled with fear that if expressed aloud enraged him even further, my sister and I grasped each other and whimpered. My grandmother sobbed and begged for mercy in Yiddish.
If my mother shouted, “Nat, you’re a drunk,” with whatever slight vision he had left from beneath the brim of his fedora, he threatened to pull the hat over his whole face, and then jerk the wheel just to show my mother he was in charge.
To be in charge of my mother was an impossible task. To be her child meant you had to hold on to who you were or you would be lost in the narcissism of a gorgeous woman with a mighty brain, voluptuous body, and the ability to convince you that unless you adored her, respected her, obeyed her every word and never annoyed her, you too could be the woman she was. Or you could be nobody.
There was no one as good as she was.
My father and my mother had, by force of nature and by the institution of marriage (and of course like moths to the proverbial flame), entered into a power struggle that he would eventually lose just when he was on the verge of “detaching” (a word he’d never have known in the 1960s). Or as he said, “giving up and filing for divorce.”
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To be her husband, her lover, her sibling, her mother, that was difficult. To be her friend? She had none. She burned through friendships, busted up the couples friendships she and my father had, caused family rifts that still exist 70-something odd years later, and in general behaved to bullet-point DSM diagnostic listings for a score of one hundred percent: Narcissistic Personality Disorder checklist.
My father and my mother had, by force of nature and by the institution of marriage (and of course like moths to the proverbial flame), entered into a power struggle that he would eventually lose just when he was on the verge of “detaching” (a word he’d never have known in the 1960s). Or as he said, “giving up and filing for divorce,” 23 years into this union, his first marriage, her third. He was 56 when he told me this.
He told me in confidence at a lunch at fancy restaurant in New York He was quite uncomfortable talking intimately with me as he was one of those “rough and tumble” kind of guys from the “rat pack” era. In fact he was acquainted with many of those celebs and dealing with his daughter’s depression, mine, at age 16 forced him to talk of being a “failure,” he said that day. I actually think we were at the Four Seasons, but I remember mostly his gentle hand on my hand, and his apology for being a terrible father and for avoiding coming home every night until he thought we’d all be asleep, and,worse, he couldn’t come home without being drunk. His strategy was a disaster. He told me he had panic attacks and felt badly that I now had them too.
There was always a scene when he came home, nightly. Blame, remorse, and toward the end, physical rage from my father after my mother smacked him in the face when he wasn’t drunk. A fight over who may have stepped on her rose bushes at our summer house. He responded by hoisting the top of an antique tiger-maple hutch filled with ironstone dishes and hurling it across the room. I ran out of the house and sat far away beneath the weeping willows, wishing them both dead.
Power is a word I had to explore fully when I was pulled over DUI not that long ago. The woman cop, who always must follow a male cop to a location where there’s a woman perpetrator, automatically took on a belligerent tone and unnecessary force with me.
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Anyone could step back and see how they enabled each other, how my mother’s resentment of not having her life partner home at night to deal with her two little girls: one the rambunctious me, and the other my concernedly-withdrawn sister. How his esthetic was all about people understanding each other. (He was a well-known labor mediator.) Hers was about creating tranquil surroundings laced with just enough luxury and plenty of good taste. Expensive. And to have all of the neighbors envy her. She was a bird watcher and a painter and read copiously, several library books a week.
My parents were wildly attracted to one another. You could feel the sizzle in the room when they were at their best. “He’s impotent when he’s drunk,” she confided with disgust in her tone. I was 11 and had no clue about what she was saying.
She was glamorous and looked great on his arm. She “cleaned him up,” she said, and he was a natty dresser. Their repartee commingled Damon Runyon-type stories from their immigrant grandparents, and from my father’s tales of his Irish drinking pals his union buddies made for good entertainment. Meanwhile, the only time I was happy to be dining with them was during the day on a Sunday.
My father never drank on weekends. My mother was rarely happy with the food or the service and voiced it, but if we all had good table manners, we could keep the conflicts to a minimum and Daddy could drive home sober. A designated driver was always a husband in those days.
Power is a word I had to explore fully when I was pulled over DUI not that long ago. The woman cop, who always must follow a male cop to a location where there’s a woman perpetrator automatically took on a belligerent tone and unnecessary force with me.
“Yes,” I had answered. “I wasn’t drinking per se, but I did have a drink.”
There are no field breathalyzers in our town. The woman cop quickly enveloped me from behind and pulled my wrists tightly down below my hips from behind to cuff me. She threw me into the back seat of the male cop’s squad car with such force that I went in face down. My wrists were raw for days from the cuffs.
“Just to keep you from trying to escape,” she said.
On the police reports I am listed as “genial, cooperative, and in complete agreement with the process.” I was slightly over the limit of 0.08, and that’s guilty. A fact I would easily admit in court and to do recompense with a 16-week program.
I wanted to tell the cop I wasn’t powerless the way she wanted me to feel. I wanted to tell her that powerlessness was being a child in the hands of a man I loved whom I expected to protect me, to not endanger my life …
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I wanted to take the woman cop out for a drink, or a soda, and remind her that guns and a badge are not real power, and that sometimes cops are just convicts with badges. I wanted to tell her I understood the offense of drunk driving, and would never do it again. I wanted to tell her that when she stood in front of me, facing me, with her hand on her holster and the other on her Billy club in the prison bathroom while I peed, I wasn’t powerless the way she wanted me to feel. My generation of women gave these women the power to be in a man’s workforce. I wanted to tell her that powerlessness was being a child in the hands of man I loved whom I expected to protect me, not to endanger my life by purposefully getting behind the wheel of a car, drunk, his testosterone raging to prove he was potent and in charge to my mother. But he didn’t.
He stopped drinking for a year, and I only saw him drunk on the next-to-last time I ever saw him, accepting an honor as a philanthropist. At the airport, he whispered that when he and my mother returned from the honorary trip they were going on, she would be served with divorce papers; “I need to protect you,” he whispered.
He died at age 56, on that trip, and my mother reported in a venomous tone, “All he could think about on his death bed was you. ‘Take care of the kid,’ he said.”
Every Father’s Day I feel an ache so profound I often wonder if something is physically wrong with me that day, always a Sunday, and a day we’d have been together in a seafood restaurant where he would challenge me to eat a lobster with fervor. “Not too dainty,” he said. “Claws too. No pre-picked or stuffed.” I would gladly oblige.
I wonder how so many years have passed? And do I believe he would ever have found the self-worth, or sought the insight from professionals, to leave my mother?
Photo: Dami Wurtz/Pixabay
Very beautiful piece. Thank you for your honesty and your powerful voice.
I know no other way to tell this story, but it took many years of repeated pain. “If you
don’t the lesson you have to repeat the grade.” Think
I did 7th grade over about 10x. Thank you for taking the time to reply.