You'd think I'd have learned by now to stop seeking her validation.  You'd think I'd be an old pro at this by now, but alas, I am human, and I still expect validation when I do a good job.  Not like "OMG you're so great at this!" or "WOW!  THIS IS AMAZING!"  But I do expect to not be outright disapproved of or rejected.  I don't care if someone didn't notice something cool I did or worked hard on.  I will come out and ask "Hey, I did, this, how do you like it?"  We all do this in my house.  Because we all deserve validation for hard work and effort.  My youngest son cleans their room quite regularly.  I always notice and tell him I'm jealous of how clean he is and I wish his awesome skills would rub off on me LOL 

See, I have ADHD, aspergers, and CPTSD.  So my executive functioning is kind of fucky.  My brain doesn't work the way organized brains work.  So when I do get the bug up my butt to start a project, I work hard to finish it, because if I don't, it may not get finished for weeks.  I do stay on task if something really interests me (like art or writing) but cleaning is not my jam.  But I do it, and since moving into our new house, I've been doing it quite regularly and been better at keeping my brain organized with certain things.  But projects tend to take over my life and will spill out into different areas of the house if I let them.  So I don't, because our house is teeny weeny, and it's a total clusterfuck if that happens.  So I keep my projects in certain places.  The garage being one of those places.  But at the same time, my kids and hubby are working on a woodworking project, I have all my paper products to burn (we live in the country), we save cans for recycling, the kids have their fishing stuff in there, and we also use it for storage.  So safe to say, it's always a mess.  We also store extra kitchen items out there (because my mother hoards kitchen stuff like pots and pans and bowls and all sorts of crap and I refuse to let her stuff up our cabinets with them all), paper towels/toilet paper, tools, and have two chest freezers.  Yeah.  That's a lot of stuff. 

So, yesterday, I said to my husband "Let's get this crap organized and clean".  And while I knew it had to be done, the only reason I said to do it now was because my mother keeps saying how she's going to go out there and organize everything, even though all the stuff is ours and not hers.  She loves to be the boss of everything, and when she can't boss me around, she likes to boss my stuff around.  It's totally maddening.

Deep down I wonder if she says these things knowing I don't want her to touch my stuff to get me to do it?  Well, if so, it works LOL  So we work all night until midnight and went to bed and about 90% of the stuff was thrown out (we burned all our paper products, like small boxes and the such, and the other ones we ripped up and threw in recycling) and/or organized.  We had a very small pile of stuff right by the door to go down the basement.  But you can not only see the floor, but it's all open and airy now.  Oh yeah, we also have tons of paint cans on the floor because we were putting concrete in them because the previous owner left them all for us to deal with (the jerk).  So there's some paint cans on the floor drying, so there's nothing we can do about that.  But most things have a place now and it's looks soooooo much better.  And we worked our asses off last night to get it to the place it's at now. 

And yes, before, it was a total disaster.  Not hoarding level disaster, but you had to be careful where you walked so you didn't trip.  And of course, since my mother has ODD (oppositional defiant disorder--like an angsty little teenager) and does exactly what she's not supposed to (she's a HUGE fall risk and has broken two bones in the past six months due to falling), she would always be mucking around in the garage to get things she needed.  Never once did she ask me to get things for her unless she had no idea where it was.  Never once did she talk about it being dangerous for her to be in there (even though it was).  And if I told her to be careful, she'd tell me to shush and that I was being "too dramatic" or "over protective" (and yes, I bought locks to keep her out of places that could kill her, like the basement door, where her physical therapist told her to stay out of). 

Yet, we cleaned it and it's mostly safe for her now, so she says to me this morning "If you're going in the garage, let me know, because I need to get my chopper and I need you to watch me so I don't trip on all that shit in there".  *sigh*  She's in there every single day and the moment there's hardly anything to trip on is when she has to say something dumb about it.  She added "Well, since you're up and here to hear me if I scream if I fall, I think it's safe for me to go get my chopper now."  Goodness.  And she says I'm overdramatic.

