A Love Letter to My Narcissistic Mother

The day I found my mother’s psychiatric medication is a day that saved my life. Sneaking into my mother’s bedroom had always been a sin, but it became a capital crime after my father left. Weeks after his car had peeled out of the driveway — gravel ricocheting in its wake — she had slammed the door shut to that doomed room and pointed her finger in my face.

“You’re not to go in there anymore, understood?”

I nodded my child’s head eagerly, but the goalposts were set. I became obsessed with this new forbidden zone; with everything locked behind that impossible door.

Almost a year to the day of my father’s departure, I got my chance. Left home alone by a mother forced to work more than ever before — I found the key in the drawer and crept quietly down the hall. This was in the early days, before the hall was filled with sewage.

I turned the key over in the lock and felt the spring give way. With a quiet pop, the pin burst outward and the knob turned freely in my hand.

The door was tough to move over the age-stiffened carpet, but I persevered and made my way into the dingy space. Sparse shards of light flickered through ragged curtains and delicate specks of dust danced in-between. It was a time capsule of doom. Nothing touched or moved since the day my father had left us.

The water bed was still there, a hulking wooden frame dark and imposing against faded white walls. The mattress was motionless, but it still bore the old quilt my grandmother had given my parents only a few Christmases earlier. One corner, on my father’s side, was still turned back to reveal sheets that were crumbling and stained by some invisible hand.

It was a mausoleum of failure, and even in my naivety I could feel the grief and the misery pouring off of every trinket and dust-caked pile of clothing.

Desperate to get away, but unwilling to abandon my quest — I ventured further into the shadows of my mother’s abandoned room until I came to the small half-bath, forgotten and tucked away into a dark corner.

Behind the bathroom door.

My afternoon of exploration led me to the dirty little secret my mother hid from me until the very day she died. And it remains one of the most important discoveries in my life. As I secretly scrounged through the memories of her marriage, I came across the one thing she struggled to admit to herself.

Climbing up on the dirty white porcelain of the toilet, my feet and hands left a trail in the thick dust. I made my way into the small medicine cabinet that hung above the sink. Prying open the rusted edges, I exposed an array of bright orange prescription bottles — each one wrapped in crumbling and faded white labels.

It was like digging up a forbidden treasure. Driven by my curiosity, I pulled them one-by-one from the shelves. They were large, heavy, and still filled-to-the-brim with pills of various sizes and shapes. I couldn’t close my small fists around them and had to use two hands to get them into a reading position. Each one bore the same letters.

K. Johnson. K. Johnson. K. Johnson.

Kathleen Johnson. My mother’s name. Each bottle bore the familiar inscription, and each bottle bore the complex name of a drug designed to treat difficult and often dangerous psychiatric disorders. My mother was ill. Incredibly, incredibly ill. Yet the bottles were full. Faded by their years in the intermittent dark.

The medication had been abandoned, like everything else behind that cheap pressed-wood door at the end of the hall. Everything in this room had been discarded; stonewalled and bricked up in a way that allowed my mother to pretend it didn’t exist at all. Just as she had always done.

As I look back on this memory now, it helps me to see my mother more clearly for what she truly was…a narcissist.

Unable to face any fault in herself, she lived her life in a wellspring of pain rather than accepting the one truth (and simple action) that could have saved us all from the personal hell we lived in.

At times covert, at times overt, my mother’s narcissism reigned over my childhood and even parts of my adult life with an iron fist and a deep emotional wounding that I will probably never escape.

She was the woman who never was, and I continue to uncover her deceits as I heal and move toward my future in recovery from her abuse. She lied to me. She lied to my brothers. My father and her own siblings. Most of all, though, my mother lied to herself, in the truest narcissistic fashion.

And even though she has been gone from this plane for almost 5 years, I continue to uncover the deceits — like so many layers of a cake. As each layer is peeled away, I am lifted, but I am more destroyed, too. Because what I’m uncovering is a mother-wound so large it can never be entirely healed. I’m uncovering a person I did not know, and a lifetime of lies which will forever work to undermine who I really am.

