An Angry Response to the Estrangement Panic
CW: parental neglect & trauma, ableist slurs
I'm an adult child with a narcissistic father. No, I'm not using that terminology lightly; he fits the exact type of individual afflicted with Narcissistic Personality Disorder. To be clear, I don't think having NPD or any other personality disorder automatically condemns somebody to be a bad person; it will complicate the process of navigating interpersonal relationships, like many other mental disorders, but it doesn't make the navigation impossible.
That being said, I need to be very clear about this: there isn't an estrangement epidemic, adult children like myself are just tired of having our boundaries repeatedly violated by parents who aren't even trying to adapt.
I've had a pretty strained relationship with my father which came to a fever pitch late last year. I asked a close friend to come with me to meet my dad, who was visiting from out of town to give me some food and some money. I'm unemployably disabled as a result of a variety of mental conditions alongside chronic pain that unpredictably varies between "annoying" to "can't leave my bed." I'm not unappreciative of his assistance while I'm struggling to make my government benefits stretch the whole month (they can't but I still try), but it's the way in which he provides that assistance which started pulling me to my limits.
In front of my good friend, we had a conversation about irresponsible firearm handling. We were all in agreement; toys are not guns, they're dangerous. Or, I thought we were in agreement.
Not two minutes after we'd all agreed that handling guns like idiots is a dangerous thing that can kill people, my father goes into a story about how he, as a young adult, told one of his friends to hold a shotgun incorrectly on purpose. He wasn't telling this story as a sign of personal growth and to demonstrate how quickly 'just horsing around' can turn dangerous; he was laughing. Like it was a fucking practical joke.
My friend, usually a calm and measured individual, called him an asshole. Afterwards, she told me she'd only laughed while saying it because she knew it was the only way she'd get to call him an asshole without having to worry about being mauled by him. My best friend thought, apparently reasonably so, that my father would beat her up within an inch of her life if she even dared to call him out to his face.
Not twenty minutes after my dad laughed off a horror story he'd been the main monster in, he gets me alone in his truck to have a private conversation where he begs and pleads me to understand he's not a mean person. A week previously, I'd made a Facebook post detailing many of the ways in which he hurt me, and mentioned I was considering estrangement. His brother - my uncle - saw that post, and immediately told my dad about it. He mentioned this to me. He didn't tell me who did it - it was just easy to figure out. They're two peas in a pod; a few years prior, my uncle's girlfriend - someone who'd been to family gatherings since as far back as I can remember - broke up with him. I don't know for sure the reasons why, but my dad and my uncle are very close and behave very similarly. It doesn't take long to guess at the reasons.
What is narcissistic about my dad is the fact that he keeps getting stuck on how other people think of him. He doesn't get defensive, he doesn't try to change his behavior; instead, he tries to convince he's not THAT bad. Other people with NPD who work hard to adapt to it will be able to adjust their behavioral patterns hurting others; my father, on the other hand, refuses to believe anything is wrong with him at all. Instead, he thinks himself to be a good father just because he had money he could spend on me. He thinks he's a good father just because he didn't hit me. It's a dick measuring contest; "I'm not like THESE terrible fathers, so I must be a good father." The thing is, the bar he's set for himself is in Hell, and he has no intent on adjusting his expectations for himself further. Beyond that, he REFUSES to go to therapy or counseling despite being gently urged by my brother; in his eyes, only broken and terrible people do that, and he's not broken or terrible.
I've just come out of a particularly catastrophic month which marks the end of a particularly stressful year of my life. As I struggled with a panic attack, I called my mother and spoke for about three hours. Within that conversation, I mentioned wanting to repair my relationship with my dad. I hate hating him. I hate feeling my stomach flip upside down when I think about him. I hate screaming at an imaginary visage of him in the corner of my living room while I'm trying to broil hotdogs in my oven. I just want a normal relationship with a normal father.
He visited me three days ago. I will not have a normal relationship with my father because he is not a normal father.
Despite him being told I've just come out of an extreme mental episode (which he verbally acknowledged to me), he repeatedly showed me that he does not think he needs to change his behavior towards me or anyone else. Any time he behaved in a way any normal, well-adjusted father would, he would always say, "See? I'm not mean!"
