It’s like knowing I have an un-checked lottery ticket in my wallet, a tiny chance at something, except that something is something I’ve decided I can’t live without. Also, five years now, so the lottery ticket analogy is strained; they expire after one. Well mine can’t be valid forever either, so it goes this far.
I think it may be time to check it.
I don’t count people as grown up ever, but more practically until their thirties or forties, and you kids are still in your twenties, but that is proper for the purposes of parenting, it’s well and truly over by now. I’ve been waiting but honestly, if you came today, it’s too late. I mean, you know better than I do, it’s always been too late. You’ve tried very hard to do it and it’s worked, you’ve missed me. Every year, every day it gets torturously a little clearer that you are never going to think you missed anything.
Every time we try to talk it gets oh so painfully that much more apparent that I failed to save my kids from hereditary narcissism and that they are now in a different reality from me, a reality that looks upside down and backwards to me. A reality in which my character is my evil twin and it gets incrementally more real every day, every week, that any reality we ever shared no longer exists. If it ever did.
My life is gone, retroactively, gone since before you were born and my memories are parodies, scenes acted out in a grade school drama production. It wasn’t what I thought and now there never were any good times. All tainted, all toxic.
I warned you. I told you around the time of your family meeting – OMG at the matriarch’s house, not my house, not my family, that meeting, fuck you very much – I told you that if you booted me and refused to talk to me that I would end up hating you. That isn’t working out, a father can’t, but it’s only morphed and a father can, a father must face the fact of what his children are and comport himself accordingly.
I mean it worked that way regarding her, of course.
Fatherly love and patience is for naught if you are full grown adult narcissists exactly like your mother when I met her. At some point I am not being fatherly when you’re not having it and I am only still and forever begging people who hate me to love me. At some point, no doubt long ago, it only adds to your negative view of me. And . . .
And, I’m sorry, really sorry, you have no idea how sorry – that’s sort of the point of my pain is you have no true idea about me at all, so not this either – it’s all my worst nightmares coming true, but the one who talks to me – Kid, you’re not making any sense. Some of the things you say to me, the way the things I say glance off of you – I pray that it’s only me you don’t or can’t process. If it’s spectrum stuff, if we are appreciably divergent – well, you and I are divergent too; my disorder and your disorder are not the same. You have your mother’s disorder, not mine. Apparently.
I’m sorry, unbelievably sorry, but if you are not simply cynically lying to me so badly and just not caring if I believe you – then you sound like one of the psychos on my TV, like you think you are the only real person and I am something that you create and edit, like it’s up to you what I believe, like I’m supposed to follow your script. I’m sorry, to me, that’s really, really broken. I’m sorry to say it, devastated that it could be true. And the other one, the one that doesn’t talk to me, I can only assume the same or worse. I mean if the blind narcissist in the Google chat that expects me to believe lies about my own self is the best one to communicate, the elected spokesperson, if that’s the one who has a shadow of a memory of me like I might be worth talking to, if only in theory.
I’m very concerned you are getting worse. I saw no sign of this level of disorder when we lived together, that you could treat me as not real like that. How old is a child when they are supposed to learn that you can’t tell a person dressed in blue that they are wearing red?
Yes. Now I’m calling you names, now I’m insulting you.
I’m gearing up to give up on you. Like you don’t know the process.
This isn’t just me, feeling like I have to decide that you’re done and dusted, I am trying to offer you the choice also, to learn the truth, to escape your narcissist’s prison. OK, it’s about me. I’m having a hard time escaping and leaving you behind. But I’m getting there. I think I need to get there. Are you fucking coming or aren’t you?
No?
I’ll wish you luck, but I’m lyin’. I need to give up. Like I say, you sound like you’re getting worse, at least when you try to talk to me.
I know you’re seeking help – it is not forthcoming in your tiny, phony reality. If you ever realize it, if you ever want the truth, look me up – but I can’t watch that and I can’t help you do it, this story about my evil twin. I’m going to try to stop thinking of the right thing to say, how to reach you, it’s killing me. It’s on you now. I have to stop worrying about you, I am going to try to pretend I lost you all in a car crash, like in the Will Smith movie, maybe I can have a happy memory again if I don’t have to worry that you’re still there and want to take it away.
