Rantz Zero

Yeah, it was one of those days, when this seems a perfectly logical and good idea.
You never had one? I have to step up the power of my drawings!

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(
     Say with me "This is a rant, it's supposed to be therapeutic for the writer, not to bear 
     any sense for the  reader". 

         - "So, why do you share it?"

         - "..."
)

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I have wandered through Wikipedia (and NIMH.gov, and others), these last few days.

I think I can finally describe my parents with one word - OK, two. One. Whatever.

They were two, almost classical, narcissistic parents.  Both, although each with different attitudes.

My father had no use for his sons unless they were willing to keep doing his work, following his footsteps and enlarge his contractor's enterprise.

By the way, the guy was dictatorial on the work, completely unable to delegate anything (even a pile of scrapped bricks had to be laid down where he said, how he said), so any capable employee he ever had - that hadn't very serious self-confidence issues - left the job as soon as he found another employer. 

Also, be a contractor in Italy back in the day was much a political job - zoning permits being a mainstay of Italian's politics kickbacks-extorting power - and he had managed to literally piss off every politician in a 20 miles radius. 

By the time of his death, my father "enterprise" was down to him, its co-owner and a "shadow" employee - me.


He was obsessed of being ashamed by my brother not being good enough (whom he "decided" that was "just like" his older brother -  my father was a second son, with an enormous chip on the shoulder when it came to his brother ) , but he cut me a lot of slack (I am the second son... he considered me HIS "expy"; my mother did the same, only she thought -thinks? -  of me as the expy of her brother; she is always worried that I will become, some day, a mean drunkard - given the fact that I drink one beer, only on the Saturday nights that I go out, it really pisses me off).

Anyway, of the two, dad was the one less self-absorbed and I think that, toward the end of his life, he also realized that he seriously mismanaged his parenting duties.

 (I suppose that, having to chase after me when I broke down in a fugue state, a bit more than a year before, was a serious hint).

Maybe. Or he just realized that, dying, he left me stuck with my mother.

 (And with his car... but I am pretty sure that, when he talked about the car, it was because he couldn't  really say "Sorry son, I leave you with your crazy ma, and you'll be too old to have a life of your own by the time you'll manage to disengage from her", could he? - I still have the car, by the way).

My mother, too, was very narcissistic in her ways - if you had a problem, you better sort it out yourself, because her reaction was to be hugely pissed off at you for bothering her, when she already had "plenty of problems" of her own.

 (as far as I can tell, my mother led a very uneventful life, beyond her brush with hospitals at age 22 - she gave birth to  me at 38, so by the time I was ten she already had some time to overcome that burden, one may think).

As soon as she could, she shanghaied off both me (age 10) and my brother (age 12? gran-ma cared for him till she died, so he had a couple of years more... but granny was a mean-ass bitch too, he says, so I am not sure it was much of an improvement) to "work" with dad - in our spare time - so that she had not to be responsible for us, in front of him.

(As I said, he was the less self absorbed and most caring one of the two, so if we broke some bones it would have quite upset him... still, my bro was pretty sure that he used to care more for his crane, than for one of us; at the time, I was stupid enough to think that my bro was wrong on that count - lately, I realized that he probably wasn't).

As many narcissistic parents do, they conflated their wishes with "the needs" of the family, and shaped all in term of "duties" that we sons had to carry on - why exactly, they couldn't really explain.

( So, by age 13 I had come to the conclusions that "duty" is just a word that "authorities" use to mean  "because I just fucking wish so" - so, even today, tell me that I have a duty, and I'll look for a silent way to sabotage it, open rebellion not being my weapon of choice.  

And, yes, "duties" are illusions of authoritarian minds... what people really have are choices.

For example, people has to pay taxes? No, they can go to jail instead. It is just a choice to make... someone may as well chose jail, to avoid financing a military budget that they find obscene, or just for the sake of not bowing to an external authority, whose moral right is as fictitious as any. 

It is maybe a stupid choice, but it's theirs. It is not really a "duty" imposed from outside... something that they must inherently do or the whole universe crumbles down.

And it is so for everything.

Terrorists have no right to blow others up (not sure about not-critical infrastructures... those may be fair play; alas, there is no such a thing as a non-critical infrastructure, nowadays), but everybody has the right to sit down and say "this system is shit, it's just a bunch of bullies hoisting themselves up to control a mass of sheepish morons, with truncheons if needed, and I won't have anything to do with it any more. I won't lay a finger, if my work ends up filling the bullies' pay-check". 

Not the wisest possible choice, maybe. Maybe. 

Maybe it beats be an accomplice of one's own enslavement... and, India was freed that way. 

Long live Gandhi. )

So, my parents could be classified as a couple of narcissistic parents, dad was an assertive control freak with huge self-esteem issues, mother a completely self-absorbed master at guilt-tripping and neglectful parenting.

Where does this leave me?

First thing, the literature on the category confirms something that I had already suspected...the tendency for children of narcissistic parents is to grown up into narcissistic parents - unless they have broken down in a borderline mess.

Not sure which one of thr two I am, but it doesn't really matter - neither should be a parent.

( Yes, it is a tendency, it's just statistics, it is not bound to happen to me, and the fact that I realize the risk is usually a good sign - bollocks, being a parent is a though job that I have been taught wrong before I could manage to distinguish bullshit from crap; It's over).

Also, I hate, hate, hate the "family" concept.

( I realize, now, that my parent really used it to justify, mostly to themselves, some pretty selfish decisions of theirs, but still... 

I do not fucking care. 

If there is an organization for the abolition of the family, I will join it yesterday. Luckily, modern society is already going that way - it will never be soon enough ). 

qI won't have one, no matter if it may do me a lot of  well or that I may be a good father (Really? I don't think so... I feel my own wounds trying to find a way to get MY narcissistic supply) or any of the other platitudes that my relatives come out with, when I let it be known.

Family? Thanks but no, thanks - I've already given the monster enough.

The part about not financing the enslavers?  Yes, I believe that too. Kind of sap any motivation from doing a day job.
   
As I said, read at your  own risk