Fueling the illusion.

To understand my mother’s narcissism and subsequent spiral, you must understand her origin story too.

My mother was a larger-than-life figure, even though she strode atop the world at a less-than-imposing 5’4”. With thick brown hair and a bright smile, she caught the attention of boys easily with her figure and was married and preparing to give birth to my oldest brother by the age of 17.

Her life was anything but sunshine and roses. The youngest of three, she was raised by a veteran of the 101st airborne — newly returned from WWII — who left his kids alone with an endless parade of wives (each one being worse than the last).

To describe my mother’s formative years as abusive would be an understatement. After my grandfather returned from The War, he became a long-haul truck driver (among other random jobs) and was always on the road. This meant that my mother was regularly subjected to abandonment, rape, beatings, and starvation. By the age of 15, she was living alone in a trailer on the edge of town (with only a small dog to protect her).

This brutal start informed everything my mother did for the rest of her life, and everything that happened to us, too. Scared inside-and-out by the endless tortures and disappointments of a life designed to fail her, she built around herself an ego that was simultaneously brittle and overwhelming.

My mother hated herself, but she hated everyone else more. And in that self-loathing, she learned not only to destroy her happiness — but the happiness of her children, too.

That childhood day sneaking into my mother’s bedroom was the first time she exposed herself as the person she was, and the person she was not. Thinking of her now, I often think of her as the Woman Who Never Was. A mass of illusions made to defend and deceive. A fairy tale created and perpetuated by someone who couldn’t see what she was.

The Woman Who Never Was

It seems harsh, maybe, to call my mother the woman that never was. But in truth, I don’t know what else to call her now. Realizing that your parent is a narcissist is a strange road, and as you learn (and remember) more about your journey, you come to see the relationship you had with them in an entirely different light.

You see, my mother loved to project herself as the ultimate parent, friend, worker, intellectual. She knew everything about everything and thought about herself as the best person in the room — no matter what. Any time the subject would come up, she would proudly brag about the sacrifices that she made as a wife and a mother. She would brag about all the improvements she had built into her own parenting styles.

She was the best mother in the world, no questions asked. It was an image she projected and protected until the day she died, despite there being no empirical evidence for it.

“You’re lucky you didn’t grow up in my house…you wouldn’t have survived it…You’re lucky you have me for a mother. I’m too good to you.”

Because that’s what a narcissist does. They insist on a projection of themselves and beat the world into submission around that image.

Ask anyone who knew Kathleen Johnson and you usually get something along the lines of, “She was so kind…she had such a hard life…she was such a good person…a great mother…” This is the Kathleen they always talk about; this woman who had it all together. Even my brothers still see her as shades of that woman. Having had her to themselves for decades before I was even a thought on the scene, they still struggle to fully conceive of the horrors that unraveled at the end of her life.

But I never saw that woman they remember. Looking back now with my adult eyes, I see nothing but the opposite.

Like most narcissists, my mother deteriorated across her lifetime. And so did all her other relationships — including the one with me. She became harder, crueler. She connected less with me as her child and became more vindictive about her sabotage of me and my life.

The disappointments in her life piled up. After my father left, her life continued to spiral. She faced financial troubles, the impracticalities of juggling my growing life, and the public humiliation of a 30 year marriage in shambles. All of this with multiple physical and mental health diagnoses — only a third of which she actively chose to treat.

When I was about 10 years old, the final blow came when my mother was hospitalized with heart failure and cardiomyopathy. Given only a few months to live, she, I, and the rest of the family prepared for the worst.

In the end, she pulled through, but she was made worse by the experience. Forced to leave a job she enjoyed, she settled into a dank spree of depression. She nestled herself into the couch, and moved only to go to the bathroom or to let her dogs out. Her weight ballooned, her health continued to decline. She developed diabetes and severe arthritis. She ran out of breath walking to the door in the morning.