Oh, I’ve had another tiny breakthrough, a third story, like the gay lie, like me not listening to the older one, it’s the one about when the younger was two and I had to go out of town for work for twelve nights, phoned every day, but lost them as “my kid,” during that period, remembering how the ex spoon fed me that story and how I accepted it uncritically. I suppose it’s still possible that it was just that, it happens, but there have been too many other things, too many lies the kids come to me with now, not to doubt it and begin to wonder how she leveraged that situation too.
The breakthrough bit was realizing the part my low self image played, that I was too quick to accept that it was me hurt you, and too quick to stop looking for other things that might have been hurting you.
Jeff,
June 10th., 2021
Neighsayer's Other Stuff 
They know they’re running from reality, they know there are places they can’t go, people they can’t talk to in order to maintain their bubble. Me, mostly, but my whole family, meaning my sisters, and also counsellors, family and marriage both. I don’t understand the need, the fear of what they would lose if they faced reality, to me, it seems like the whole world they are losing when they believe what cannot be true, the things one must avoid and the things they misunderstand can only multiply. OK, there is the family property, which I have come to regard as cursed, having watched two generations of them fall into poverty and dysfunction waiting for it. There can be only one! It seems that one may be their mother, and they may have a look at it – but again, cursed. I never counted those chickens, I never really expected my luck to get me there. There are native cairns there, I don’t know the age. I was shocked out of my mind when I learned I had lost them all, before I learned I had never had them, but somehow, the property wasn’t part of the surprise. I grew up knowing no such inheritance was coming, maybe some part of me knew it all, felt it all.
I get this blog looks like shit, I lost someone over it today, I trust too much in my own motives and my innocence, I don’t think about how things look and this looks awful, that person must have assumed that harassment is a long pattern of behaviour for me.
It isn’t.
I crossed some lines in this one, my own damned lines, telling my kids they’re fucked, I’ve never done that before, or not so clearly. I keep thinking they’re kids still, like they were the last time they loved me and talked to me, I keep thinking it’s a warning, something avoidable – I’m having real trouble processing, my world was destroyed on purpose, I was lied to for years – I resent the suggestion that I have agency and power and the ability to make clear choices and I’m the only one who is supposed to be all of that. I wish I was, I wish I could. They’ve already seen this, or I’d take it down.
I’ll stop. They’re adults, they are what they are or what we made them, some combination of the two. Y’all don’t understand, the ex used them to get rid of me, made the youngest do all the talking, basically said it was all the youngest’s idea, and I am amok, suicidal – this “warning,” this calling them fucked, I have been seeing this as their only way out of spending the rest of their days knowing they pushed me out a window, THAT’S been the point. And they were still teenagers when this effort began.
But I’ll stop. The shift from narcissist’s victim to narcissist, if the kids have made it, I missed it twenty years ago, probably.
I’ll stop. I’ll give up.
I mean, I really didn’t get just how shit it looks.
Y’all don’t get, and I know you never will, this blog is the first time I have EVER berated them. But y’all won’t believe, so screw ya.
And now I know why it was so upsetting losing that person over this, that I am apparently not allowed to be angry once, ever, in my life. Of course they can’t know that.
and what was the complaint? sexism, anti-feminism?
Where does that enter into this blog? I said lies, I said narcissism, I said nothing, and think nothing of sex roles in my situation except that my ex thought too much of them. I get that a guy who berates his kids and shit talks his ex is probably sexist and anti-feminist, but I ain’t. Again, that has not been my pattern, This was a pre-suicidal loss of reason if it was a crime and it was understandable frustration for someone who’s been through what I have if it isn’t, and it isn’t.
You all can’t believe or imagine what has happened to me, the unique trouble I’ve gotten myself into. I ain’t no garden variety domineering man, no matter that my ex carved that into my forehead forever.
and another thing – this was for them, this is my only, shitty, one-way way to pretend I am talking to my own children, it wasn’t for the public, this blog has very little public reading it, I think. And it wasn’t meant to stand on its own, all the people in this blog know who they are and what is going on and who doesn’t is YOU, Dear Reader.
I have ten years’ worth here, and I do not revise, if anyone wasn’t busy with their own troubles and had time to look, they would see a little of what has been going on, and you’d see who is busting whose balls eternally, who treats who like a human being.
I’m telling them they seem unwell to me – because they are living with the person who made us all unwell and who is working hard at their bs to keep them unwell and make them more unwell and if it was a physical or biological hazard no-one would mind the warning, if it was a boil on their face, everyone would agree they have a right to know about it.
But it’s not a boil, it’s NAS.
