“But enough about me and my life—what do you think about me and my life?” So goes a joke I read somewhere, and which brings to mind the Way of Jeannie. I guess I’m as self-absorbed as the next childless only child, but somehow my stepmother (who grew up with a brother and raised two children of her own) has managed to outdo almost everyone I’ve ever met on the “me-me-me” scale.
If she had a formal diagnosis (narcissistic personality disorder, for example) I might understand despite being irritated. She may in fact have some type of disorder, but would never consider questioning her own motives or consult a therapist, unless it was to figure out why another person in her life was so troublesome.
She regards a question directed at someone else as an insult, and will find a way to answer it no matter how unrelated. (Asking my dad “So how long were you in the army?” prompts Jeannie to deliver a lengthy monologue about her teen years growing up during the war.)
This tendency is not new. Her attitude has always struck me as appallingly self-centered; even those few occasions when she’s expressed regret about something that she did, it’s been defined by her own sense of discomfort or pain, not the hurt she caused others. And most of the time (at least when dealing with me) she simply didn’t care how most people felt.
Once I noticed she’d gone through my closet while I was at school, intent on throwing out “unnecessary” things. One of those things was the treasured overcoat that I’d inherited from my grandfather, made by the workers of his own union in the 1940s—and which I still have today—only because I found it in the garage, packed in a box and ready to donate to Goodwill. When I protested, she was flippant: “That old thing? It’s just a dog, why would you want it?”
Her exasperation at having to “put up with kids” (including her own) was an attitude I’d never encountered before. She seemed to compare being a parent to an 18 year prison sentence, rather than expressing the sheer gratitude I’d come to expect.
I freely acknowledge that I wasn’t the easiest kid to deal with. My sense of entitlement was nurtured by a doting, overly-indulgent father, who along with my grandfather assured me that I was the best and brightest, the most loved member of the family, destined for success. After being the only child for 14 years, it was inevitable that having to share my father (not to mention living space) with three new people whom I never would have associated with would result in big problems.
Somehow we all survived. I guess that now would be the time to wrap things up philosophically, to affirm how everyone’s become older and wiser—and maybe there’s some truth there, but in so many ways we’re exactly the same as we always were.
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