I knew she'd already either been in there or looked because I heard the door open and close.  I assume she wanted her chopper and waited for me to get up to make a production out of it because she saw that it was cleaned (not completely, we still have stuff by the door to bring downstairs, but that stuff was always there).  And she went in to get her chopper and came out and said absolutely nothing.  Had she not been in there yet, she'd have said "Oh, look, you started cleaning."  But instead she just acted like it was the same as usual. 

This is the type stuff we all deal with when it comes to narc parents (or other narcs in our lives).  We do do good things and rather than get validation, we either get insulted or disapproved of.  This happens from early childhood until our parents either die, get sick, or we go no contact.  Then sometimes, they will shower us in approval, just to mess us up and make us wonder if we're the crazy ones who imagined it all. 

As a child, my husband wrote a story (he was like six) and was so excited and showed it to his mother.  She looks at it and makes a face and says "What is this?"  He gets uncomfortable, feeling her disapproval and says "It's a detective story."  She replies with a laugh "That's not a story.  A story has a beginning, middle, and an end.  This is just a bunch of words about a detective."  And from that point on, his writing became about his mother's approval (which he hardly ever got). 

All my art projects I showed my mom, even as an adult, she'd so the same exact thing.  She'd crinkle her nose and say "hmmm, something is so off about this" as though she was an art critic or that I was asking for a critique. 

My therapist says that narcs do this stuff because they are jealous that they cannot do what we do, whether it be writing, art, the type of work we do, or anything.  If we do something well (or at least put a good effort into it), that makes them jealous.  If we do something not so well, it makes them feel good because they can't do it, and to them, neither can we, so they have to make a comment either way to bring us down.  So when my mother wanted to control where my stuff went in the garage (or wherever she wanted to put it--she had a knack for hiding my stuff) and saw that I did it first (well, me and the hubs), she got angry and/or jealous at her lack of control, and lashed out at me about it.  She wanted me to know that she was not going to give me any validation or approval of my actions and instead, put me down for it.  She wanted me to know that it wasn't good enough for her standards, just like every other thing I've done in my life. 

It really pissed me off this morning.  Not so much right now.  My therapist told me to use a scale of 1-10 and to put every situation on that scale and everything below a 5 isn't worth caring about.  And when I do this, I find that most of the situations I get mad at are really 0's.  She wants to make me mad and succeeds every single time.  But now I have a tool I can use to combat these tedious remarks and jabs and ignore them.  And while I didn't need her to say today "Good job on the garage" (because it wasn't done yet), I didn't need her to remind me that nothing I do is good enough for her. 

Now, when it does get done, I have to remember that I do not need her to approve of what I did.  And had this not happened, that's exactly what I would have wanted.  I would have went to her and said "Oh, did you see how good the garage looks?"  And she would have shot me down.  Now I know not to say anything at all. 

Most days, I do things and don't even give them a second thought about anyone even noticing I did something.  I live with three men so I am used to things being overlooked.  I stopped needed validation for the little stuff a long time ago.  But my mother will beg for approval over every tiny little thing she does (once, she moved the recycling bag back an inch and literally asked everyone if we noticed).  It's exhausting.  And it also makes me feel bad for her.  Growing up she probably never got approval from her mother, now she seeks in every single way possible.  I don't want to be like that.  I validate my kids all the time (not that fake praise though, which kids can see through, I actually mean what I say).  I validate my husband.   And I don't always get it back and that's okay.  I've pushed myself to not seek out anymore.  To know I did a good job and be proud of myself is enough most times.  It's the disapproval I can't stand.  But I'm learning to ignore that, too (with the help of my awesome new therapist). 

When your parents refuse to approve of you, learn to approve of yourself.  And know that their disapproval is ONLY a reflection of how they feel about themselves.  Know when they are insulting you, they are insulting themselves, when they are telling you that you're not good enough, they know that deep down inside they aren't good enough, and know when you've done a good job at something and they pick it apart?  They are jealous of your abilities and/or accomplishments because they feel they can't do things as good as you can, or at all (or they feel slighted because you took something away from them).  My father used to call me a freak.  But I know that inside, he felt like a freak because he was made to feel like one his entire life (though I didn't know that at the time he called me that, only now, 20 years after his death). 