During this time, the house got worse. She stopped doing the dishes and cleaning up the mess when the animals didn’t get let out. She taped black plastic bags over the windows (to prevent anyone from seeing the mess inside) and the house grew dark while the junk piled up.

Eventually, she was forced to find minimum wage work, and when she did, the hoarding escalated. So did the distance between us. Fights became common, and I was regularly referred to as a whore or worse. The roof collapsed in the laundry room, and the walls rippled and bubbled with black mold.

Despite it all, the comparisons remained the same. My brothers (both out of the home) and my mother’s friends continued to tell stories of my mother’s “glory days”. Of all the hard work she had done, and all the pain she had overcome. She was always the best parent. When they spoke of her, she was a goddess, fierce. She was a mother “doing her best” and she was always talked about in whispers, like some strange mythical creature that I didn’t recognize.

That day in my mother’s bedroom, I remembered those stories from brothers, my father, and everyone else. I looked for that “best mother” and the “hard worker” but found someone else entirely.

As I combed through the forbidden time capsule — and the memories she could not stand to look at — I let the images fill my mind. Something in me probably hoped to find that woman hidden in that room. But I didn’t. Near the door, a dusty jewelry box rested on a small stand and it caught my eye.

It was brass and shaped like an old Victorian bird cage. Between the delicate wires hung a gilded perch, and on it was a small feathered bird, colored in my mother’s favorite hue. Sagging and faded, the bird sat molding and crooked over a pile of old costume jewelry which had been casually tossed at his feet.

I pictured my mother in this jewelry. I tried to envision her making her way through company parties — hair done and a lipstick-slathered smile spread across her face.

That’s what my mother’s bedroom was filled with. Sad scenes just like that.

Piles of clothes. Boxes of photos. Each inch reeked of a strangeness that my adult mind only now understands. Clothes of all makes and colors lay tossed over the bed. Even a pair of my father’s boxers were still laying on the floor beside a discarded pair of old socks (the long black ones whose appearance in the corners of the house always drove my mother wild). Even the toilet remained un-flushed — filled with the molded tissues my father had used his last night in the house.

In my memory, small hands still run across old rings and necklaces, through silks in her closet, through abandoned dressers covered in expensive perfumes. I desperately tried to remember seeing my mother in any kind of dress or finery. Tried to imagine her in lipstick or drenched in Chanel №5 with big cubic zirconia earrings.

To me, this is the woman who never was. The woman my mother still pretended she could claim despite the mess, and the pain, and the horror, and the failures.

I still can’t imagine this woman — striding confidently into rooms like a person who cares what happens to the people around them. Thickness still tightens in my chest to think of it, and even here, thirty years removed, I get the lump in my throat and that burning feeling on the back of my tongue.

That’s because I never knew this woman. This vision of who my mother once was confuses me. This woman painted by abandoned items is still so at odds with who my mother was in the last decades of her life.

Because the Kathleen I knew was bitter, manipulative, close-minded, and horribly, horribly insecure. She was a woman who would break down and spend weeks lying on the couch, while her child scrounged through cabinets to eat expired canned food from the cheapest shop in town. She was the woman who criticized everything and judged everyone in the worst possible way.

I remember Kathleen as the woman who strangled my voice. Who told me (as I proudly practiced my 4th grade chorus audition piece for her in the living room) that I “sounded like a Black girl clown”.

I remember her as the woman who stopped washing her hair, or wearing clothes that were clean. Who let me go into the world in clothes that weren’t clean. Who showed no pride in herself, her daughter, or her home.

I remember Kathleen as a woman who allowed her child’s home and bedroom to fill with sewage. Who allowed the endless stream of animals she “rescued” to defecate all over the house. A woman who allowed her mental illness to take precedence over her children and her own wellbeing.

The mother that I knew was not the mother my brothers sometimes knew — having escaped this episode of darkness as adult men who could build families of their own. They didn’t spend their childhoods climbing over the piles of feces and fast food trash, or hiding their clothes in plastic bags so they wouldn’t reek as badly of cat piss.