“Toxic “ they said, and I freaked out, and I’ll tell you why but it wasn’t because I ain’t toxic.
I’m as toxic as they get, I have cut off everyone I love and care about, authors and celebs I love and admire, all to protect them all from my toxicity.
I’m freaking out because I was neither born toxic nor raised toxic, nor did I just think being fucking toxic was a good idea or anything.
I’ve been poisoned, over decades, a family tradition among my in-laws, apparently.
If I had been fed lead all those years, I’d be a toxic corpse and yes, you shouldn’t touch me. But I am a victim of a long game, I am toxic because I have been given a lethal dose.
You can’t imagine, I won’t repeat it. It’s all through this blog.
My ex hated me enough to live a double life, to Truman Show me, that hate is very toxic. Enough to brainwash my kids and take them, enough to replace the gentle father they really had with her made up terror. Enough to taise her own children in a hate-filled lie – and if you understood this blog, to NEVER LET THEM OUT.
Yes, this level of hate makes one toxic.
What happened with what I thought was a new friendship here, this is always it, my lived experience is “toxic” to women, all
women, and I am looking at never having another relationship again.
It’s the Hell’s Angels credo, from the book: if one hates you, that ALL hate you.
It’s Father’s Day, the fifth one I’m being shunned through, I am hurting badly.
Ten years ago, I was the World’s Greatest Dad, even I believed something like it. Ten years ago, I and my family were a triumph of non-violent, no punishment parenting, still all talking together, it was us against the world. Ten years ago, we all congratulated one another, we all basked in our strife free and stress free life, we all felt sorry for all the other fighting families. I mean, the older one had gone quiet on me long before. I should have known it wasn’t real – but I didn’t know why it wouldn’t be. It was exactly what I had tried for. It was real for me.
I mean, they were allowed to go quiet on me, if my kid doesn’t want to talk to me, they don’t have to. This is how I was was with everything, this is what no force, no punishment parenting means.
My plan was to continue modeling that respect, keep respecting that boundary, make sure they’re safe, they would see all that, feel all that, and come around. It was a mystery to me, because I knew my attitude had never been any different, utterly passive, and so that it should get worse during this period was something I didn’t imagine, I was careful not to offend or press.
But it had gotten worse, very worse, and six years ago, I was shocked to learn they all hated me, they all believed I hated them and wished them harm!
What I had changed, what I had dome differently, was that I started smoking weed again and crying. This began when I was beginning to realize and suspect, I think, that things had gone badly, and after a few months of that the kids’ silence ended and they informed me of their beliefs about me and showed me the door.
My shit talking the ex, that’s really just a guess.
I mean, that’s all you get with a certain personality disorder, but that’s not a proof in itself.
Kids, every few years, for Father’s Day, let’s say: will you please tell a father where his kids are at? Alive, dead, vaccinated?
Will you please give me some idea what you are doing in your therapy, how you are doing in it?
This is very hard to ask, and it’s going to be very hard to know, but as you see, not knowing can’t stop me worrying and making up my own stories about it.
I need resolution. Somebody owes me to talk and fight and argue until we all arrive at the fucking truth. Y’all don’t understand, you one specific reader, all you readers, my kids, none of you understand, you are all doing exactly what she wants, playing exactly into her hands, helping her continue to suck the life out of my kids.
broke my own rule, calling my kids disordered – I just realized I broke more than one, maybe I’m breaking the one about not calling stupid people stupid, what’s the point, it’s just cruel.
But I’ve been doing this a lot lately, realizing a thing right after I’ve said it . . . and now I don’t know which way to go, which way is worse, with the rule above: do I keep saying it, thinking and hoping it’s not true?
Or do I stop saying it forever because I believe it now?
The ex used to talk constantly about what a fucked up bunch of people her and her sibs are, what a perfect storm of toxicity her parents were – so I decided to help her escape, help her break the cycle, convince her of the no punishment parenting thing, and she acted like it, like I say, ten years ago, we all acted like it.
But no. Exactly while talking that way about her family, she ignored me and my ideas. listened to her mother and did exactly all the same things, , exactly like it was done to her, but in secret.
But no. . . . because hate? I want to say, I used to say, because trauma, and I meant from men, but . . . my ex’s only trauma was her mother’s hate and I’m pretty sure that was my kids’ only trauma too. Because hate. Because some people find life clear and simple when there’s an enemy? I lost those kids for no good true reason at all. My kids lives were a fucked up lie for no good reason at all, just to hurt me or something.