So much of my life that I remember either didn't happen, or didn't happen the way I remember it.  Or so mother says.  She tries to convince me I'm always wrong in every conversation, making up lies just so she can "prove me wrong".  Even over stupid things, like whether or not I've ever done this or that, or whether this happened or that happened.  I try to stay out of conversations with her due to this issue, because everything always turns into her disagreeing with me for disagreement's sake.  It's crazy and ridiculous.

Then we have the issues where she says something that's wrong (which is often) and I correct her.  I don't have to.  I know this.  But sometimes I really do, like when she tries to tell me that diet soda is worse for you when you have diabetes (which she has) than regular soda, yet, she can't figure out why her blood sugar is so high when she drinks root beer every day.  I will correct her, and she will make up things that make absolutely no sense to argue her point, and then adding in things that have no basis in what we're talking about.  This is also a constant thing.  I think she says this stuff knowing it's wrong just so I look like I'm the one being argumentative with her.

Then we have when mother just wants to make up things for fun's sake.  Like recently, she's been on a kick saying my children's bedroom stinks.  It smells like literally nothing, since their room is spotless and their sheets and blankets are always clean.  They literally own practically nothing.  They are true minimalists.  But she insists their room smells horrible.

She talks about this constantly, which cracks me up, because my mother has absolutely no sense of smell or taste.

I, on the other hand, have an acute sense of smell.  It's one of my best senses.  I can smell things other people can't, which sucks because when something smells gross, I am always the first to smell it and it makes me more sick than others because I smell it worse than they do.  It's a blessing and a curse.  But I go into my children's room and it literally smells like air.

She came home the other day from the store (my husband takes her shopping) and even bought a disgusting air freshener for their room.  I walked into their room and immediately almost gagged.  "What's that awful smell?" I yelled.  "Yeah, can you please throw that away?  Grandma put that nasty thing in here," they replied.  I grabbed the air fresher and chucked it into the garbage outside.  I can't stand air fresheners (or bleach or anything else with a strong scent, unless it's a food related scent, like coffee or cinnamon buns), and apparently neither can my children.  And for once, their room actually did smell awful.

Now, my mother has had dementia for several years.  It's not that bad yet.  But it's getting there.  But I do not believe for one moment she's thinking she's smelling something she isn't there.  I think she's making it up because she wants people to think of the kids as "gross boys".  The funny part is her room stunk so bad when she had her cat that we had to put down recently.  She couldn't even smell how bad her room was (you could smell that shit from outside sometimes), yet my boys' room smelled so awful she needed to buy an air freshener for it?  It makes absolutely no sense.  And she kept saying it every single day as though we were just going to cave and say "You got us, we were lying, their room smells horrible".  But she said it so much that I kept going in there to make sure I wasn't crazy.  And sure enough, I wasn't (and neither were my kids or husband).

She didn't like me throwing her air freshener away.  But she also hasn't said anything about their room since.  I think it's a fun game she was playing, since the quarantine order has been in effect she has had nobody to hang out with besides us.  She can't get her supply from her BFF's anymore, so she has to get it from somewhere.  So she made up a story about "The Stink That Ever Existed".

So much fun.

I have a game I'm going to start playing called "What will mother lie about next?"  That actually sounds like an exhausting game because she tells so many lies daily I can't keep track of them all.  Sigh.

That's gaslighting for ya.  Mother's favorite party game.

When time has gone by and they've been good for a bit, you know they're gearing up for some drama.  That's because they're addicted to chaos, and they can't go without it for too long, otherwise they get too bored.  And god forbid they become bored.  Because the more bored they get, the more drama they want to stir up.

So, how do you combat this nice little feature the narcissists seem to be preprogrammed with?

Well, on their end, there's not much you can do.  They are who they are and you can't really change them.  The only thing you can do is to not let their behavior spin you out of control.  Believe me, I know what it's like to get caught up in their drama.  It's so easy to do (especially since they taught us that from childhood).  Take my ex, for example.  He used to get the kids every Friday night.  It was horrible.  The kids would beg me not to go, but the courts forced me to let him see the kids, so we had to comply.  He would do something stupid every freaking weekend to the kids (like let them watch rated-R movies or leave them in the care of someone else while he went out, etc.) and I would get caught up in his drama every single time.  I would call him and yell at him on the phone for an hour and every single week went like this.  Then one day I realized, he's doing this on purpose to lure me in.  So I quit participating.  He would do something stupid, and I would say "That's not good."  And I stopped calling him about it.  I realized I got angry because I expected him to be better than he was.  I expected him to act like a good father, when he just wasn't.  I stopped particpating in his drama.  The things he did weren't things I could do anything about (if he had put them in real danger, I would have called someone, and when that did happen, I got a restraining order on him).

When you participate in their drama, they get high off it.  My mother loves to feel victimized so she'll create situations where I have to either tell her to stop or to say no, so she can feel like I'm the bad guy.  Yesterday, she came home with a brand new pan.  She loves to have 50 of all kitchen items (when she lived alone, it was crazy how much her shelves and cabinets were stuffed full).  So when we moved in together, I did was I had been doing the past two years and only had two pots, two pans, enough plates for each person, same for bowls and had only the essential kitchen tools in my countertop crock for spatulas and whatnot.  She practically went insane about this, but since I am the only person who cooks, I put my foot down.

