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I know what she's doing right now.  She's cooking, baking, and gathering ingredients for tomorrow's feast.  The feast she will be having with my replacement, BM.  She'll be baking pies, cooking turkey, putting together a disgusting stuffing.  My mother's cooking was well known for her blandness and poop-inducing properties (for real, after you eat a big meal of hers, you have to take a big ol' poop, sometimes with nasty side effects!), but she was also known for her massive amounts of food she would cook, even when just for two people. 

Growing up, my oldest cousin would come into the kitchen each year and yell "Damn, Aunt K, you cooked enough to feed an army!"  And he was right.  She always cooked enough food so we'd have leftover for a freaking month.  And then she'd bitch it always cost her so much money and how nobody pitched in.  But nobody ever asked her to cook that much, and nobody ever took leftovers home.  Ever.  But that's the way things are with narcs.  They create situations to bitch about.  If you notice in your own life with your mother, you'll see she does exactly that.  Practically everything they complain about is their own doing.  Not always, but a lot.  I mean, they have to keep a steady line of narcissistic supply, so they create it themselves.

And she has a strict schedule she sticks to when she cooks for holidays.  Hell, she has a strict schedule she sticks to every single day.  I personally feel that's due to her anxiety (which she denies having).  I think she NEEDS her schedule (even though she has nobody to come home to anymore) in order to feel sane.  I think she actually has pretty severe anxiety, but pretends that she doesn't (just so she can make fun of me for mine). 

Not me, when I cook, I cook and when it's done, it's done.  I don't give two shits how late it is, or what time it is.  I think part of that is due to the fact of growing up with such insane strict schedules (we literally ate dinner at 6pm every single night growing up, ON THE DOT).  I am not a schedule person.  Never have been.  So now, as a grown up, I am a little too lax on stuff when it comes to that.  But my family could care less and we ate Thanksgiving at 8pm this year.  Though my kids did a huge amount of the cooking (who would have thought THAT could happen??  They are really, really good cooks!). 

It was so nice, so relaxed, nobody yelling, nobody getting annoyed, just good food and awesome company (though we did have a mishap that we're still dealing with days later--the ham leaked it's sugar glaze on the bottom of the oven and there was smoke everywhere!  Still smells in here! haha).

I thought about her.  I thought about how she's hanging out with my replacement, and how she probably complained about us.  But it was a fleeting thought.  And for the rest of the day & night, I didn't think about her at all.  Until after dinner we all sat around talking about what we're grateful for and everyone started talking about how grateful we were to not have her in our lives anymore and then it became a conversation about how awful my mother was and all the awful things she did to us.  My kids started the conversation, and I let them talk as much as they wanted to, knowing they needed to get out how much they were hurt by her.  Even my youngest, who's 16 and was her golden child, reminisced about how she tried to pit him and his brother against each other and how she'd only buy him things to buy his obedience. 

So the holidays are here, and whereas once I thought I couldn't live without my mother, now I couldn't imagine having to live with her in our lives.  Narcissists leave a trail of hurt and pain wherever they go.  But at least when you go no contact you have control over that hurt and pain and you can choose to never have to ever have that in your life again.  When they are in our lives, we have no control over what they can do to us.  When you choose no contact, you can finally get that control back and never allow them to do anything to you again. 

I loved my Narc-Free Thanksgiving ♡  Even if the house was full of smoke, and I was sick with an ear infection, and we didn't eat until 8pm.  Some may see that as a bust.  But not me.  It was still perfect and awesome and wonderful!

All because my mother (and my narc in-laws) weren't a part of it. 

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I know, I know, you're shaking your head right now, thinking "Yeah, right."  And you're right.  But there are a TON of people out there who don't really understand NPD, and think that just because a narcissist treats them well, that they've changed.

The mutual friend I had with my mother thought this.  Her sister was one of the biggest bully narcs you'd ever meet.  But when their mother and father died, the sister all of a sudden became clingy to my friend.  She even told her once "You're all I have now."  Which, to most people, would have been a telling sign, that she's only changing her tune because she had nobody else, but for some people, like my old friend, it meant something else.  Something benign.  Loving, even. 

I tried to tell her "She didn't change.  She only changed how she treated you because it benefitted her."  To which she replied, "Maybe, but I know she really loved me.  That I don't question." 

What can you say to that?  I just replied "sure" and moved on.  When you're faced with someone who doesn't want to accept their loved one is incapable of love, my suggestion is always to leave it alone.  That there's no point in trying to convince them otherwise.  Because if you do, what will you accomplish?  Making them believe they weren't loved?  And what how is that a good thing?

