daughters of narcissistic mothers
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I remember the birth because it was winter. I remember the smell of disinfectant, and Peter’s hands, warm and steady, holding mine. I remember feeling nothing and thinking that must be what peace was. They said she was small, fragile. He called her perfect. I told myself I’d given him a gift. I said it
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She was born beneath a silence, her first breath woven through with forgetting. They pressed a story into her skin, but the ink dissolved before it dried. She drank Lethe in her mother’s arms, unwitting, unknowing, learning the taste of absence as nourishment. Her lullabies were pauses, her cradle padded with omissions. Two fathers circled
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I call them the good years. I have always called them that. Beaming as though your brightness were my achievement. Perhaps it was. I left too many silences in my wake, so you filled them with pride on my behalf. It was easier that way. D had remarried. She hated me, her eyes narrowed whenever
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There are adults who do not walk through life as whole persons, but as a gallery of selves—each one trying to make sense of the others, or deny them altogether. What the DSM once called Multiple Personality Disorder—now formally termed Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)—is not the theatrical split so often misunderstood in popular culture. It
Reade Saunders 