Narcissistic father acknowledges some failings

He just called me on Skype to tell me he 'almost died'. He has acute pneumonia and chronic heart & blood pressure issues, not a good mix. He'll live.

But he went sort of sentimental and wanted me to thank my ILs for being there for me and my kids. Then he said "I know I haven't been there for you when it comes to this stuff. But you know you can come to me when you need money".

This is true. And he and I can now be honest about the scope and extent of his being a father to me. He knows what he is capable of, and I feel safe being thankful for those several times in my life when he offered me money for something needed and I accepted.

I feel freer. I cried. And like I can allow some more emotions now.

Parentification

People who never had real parents tend to parentify their children. This doesn't just mean that they want their children to take care of them emotionally (and sometimes physically) the way their parents should have.

This is common, but there are other ways to parentify and mess up your kids.

You can treat them like your messed up parents wanted to be treated, thinking misguidedly that this is simply the best way to treat human beings.

You can try to do anything not to upset them. You can try to leave every decision up to them. You can  allow them to walk all over you (sometimes literally) thinking it's your duty to just bear it. You can fail to have any boundaries. You can treat their every wish as your command.

I've been guilty of this. And then I've sometimes snapped and said "What do you want from me?"

Authoritarianism and permissiveness are two sides of the same coin - a parent who doesn't instinctively feel where sane boundaries lie because his or hers were violated in childhood.

Sometimes even infantilization is actually a form of parentification. My father did many age-inappropriate things for me and sometimes behaved as if I were a princess and he were my servant (but there was sarcasm involved). For instance, he'd ask me if I wanted something to eat in my room, I'd say "OK", he'd bring it to me and I'd finish it and then go on reading or whatever. He'd come in, see the empty plate, and sardonically say "May I remove Your plate now, your Majesty?" or something like that. There was no right response. He was resentful about doing something I never asked him to do. I'd mumble "Yes" or try to take the plate back myself - he'd never let me.

He and his sister had to serve their narcissistic mother as the Queen she was. So he did the same for me, because I represented her somehow. She demanded this sort of treatment, I never did, I was deeply embarrassed by it.

I'm a bit down now and feel like whatever I do with my kids, it will somehow be wrong because I'm broken and can't get it just right. I'll just do the opposite of what my parents did, and the cycle will go on.

No confrontation.

Reading about the experiences others have with the narcs in their lives, I feel very lucky to be seen as unimportant by mine. I don't know what I'd do if I was constantly persecuted and stalked and hunted down like a missing piece of the narc's heart that he can't live without, every time I exhibited a bit of independence. I'm sure it would have to end in No Contact and all the potentially difficult consequences for my FOC.

My father and I have ceased pretending we cared for each other a couple of decades ago. But we are on polite terms. And I plan to keep this up for as long as it is possible without compromising my integrity.

As it is, I feel, more than anything, like a diplomat dealing with an insane tyrant of a country in possession of nuclear weapons. I may not like or respect the tyrant, but telling him that would not be wise. It would do no good to anyone.

We don't have a relationship and don't really pretend we have one. But he must be getting the illusion of something that makes it worthwhile for him to have any contact with me at all. What?

The illusion of having a daughter and granddaughters? As long as it's only an illusion and he gets no unsupervised time and very little supervised time with them, I'm fine with that.

Our home as his waiting room for an hour or two, twice a week, six months out of the year? That sounds more like it and it's annoying and I'll have to work on strategies to make it rarer. But there's just something about telling one's father - or anyone else, for that matter - "No, you can't come, because I find your presence annoying" that just doesn't agree with me. I've been able to turn him away a few times by making other plans, which confused him greatly, as people having lives outside of him is a difficult concept to grasp for him. I'll need to work on boundaries in this area starting next October, when I'll see him next, I just don't know how to go about it in practical terms yet.

I can't think of anything else he's "getting" from me. When we lived away, we never saw him. It must be the waiting room service he gets. Oh well.

The Power of Prayer: Or How I Started Setting Boundaries With NF

Now that I look back, I can only ascribe it to an act of Divine Providence - because I sure as hell didn't know what I was doing at the time when I had my first and only serious confrontation with my narcissistic father. And yet it worked out quite well. I still shiver at the thought of all the ways in which I could have messed it up. I had very little understanding of how NPD works at the time and only a suggestion made by a member of a family forum that my father might be suffering from it.