Days after an apocalyptic crashout, the one thing he has remained fixated on is how he thinks I feel about him. It's not a thought in his mind that he should change.
The first thing he said to me at this visit was, and I quote, "Fucking retards in the city, on the highway, all of them. None of these retards know how to drive." I am a disability activist and he knows this. His sister's son has a developmental disability. He himself is not the greatest driver, either; he drives a gigantic pick-up truck and has, on multiple occasions with me in the passenger seat, climbed over curbs accidentally and blamed the curb that has been there for decades.
On this visit, we went downtown to a mall so he could pick up some wireless headphones his brother recommended to him. While I was using my phone to pay for his parking after our city moved to internet-based payment and away from physical parking meters, a man stood behind us and lit a cigarette. Having lived in the city for a year now, I recognized what the man was doing; he was having a smoke break, and that's probably 'His Spot' on the wall where he likes to smoke to shield himself from the wind. My dad, as we were walking away, said, "That guy'd better not steal my fucking truck."
I responded incredulously. "What?! No, he's just on a smoke break. He's not gonna touch your truck."
"Well, you never know."
"Dad, he's an old man with grey hair, smoking a cigarette, leaning against the building and wearing a nice coat. He's not in a gang, and even if he was, he wouldn't fuck with you because YOU'RE not in a gang either."
"You can never be too careful."
The old man was fucking harmless. He had a kind face with deep laugh lines and soft skin; it was obvious to me he just wanted to get some nicotine in during his fucking work break. But because this man dared to stand behind my father and light a dart, suddenly the man became my dad's worst fucking enemy. This is my dad; he only cares about himself, how others might do wrong by him, and he can never admit he's wrong.
His visit ruined my fucking mood. I'd just had a heart-to-heart with my mom about how badly I wanted the relationship between me and my dad to just be fucking normal, and he went and acted like a complete asshole from start to finish. He hasn't changed in the slightest, even after hearing how I really thought about him and his behavior through the family grapevine. During the only moments he showed positive improvement, he slapped the "I'M NOT MEAN" statement after it as if to immediately prove he was only doing it so I'd thought he'd change, instead of having actually been changed. It's because he wasn't genuinely trying to treat me or anyone else better, it's because he wants me to stop thinking a factual thought: that he's treating me like shit. He's trying to make me regret ever saying anything close to "my dad is why I have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder."
This is the kind of story that isn't being told by these pigshit fascist rags publishing these boneheaded stories about the "Estrangement Epidemic." They hear all these shitty parents talk about how their adult children are being unreasonable and bratty, but they never really believe the stories from the adult children - if they even bother to reach out to the children at all.
I was not sexually abused as far as I'm aware, and I wasn't physically abused either, but if that is the bar for good or bad parenting, the bar - as previously stated - is in fucking Hell. Adult children estranging themselves from their parents still pushed to extremes, their boundaries consistently violated over and over again. Estrangement is a last resort, not a petty revenge story. My father has repeatedly browbeat me about my interests and hobbies if they didn't line up with his. He constantly accused me of hanging out with drug dealers and professional criminals despite having absolutely no evidence of it - you'll never find evidence of an event that never happened. He only ever showed interest in something I showed interest in if he also had the same interest, but even then, it was just so he could enjoy his interests vicariously through me - selfishly, not healthily.
He was only ever in it for his own gratification. He didn't want to see me grow and mature, he wanted me to be his subordinate. He didn't want me playing hockey so I could have fun and develop some skills on the ice, he wanted me to be the next Gretzky so he could be rich off of my efforts. He still doesn't see me as a regular human being, he still treats me like a fucking child. He still misgenders me if he genders me at all, and never apologizes when he uses my deadname and is gently reminded about the correct name to use. My name in his phone is still my deadname.
It has been almost eight years since I came out to the family. My grandfather - my father's father - is better at this than him.
I cannot, in good conscience, let this fucking asshole keep running me over. I DESPERATELY want a normal relationship with my father, but he is not letting it happen. At a certain point, estrangement becomes a necessary action to protect myself from his behavior, and subjecting myself to him would be akin to letting myself get hurt over and over again.
There is not an estrangement epidemic.
Adult children are just fed up with being treated like shit, and we've had enough.