Respect and Narcissism

Sorry for the incoming and possible incoherent rant, but this kind of thing bugs me.

There are a lot of kids out there who live in "bad" homes. Some of them have good parents who are just down and out. Good parents who just aren't that good with money. Loving parents who make ends meet, but never finished high school, who don't know how to help their kids go to college or how to dress up for a fancy interview or apply for financial aid. These aren't bad parents.

But some kids do have bad parents. Some are terrible. You read about these parents in the news. Parents who kill their kids, drown them, rape them, strangle them, beat them, burn them, leave them inside cages or out in the street. For every bad parent you see on the news, there are many times more parents you aren't hearing about, doing just as unspeakable things.

I was lucky, I guess. My parents weren't terrible. Not great, by any means, but they could have been worse. My mom was a drunk and a chainsmoker (she's now dying from emphysema and cirrhosis of the liver). She loves me, yes, but as a parent she often was too drunk to remember where I was and left me in strangers' homes when I was a young child. She made terrible choices in men. We lived in filth in Texas and I can't remember a time then when I wasn't starving. She punched a cop at a gas station after a stranger gave my baby sister a muffin. She knocked out her sister's front teeth and broke her mother's jaw during a family visit while I was in college. She was more often unemployed than employed and owed the state of Texas over $15,000 in DUI and speeding fines.

My dad robbed a pharmacy in high school, did about every drug imaginable, and ran from one heavy metal concert to the next stealing money from his parents. He borrowed from his father-in-law in order to take computer courses only to find true love in being an orderly at a mental institution (a job he sadly couldn't keep because it didn't pay enough to support his eight children). He loves us kids; I have no doubt. Growing up, I was fond of his crazy conspiracy theories and pseudoscience. When he went from an avid atheist (which he inadvertently taught me to be) to a born-again, bizarrely fundamentalist, anti-establishment Christian, I was confused but not threatened. He was dreadful about keeping track of money, mooched off his parents (though he'll argue otherwise), and married my mother (bad choice #1) and then got remarried to an Ex-Middle School English Teacher with an addiction to Valium (bad choice #2). He now stays home all the time with my stepmother taking care of my three autistic brothers, two of which still do not talk.

They weren't all that great parents, but they didn't try to kill us. My mother infuriates me and I fear my father has long since gone off the deep end, but I don't outright hate them. I, do, however have a hard time showing them any respect. And that's just me. I can only imagine how hard it would be if my parents had been worse.

When a kid has it bad, they know that there's something wrong with their parents. They see how their friends' and classmates' parents act. They're not stupid.

Fun fact: You can't tell anyone, especially strangers, that you are in fact smarter than your parents. That, really, you've been smarter than them since you were fifteen. You can't say: "My mother was not a good mother" or "My parents were not good parents." Inevitably, the stranger/friend will tell you, "You don't mean that" or "When you get older/have kids/hit menopause/bang your head, you'll understand" and when you argue, you usually get called all sorts of fun names like: "narcissist" "ungrateful" and "brat."

It all stems back to the whole "honor thy mother and father." Respect your parents... no matter what. Children are told to make mother's and father's day gifts in their elementary classes, write essays about why their parents are so great, so nice, so giving.

It all comes in good faith, yes. There are, truly, a great deal many "spoiled brats" out there who take advantage of their parents, who get in trouble, who bitch and moan, who say they're "smarter" when they really aren't, who deserve to be sat down and told straight: "you aren't special."

But those kids with bad parents? Imagine you're a boy who's Mommy is in prison for burning your back with an iron as punishment for not changing your baby sister's diaper while Mommy slept in a drug-stupor. You're ten years old. Imagine you're told to write a letter of love and thanks to your Mommy for Mother's Day. You don't have the nerve to tell the teacher that you'd rather not do this assignment, so you make up a happy mom you wish you had and write a thanks to her. You don't understand the families in the TV shows. You're jealous of your friends' parents. Years later, you're at your high school graduation and a man tells you, in a speech, that you are nothing special. That you're a part of a narcissistic generation. That you better get your act together. Your parents can't help you with everything. You go to college and you hear your roommate, a white boy from a middle class family who gets everything handed to him, everything paid for, complain about his girlfriends, his drinking buddies. He brags about how he passes half his classes just through charisma alone. Meanwhile, you struggle to keep your grades up, wrack up an enormous amount of loans, work three jobs, and hope your major still has hiring potential when you graduate. When you graduate, you see all your friends move back in with their parents. You have only yourself.

It's a dilemma I don't think people want to see. Telling a teenage girl whose dad raped her, whose mother is in jail for doing heroine and prostituting her older sister, that she should still love her mother, that she should respect her parents... it's... I can't even begin to say how terrible that is. Yet people do it! I see it all the time! How can anyone, as a stranger, tell a kid or teen that they should be thankful and forgiving of their parents when they have no idea.

And, hey, get this: Narcissism is one of the best ways to get OUT of that situation. If you think-- No, if you know that you deserve better, chances are you'll go out and get what you want. It's only when kids like these realize how terrible their parents are that they decide, hey, it might be in my interest to do something better. To be something better. Because I am better and I am special and I can prove them wrong.

When my mom, drunk as all hell and bawling, "helped" move me into my dorm my first year of college, she told me: "You won't last long," and "You're only going here to get away from me." She sulked in the van while my stepdad moved my furniture, and she made a scene in my dorm room, shrieking that I was only trying to hurt her--right in front of my unfortunate new roommate. I seethed through the whole thing, teeth clenched, and said not a thing to her until three weeks later when she called from home. Four years later, she called to tell me how proud she was and she didn't think I'd actually go through with it. I threw the phone across the room. I was thrilled when she doesn't come to my graduation.

So anyway, I would like remind people that you can't make assumptions about family and love and "blood" and unconditional parental love or narcissistic, spoiled children. There are so many, so very many kids out there who are being abused, and many who never speak out, and too often I see them, like my friends from bad homes, grow into a kind of entrapment Stockholm syndrome because of all this shit you hear about family love and bonding and closeness and respecting your parents. They end up staying with their abusive family members, do drugs, have kids, and become their parents.

It irks me when I see these articles and made-for-tv movies and blog posts and memes all going on about how kids these days need to be more respectful of their parents, how they all think they're so special, how they all take life for granted.

I get it. I get who you're talking to. But some kids, unfortunate kids, they don't know that they should be tuning you out.

Should we stop making kids make Mother's Day cards? Probably not. Like I said before, there are good parents out there and many parents who are, actually, taken for granted. There are some genuinely spoiled brats in the world. But how is a teacher from a nice middle class happy family supposed to know that this quiet little boy in her class is being abused if she takes for granted that everyone loves their parents like she does and they all want to thank them for all the gifts and fun trips to Disneyland? How is she supposed to know that this little boy can't tell her about his mom, because at worst, he'll get beaten again, and at best, he'll be put in a foster home? Foster families aren't all that great. Trust me, if my coke-snorting aunt who lived most of her life in and out of rehab could be a foster mother of 8 kids, anyone can. As a kid, it's definitely better the devil you know than the devil you don't.

How's a kid supposed to pull himself up from his "own bootstraps" if you keep telling him he's a brat for wanting something better? How do you know his parents aren't holding him down?



P.S. I'm sure I'm looking at this all through an orange-colored narcissist lens and being unreasonable, but boo! I do what I want!