So when she came home with this pan, I was confused.  All of a sudden while at the grocery store with my husband (he takes her shopping to give me a break) she gets this idea in her head that "I need to eat healthy!"  And buys tons of chicken and gets herself a pan to cook her chicken in.  Never mind I just bought four bags of chicken and had two huge bags of leg quarters also.  I said "What's the pan for?"  She said "So I can cook my chicken."  I said "We have pans."  She says "Well, so when you cook your food, I can cook my chicken at the same time."  I said "So you're no longer eating my dinners?"  She says "Well, your cooking is so good and tastes so delicious that I eat too much.  If I make my bland chicken, I won't eat as much."  My mother is the queen of made up bullshit.  This is what she thinks she's good at.  She's not.  "Ma, for one, just take less portion sizes if you're worried about eating too much.  And you have absolutely no sense of smell or taste.  How does my cooking taste any different from your cooking?" (being that she has no sense of smell or taste, she will salt her food until the cows come home just so she can taste something, and she has high blood pressure, so eating that much salt isn't good).  Then I added "We have two pans up here already.  And more in the basement, so why did you buy this pan?  I'm not storing it in the kitchen.  We don't have a lot of cabinet space."  So she replies "I guess you can just return it then."

It's not that she doesn't like my cooking.  It's the fact she's bored and wants to change things up and create some chaos.  When she's in the kitchen while I cook, all she does is tell me what to do and make constant comments.  This annoys me greatly (as it would anyone).  So I started making a big show about how people are always in my way while I cook, so now she goes somewhere else until dinner is ready.  And some nights, she cooks (and I help when she needs it).  So it's not like she can't cook, I let her cook any time she wants.  She just doesn't want to anymore.  But all of a sudden now she wants to make her own food while I make food for everyone else.  Which makes absolutely no sense, since we all sit together to eat every single night.  And supposedly all that chicken she bought was for herself.

After she told me to return her pan to the store, she went outside.  I went outside to go pick up stuff in the yard before the storm rolled in and she started to tell me about how she was going to start going to church.  She isn't religious.  And she hasn't been to church in over thirty years.  And now, amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, she wants to start going to church.  Even though just a month before she called all the people idiots who wanted churches to open so desperately they were protesting in town about it.  *sigh*  First of all, she can't go anywhere alone.  She knows this.  She can't walk that well.  Second, she can't drive, so we'd have to take her.  And third, duh.  If I don't let her go to the store more than once a month due to the pandemic, why on earth would I let her go to a small, enclosed space to sit for an hour or more when she doesn't even believe in it?

She's bored.  Plain and simple.  When she gets bored, she has this obsessive need to do something.  Just any idea that pops into her head, it becomes a huge deal and eventually, yes, it will fizzle out, but until then, she'll press about it until she annoys the ever loving crap out of those around her.

Like she's obsessed with rearranging our living room.  She doesn't even use the living room.  But she won't stop pressing us to move the furniture around.  The issue is, it's the smallest living room in existence and there's no room to put anything any different than what it is.  Well, unless you want half of the furniture put somewhere where you can't see the television (which makes no sense).  We like it the way it is (which we constantly tell her), but for some reason she gets so damn obsessed with the idea of changing it.  And again, that reason is boredom. Plus, she used to constantly rearrange the kitchen cabinets, until I told her to quit because I do all the cooking and can never find anything.

Why is she so bored, you ask?  Right now, it's the pandemic shelter-in-place order.  She can't see her friends (from whom she gets her narcissistic supply).  She can't go shopping (which she's addicted to).  She can't do a lot of things per her doctor's orders (because she's a huge fall risk...her legs do not work right).  So I get it.  There's not much to do.  But even when she could drive and cook and go up and down stairs and do everything she always did, she'd still get bored and create chaos because, like I said, when there's no drama, they have to create drama so they can feel fulfilled.  For them, it's a basic need like food or water.

And the only thing we can do is refuse to participate when it rears it's ugly head.  What that looks like will be different in each situation that comes up, so there's no absolute formula to follow, though a basic one is to pretend you don't care, even if you do.  And another is to stick to your boundaries.  Letting my mother bring that pan into my kitchen, after I explained to her why we can only have what we need rather than an excess of everything, would have just blown my boundaries out the window.  Yes, I participated in her drama.  But what was more important this time was that my boundaries weren't crossed.  If I let her bring that in, it would have opened a doorway to her overfilling our cabinets with all sorts of stuff (which right now our coffee cup situation is getting out of control).  And the other boundary she'd be crossing is creating a complicated situation where dinner would be come "mine" and "hers", rather than ours.  And that would be a whole other situation to deal with later as the idea of washing dishes and storing the food would get more and more complicated.

Some things aren't worth fighting (that's when you pretend it's no big deal and that you don't care) and other things are worth a small confrontation or fight so bigger ones don't happen later.

So prepare yourself, if the narc in your life has been good for awhile.  Know they are getting bored and are gearing up to either start a little chaos or big chaos.  You just never know which will be coming, so prepare for both, and protect your boundaries as best you can.

Good luck.