When you ask for their validation and don't get it (and you most likely never will), all it does is create this voice inside of you that you'll carry forever that says "I'm not good enough.  I never will be."  Don't let them do that to you.  Because it's not you.  It's them.  It's always been them.  You don't need their approval for anything you do.  You just need your own.  And use that scale I mentioned earlier.  If it the situation is below a 5, just let it wash away back into the dirt where it belongs. 

So we moved in with my mother this year, right before the covid lockdown hit.  And as soon as we did, my mother took over being "the boss of everything".  She had to tell me where to put the furniture, where to put the tables, and she even took my furniture and used it as her own (even though we hardly had any furniture at all).  She even went as far as to tell me "You can decorate your room, but I get the rest of the house".  She's also famous for constantly saying "When I'm dead, you can do what you want with the house", meaning that I am not allowed to choose anything while she'd still here.  The funny part is that she thinks she'll be living here until she's dead.  The woman has dementia, and the minute I have to change her soiling herself, she will be in a home. 

The issue is that my mother picks dangerous things to do when nobody is looking, which has led to her breaking two bones this past few months.  She can barely stand upright most of the time, yet she constantly walks through our hilly and holey yard when everyone is asleep.  And she does it on purpose because she'll brag about it, as though being oppositional and defiant makes her a badass.  The last time she tried to do something stupid she broke a damn rib.  She was in so much pain that they gave her fentanyl and it didn't even touch it.  Every time she moved, she screamed.  And yet, she will bug me about going in the basement most days or some other stupid thing she wants to hurt herself with. 

She thinks she the boss of everyone and everything around her and we've had a hell of a time trying to keep her safe from herself.  And I can only imagine that as her dementia progresses, it will only get worse.  And know, these actions have nothing to do with her dementia.  This is the way she's always been.  Bossy, defiant, and unruly. 

When we found the house, one of the coolest things I fell in love with was the garden area.  And because I was so happy about it, she decided to be the boss of that, too.  I wasn't allowed to pick the plants to go in the garden.  I'm not even allowed to choose where my garden gnomes go (she made the comment that I should put them out at the cemetery on my father's grave the other day, which goes to show how much she respects my stuff). Every time I put a gnome where I want it, she moves it where she wants it. 

So she tried to head up this year's garden, even though I'm the one who's kept a garden for more than ten years, but for some reason she thinks because she did it when I was growing up, she is way more experienced than me.  My kids and I tilled the garden.  We also made it twice the size by fencing off the rest of the corner in our yard.  And she kept telling me where to plant the plants inside of it.  I said "If you're not going to tend it, I will put them where I want".  And I threw on my headphones so I didn't have to hear her bitching and planted them wherever I wanted.  It felt good to not let her boss me around.  But as it turned out, a fact I found out as I was planting them, she bought almost 10 tomato plants and a few squash.  I was like "What kind of garden are we making here?"  Nobody needs that many damn tomatoes, especially not us.  And they were all the same kind of tomatoes, too.   

So now I have a freaking tomato garden.  All that whining about not letting me plant what I wanted.  All that bossing me around.  All that "We'll, we're certainly not planting seeds from last year!"  All of it.  For what?  And the minute the work got complicated?  My mother washed her hands of the whole thing.  She went from "Don't you remember?  I've kept a garden all your childhood!  I know best!"  to "Ugggh, I kept a garden all those years.  I don't even want to do this ever again.  It's yours."  Thanks.  After you bought all the plants (aka: tomatoes) and it's too late to plant anything else.  Now it's mine.  Great. 

Well, if anyone needs some freaking roma tomatoes, just hit me up.  Soon, we'll have a hundred that will rot because we don't can and freezing them makes them gross. 

I did make a fresh topping for my noodles the other day.  I cut up one tomato, one zucchini and sautéed them with garlic powder and Italian seasoning and put it on top of linguine when the zucchini was soft.  It was quite delicious. 

But I can't eat noodles every damn day, nor will I eat tomatoes every day either. 

What a fun summer this is.  I hope yours is going better.