The following is a collective case study focused on the effects of narcissistic personality disorder and how it relates to the unfolding relationship between my parents.
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A Matrimony of Hell
After tying the marital knot, it didn’t take long for both my parents to realize that their marriage may have been a mistake. The vows of matrimony usually repeated during a marital ceremony probably should have been studied under closer scrutiny by my parents. “What God has joined, let no man put asunder”, is a phrase considered by at least one of my parents far too lightly. My dad was the religious one of the two of my parents. What was he thinking? Based on my research into the past, I had to wonder how long they realized before figuring out that their marriage was doomed from the start. I have my own theories on this, and for this reason and many other reasons, I have remained single.
My first thought on “what God has joined” is that maybe God had nothing to do with their marriage in the first place. After all, there was some crafty manipulation going on behind the scenes. My maternal grandparents wanted their daughter to be married to someone they considered to be stable and suitable marriage material. As soon as my father showed an interest in my mother, my maternal grandmother was assisting my mother in moving the relationship into motion. My maternal grandmother had apparently set a time frame that my mother would be married by and worked to make sure it happened according to her plans.
Second, my mother would later verbalize that she didn’t really even like my dad, but her parents were insistent that she’d be passing up a “good” man. There were clearly some control issues with my mother’s parents. Yet, my mother was an adult. Why couldn’t she make her own decisions about who to marry? Of course, there might have been no me since the combination of my parents’ DNA resulted in my birth, but then I’d be missing out on this great narcissistically fueled adventure of life and would not have as much interesting content for a blog. Need I say more? Of course I will because there’s so much more to this story.
What I’d always been told about the time frame in which marriages occurred in back then was that the parents within the family had more to say about what occurred with their children’s lives, and the children simply obliged to fulfill their parents’ wishes. Looking back, it appeared to be somewhat of a cultural phenomena in making sure the daughter would not become a “spinster” or “old maid” in her latter years. Many families believed that it was a “curse” for a woman to stay single until she was considered too old to marry. Fortunately, for me, I was not born in those times. Needless to say, those were the beliefs and values that many families within my culture practiced until the societal views changed and a different generation changed this.
Undoubtedly, my parents could have used a better understanding of their marital vows, though, because the phrase “let no man put asunder” clearly means to me that no man should separate what God has joined. As I said before, however, I don’t believe God had much to do with setting their marriage up even though there were three beautiful children formed from the union. Yet, clearly this marriage needed separating from the start though. It should have never been, but those are my thoughts after living a chaotic life with my parents for 18 years. Fortunately, there are others who know my parents and would agree with my sentiments. Some of the members of both sides of my parents’ families could not get along because they did not agree with my parents’ marital union. My maternal grandmother immediately regretted ever becoming involved in “matching” them together as well.
As for my parents, there was a lot to deal with because of their different belief systems, different values, and different ideas on what entailed a marriage. Plus, when they married, there was never just the two of them in the marriage. My mother was a package deal tightly wrapped inside of a box with her mother, and had my father known that his marriage came with input from his mother-in-law, I doubt he would have married my mother. Yet, because of his belief system, he wanted to honor the marriage and make things work. He believed that to divorce was not only a biblical sin, it was a sign of failure. He did not want to fail even if it meant years of suffering. He also exclaimed that he loved my mother. So he was willing to stick it out with her to make the marriage work.
Not surprisingly, their marriage was hell. Their first year together sounded like a complete disaster. They even separated for a period of time, and from what I was told by others who knew about their marriage, there were also rumors of adultery in the first year. It wasn’t until my mother found out she was pregnant that my dad seriously buckled down and asked my mother for a fresh start to make their marriage work. Because my maternal grandmother was concerned about how their family would look with my mother raising a child alone, she encouraged my mother to give marriage to my father another try. So try is what my parents did; and then came me.
Stay tuned for the rest of the story …
My Voice Unchained 