Until she became disabled, my mother didn’t believe in family or want anything to do with anyone she was related to.
Now that she needs us, she softens her anti-family stance and tells never-before-heard stories about how she breastfed her sister through a terminal illness.
She says things like: “In my day, family took care of family.”
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However, her hatred of Christmas has been around for decades and is stronger than ever.
Realize that her strong negative emotions on any holiday are another manifestation of her narcissism.
If she can’t make Christmas about her, she’ll try to ruin it for everyone.
Besides narcissism, my mother suffers from some other disturbing mental health conditions, one of which is a type of obsessive-compulsive disorder, referred to as Spartan OCD.
It’s anti-hoarding/ultra-minimalist.
When provoked, she must get rid of things, which she does by throwing or abandoning them. She will go into a purging frenzy and get rid of everything in sight — even if the item doesn’t belong to her.
I still mourn the favorite Hawaiian dress my mother gave the girl next door down the street when I was nine years old. I guess there weren’t any old trinkets or spoiled fruit to throw away that day.
#The gift is not my mother’s love language
Her anti-hoarding obsession works to her advantage around Christmas because the two work together.
For example, one Christmas, her gifts to me were a block of cheese, an old, unfinished loaf of bread, some old stationery with her initials BB on it, an opened package of cough drops, and a nearly empty jar of Vaseline.
Nothing says Merry Christmas like unwanted toiletries and expired food.
For most people, this is a strange assortment of gifts, but for my mother, it was a double take. She was able to clean out her closets, and I felt honored that she remembered to send me some gifts.
My mother is smart enough to know that stale bread and stale cheese just won’t cut it, so she included a small check.
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Financial manipulation is one of the favorite tools of narcissists.
When my niece and nephews were little, my mother would hide their vacation checks under her kitchen rug.
I enjoyed watching them squirm with the same satisfaction a puppeteer gets from pulling a puppet’s strings, and then accidentally breaking their arms.
Decorating is very festive
After my parents divorced and moved into separate residences, I spent Christmas with my parents. He always had a little tree and would prepare a special dinner, usually schnitzel and red cabbage, and there would be gifts for me.
One time, my father died, and I went to my mother’s house for Christmas. Well, not exactly Christmas, more like wintertime. Since she is anti-hoarding and hates stuff, she didn’t want to have any Christmas decorations lying around.
Instead of a tree, she placed some pine branches she found on her walk in a vase, and some old cotton from a freshly opened medicine bottle as decoration.
#It is not the thought that is important
My mother wants attention and shows devotion but is always dissatisfied with everything. You rarely get a gift you love.
On the plus side, the wrong gifts gave her the choice of starting an argument, playing the victim, or reverting to the narcissist’s preferred silent treatment.
Frowning and not expressing your feelings is a great way to spoil your Eid celebration!
It’s always hard to find and hold onto the gifts you want. Within minutes, she can unwrap a gift, decide it’s not hers, and then toss it in the donation bag right in front of the giver.
Sometimes my mother wouldn’t bother donating things to charity, but would just put everything she didn’t want under the tree in front of her house for others to take.
The donation system under the tree doesn’t work as well as you might think for melting items like cookies, crackers, or evil witches.
My mother’s anti-hoarding condition makes her appear generous, and narcissists enjoy appearing to others as benevolent benefactors even if their actions are completely selfish.
#Eid food
For 80% of her life, my mother had very little food in her house, not because she was poor but because she was on a diet. But during the holidays, there was food, usually because her family bought and cooked it.