And that’s why everyone around me still struggles to see her as the selfish woman she really was. Because they didn’t live behind that door.

My mother told the world she was this hard-done by a woman, and in so many ways she was. But she was something else, too.

She was a covert narcissist who wallowed in messes of her own making rather than cleaning them up. My mother was a mental and emotional abuser who cast that same horror on her sons and her daughter that had been cast on her in childhood. Primarily because she was too stubborn to get or accept help with issues that were well-established.

What’s worse is that she seemed to have no awareness of it (and when she did, she didn’t care). She kept the behavior until the day she left his planet, and she believed in all her lies and superstitions right until that moment, too.

Kathleen Johnson was the disappearing woman. One moment great, the next moment a monster. She was the Woman Who Never Was. Whatever fantasy she spun for the world, it’s gone — washed away with her death. But her truth remains, wedged squarely in the mother wounds she left behind in me and all her other children.

Finding a sense of the future.

It took me a long time to realize and accept these truths. Even longer for me to accept that my mother was a narcissist. That day in the bathroom remains one of the few reasons I can be strong in my conviction and my healing. Seeing those bottles in my mind’s eye — still full — empowers me to see the consciousness in my mother’s behavior.

She chose to remain ill.

And that’s why I ultimately struggle to forgive her to this day.

Those bottles remain a literal representation of my mother choosing her narcissism and her illness over me. Sitting here now, with 30 years of experience behind me, I see a woman choosing her pride over the little girl that was growing more scared of her outbursts by the day. Over the husband that stuck it out for 30 years, and even her own body.

When my mother abandoned those bottles and hid them, she chose her projection of self over everyone else. And she chose to one day lose me as her daughter.

It was more important to her that she could protect her game of pretend. It was more important that she maintain that idea of the “perfect” victim. And it was more important to her to control everyone else around her with this pain and illness. She really thought that was an acceptable way to live and to parent. But she was so wrapped up in herself, her pain, her suffering, that she couldn’t see the big picture. No narcissist really can.

And the big picture is this: a life of mental illness passed down to her sons, their wives, and their children. Endless self-loathing and self-sabotage by a daughter who doesn’t know how to be loved.

But while these memories have killed that perfect woman she projected, the memory of those bottles has freed me, too.

When I see those bottles, I can see the truth. I can see that choice that my mother made every single day of her life. Because, make no mistake, her decision not to take her mental health meds was a conscious choice. My mother was a narcissist. And accepting that allows me to look my family in the face and deny their truth, so that I can stand bravely on my own.

Because the truth is that my mother was a terrible mother.

She didn’t keep a roof over my head. She didn’t feed me a stable diet. She didn’t teach me the basic skills of executive function or emotional regulation. She didn’t even teach me how to clean, insert a tampon, wash my hair, cook a meal. She didn’t teach me how to ride a bike. How to navigate relationships. How to care for my mental and physical health.

Instead, she taught me how to embrace rage as the only emotion. Kathleen taught me how to hate myself and my body, and she taught me to fear the world and everything in it.

My mother wasn’t a triumphant overcomer. She was a sick woman who gave up on her life, even though she brought me — a child — into it. She left me to rot in the mess while she lost herself in the sour berries of her life. Then she spent the rest of her time on this earth doing the bare minimum for herself and everyone else around her.

The child in me will love this woman forever, broken or not. I will continue to look for her and call for her when I’m suffering on my own. But there is no denying that there is a big part of me that hates her, too. And that part of me still lives somewhere in that bathroom, beside those pill bottles, and the undeniable choices that she made for herself and for me, too.

That shade of orange will haunt my dreams, but I hold it dear, too. My future rests on the ability to see this image clearly for what it is, and I’ve dedicated my life to that journey. Whatever happens next, I know I won’t end up in that broken down ranch-style house on the edge of town. I can’t. Because I love myself and that poor, sad little girl inside of me more than Kathleen Johnson ever could.