My father, who had had almost no interaction with us since we got married almost five years prior to that, and showed little interest in his granddaughter in her infancy, suddenly started noticing her when he dropped by to "see" us (to while away the time until his GF's class is over and he can pick her up). She was now 3 years old and, I see that now, a budding source of narcissistic supply. He started playing with her, in an irritating, controlling way that had me saying "Let her put that Lego where she wants to" and "She CAN TOO paint the sky that color if she wants to" often, but overall, I was happy. I'd felt orphaned until then and I felt my child had no maternal grandparents at all.

I mostly let them play for the hour or two twice a week that he was at our place. As I had trouble communicating with him, I basically just didn't engage him in conversation at all and surfed the net while he was here. I was also pregnant with our second child and, as we spent almost 24/7 with our daughter, I actually welcomed the opportunity to relax a little while she was playing with her grandfather. Usually, there's nothing wrong with that, right?

Then, once, once, we needed him to babysit for an hour and a half. 90 minutes. When I got back home, he was playing with her, and then he abruptly and arbitrarily left, in the middle of the game. She cried. She was three and the game was cut short abruptly.

But his narcissistic brain had another explanation cooked up. He phoned me later and said that we were obviously neglecting our daughter, depriving her emotionally and turning her into a mentally unstable person. We kept her in a prison where she was lonely and deprived and this is why she was upset to see him leaving. Apparently he meant to say he was the only one who ever paid any attention to this poor soul and this is why she didn't like to see him leave.

He dared conclude we were neglectful parents based on observing what we did while he was playing with her for a total of, say, 10 hours? My father somehow thought it proper to attack me as a bad mother, annihilating the basis of my parenting, while I was 30 weeks pregnant with my second? And based on nothing?

I shouted that at him, said 'thanks for your concern, good bye' and hung up.Then I posted this on a family forum with a little back story about my own childhood (which I then saw as somewhat too controlled but mostly too coddled with him as the overly doting, active, involved father) and his own childhood (which I even then clearly saw as dominated by a narcissistic mother - my grandma was the textbook case no one could miss). A wonderful woman who had a narcissistic husband diagnosed my father in one short post, and wrote so many things describing him so thoroughly that I thought she must be psychic.

He came by later that week and I only had time to read up a little bit on NPD and still wasn't convinced he had it. I had no idea how to confront him. I mostly detached from him emotionally and was basically interested in establishing some very important boundaries. And even that was fuzzy in my head.

So I prayed. I prayed like mad to be able to say the right things.

When he came, I was calm, collected, somewhat cold. My voice was strong and deep. I did almost all the talking. I didn't argue or defend or justify or explain. I attacked. I said "Your comments were completely out of line. You have no right to criticize another adult's parenting, and without any solid concrete evidence whatsoever. I am not interested in hearing anything like this again."

He might have mentioned something about his own parenting, which prompted me to confront him, for the first and last time, because it made sense only then, about it. I told him the only things I remembered from my ideal childhood with all the walks in the park and whatnot were a few unpleasant instances. Like the time he was angry because I went for a walk with my maternal grandparents at age 5 instead of with him. (Because, apparently, I was supposed to remember we'd "agreed" to go together, and then I was supposed to tell my grandparents, who were watching me, "No, I can't go with you, I'll stay home alone, or you can't go either, because Dad has to take me out!")

He went pale. Then red. Then pale again. He was going to say something, but I didn't let him. 

"That doesn't matter now. I am interested in having an adult relationship with you. I love you and respect you now (I did feel like it at the time, mostly; it felt like the right thing to say at the time) and I'd like to see us interact like the two adults we are." 

He made a feeble attempt at protesting this: "But you'll always be my child. I can't see you as an adult."

It failed. "You'll have to", I replied.

He never mentioned parenting again. Over the time, there were other topics I forbade (whether or not we took the children out for a walk today, what happened to what old blanket in the other apartment, whether or not we're going to install another landline) and he obliged every time. He may sulk a little, but he never mentions it again. And I ascribe it all to this critical first confrontation. And the power of prayer.