Yes, I have a post called "Your Mother Doesn't Love You."  Because she doesn't.  If you want to cling to the belief that she does, I will never press it.  Nor should you with anyone else.  Forcing someone before they are ready to accept the fact that they weren't loved can have very negative consequences.  No, scratch that, WILL have very negative consequences.  And we each have our stories we tell ourselves so we can feel whole.  And if those narratives don't add up or are changed before we have learned to accept that change, we can end up feeling broken and completely lost. 

Think about someone getting hit by a bus.  My great-grandfather died this way.  He was riding his bike downtown and was hit by a bus.  I imagine my great-grandmother getting that visit from the police and how it must have broken her.  People who are not ready to accept change will not adapt to change for a lot longer, sometimes for the rest of their lives than those who are ready. 

There was a Youtuber I used to watch named Talia.  She was around 13 with an awesome makeup channel and had cancer.  She would get better, get worse, get better, get worse.  And one day, she died.  The world was heartbroken.  But her family, and her fans, all knew this was a possibility.  And while we didn't want it to happen and we held out hope she'd recover and never get cancer again, but she didn't.  It was awful, but not shocking.  We grieved, but eventually, we moved on.  Granted, her family grieved longer than her fans, but still, it was something they could accept and eventually be whole again.

But when we get news that changes the core of our beings without being ready for it?  We stay broken for a very, very long time.  To find out that something isn't true that we once thought was true, it shakes us to our core.

So why would I want my old friend to feel that?  She wouldn't believe me anyways, but if I pressed the situation, what would that make me?  Helpful or hurtful? 

Helping others see the truth about narcissism is helpful on the whole.  But, you have to ask yourself when dealing with a situation like this, do you want to be helpful or hurtful?  And if the answer is the latter, then how are your actions different than your mother's?

You may argue that the person is being hurt by the narc, so by you educating them on the truth, you are helping.  But you have to remember, they are conditioned to deal with their abuse.  I am not talking about physical abuse, that requires police involvement (or CPS if there are children).  I am talking about emotional and verbal abuse.  And while it's wrong, you can't stop it from happening if they refuse to see it.  If you can't tolerate it, then walk away.

My ex-stepsister was being abused by her husband.  Physically, verbally, emotionally.  She'd only get on Facebook to ask for sympathy about his behavior towards her.  All of her flying monkey friends would sit and say "oh poor you!".  But I stood up to her.  She didn't listen, so I walked away.  Now they are divorced. 

My hubby's cousin was also being abused her my boyfriend.  I told her "If you're going to keep going back to him, I have to walk away from you.  I can't tolerate this kind of behavior on either of your parts, so while I love you, I have to walk away from you."  She never left him and died a few years ago without us in her life (she died from complications of diabetes).

Both of their codependent behaviors warranted me to intervene, but there's only so much we can do.  We can't make people believe that their abusers won't change.  We can't press it.  We can let them know how we feel, but in the end, it's up to them.  My old friend still thinks her sister died loving her (even though she accepts she was a narcissist).  And what harm will that do?  That's her narrative she tells herself so she feels whole.  Taking that away from her, before she's ready, would only make her feel broken.  And, if her sister had been alive, would probably cause her to right back into an abuser/abusee relationship with her, just as my husband's cousin went back to her abuser over and over.  My ex-stepsister got out, but is entangled in a severely codependent relationship with her own extremely narcissist mother--so she's still being abused.

Narcissists cannot change (unless maybe they have brain trauma and their brains are damaged, which could possibly change their personality--though they don't usually get nicer if that happens).  But shoving this down someone's throat will not help them (and will, in fact, hurt them).  When they do eventually (if they do) go no contact, you want it to stick.  And it only sticks when the person realizes that they can feel whole without the narcissist in their life. 

Can you live without your mother's love?  What about your sister's?  Or brother's?  Or your spouse's?  That's what we're asking people to accept.  And that's a HUGE obstacle to overcome.  We have to be the ones to accept that some people may just never get there.  And be okay with it.  And if we can't, to walk away. 

Narcissists can't change.  But we can.  We can change our hearts, our minds, and our lives.  We are the lucky ones.  But when we want to help change the lives of others, we have to do so with understanding and come from a place of love, rather than coming from a place of being right.  Narcissists always want to come from a place of being right, even when they're wrong.  We need to strive to not be like them in every way we can.  Even if that means letting others believe something that doesn't seem right to us.