When Your Narcissistic Mother Still Treats You Like a Child

My mother told me, in the office of our winery and in front of bank representatives and officials from government offices, that people have to start at the bottom. I had asked to sit in on their meeting instead of going out to check the sugar levels in the grapes. This was the same mother who had more than once presented me to other people as the son who would take the business over one day, the person it was all being built for. Now she was sending me out of the room. I went. I ended up at the weighing station, drinking a beer with the workers there, while the people inside carried on with whatever they were discussing.

The arrangement is hard to explain to anyone who has not lived in one, because each piece of it looks different on its own than it does next to the others. Sending the successor out to learn the practical side of the business sounds sensible by itself, and so does most of what follows. Taken together, they add up to something else. I was trusted with the responsibility for keeping things running, I sat in plenty of meetings, and I did real work for the company. What I did not have, at any point, was authority I could rely on, or a mother who treated my judgment as that of a capable adult. Any decision I made on my own could be overruled, held against me, or used as proof that I still had a lot to learn.

Old Enough for the Work

The responsibility was not imaginary. After my father’s death I moved back into my mother’s house and into most of what he had been doing. I kept the books, wrote the reports, did the marketing, drove her, traveled with her, sat beside her in meetings, and at home looked after the garden and listened to the plans she had once discussed with him. For a while I even felt something like pride in it. She would tell people that all of this was for me, that I was the one who would carry it on, and when you have spent your life trying to get your mother’s approval, being presented that way does something to you. But the title did not come with the authority that normally goes with it. I could do the work. What I could not do was make a decision about it, because whenever I tried, the response was that I did not yet understand how things worked.

A meeting came up that would have meant several hours on the road. I asked whether we could not deal with it by email or on a video call. That was the whole offense: not a refusal, a question about whether the drive was necessary, the kind of thing anyone with a job gets to ask. The answer was that I still knew nothing about business and had no idea how things worked in the real world, and shortly afterward I was out of a job again. She framed it as concern for me. She said she hoped I’d find work in my own field, though I should expect to earn very little and would probably come back soon, begging on my knees.

She dismissed me from the business more than once, and more than once took me back, and the time in between was treated less as a gap in my employment than as a failure to take responsibility. At one point I was taken to task for meetings I had missed during a period when I officially did not work there. I told her several times, but it made no difference, and I was still expected to answer for it. A son who could be let go and taken back at will was a son whose standing in the business was whatever she said it was on a given day.

What Counted as Immature

It was never clear what would have counted as mature in her eyes. The clearest examples I have are the things she objected to. Two puppies had been left in a cardboard box near the entrance to the winery one morning. I fed them and gave them water, and my future wife and I were still at the gate with them when my mother drove up, followed by a car of some visitors who were coming for a meeting. The lecture came later. A future owner, I was told, is at his desk early and occupied with serious matters, not out by the gate, playing with dogs. What she objected to was the picture: the man she presented as the next owner, standing at the entrance with two abandoned puppies as visitors arrived. But within a few days she had a project of her own. The empty building on the grounds could be turned into a shelter for stray dogs. She talked about marketing, about publicity, about helping the animals in the area, and she worked on the idea for several days before letting it go. From then on, any mention of it from me was taken as ridicule.

The other definitions were just as elastic. Keeping a plan I had made for the weekend was selfish, since she might decide on a Friday evening that we were traveling the next morning. Wanting to invite someone to the rooms I lived in upstairs in her house was a liberty, as if the rooms were not quite mine, which in every sense that mattered they were not. Then there was the woman I later married. Her family had a connection to the winery, and in the beginning my mother welcomed the friendship. When it turned into a relationship, she began finding fault with her, and I hid it, and denied it, as I had hidden things before. There I was, a grown man with a job and a partner, telling my mother there was no girlfriend.

The Age That Never Came

None of this started with the winery. For as long as I can remember, I was too young to understand, not mature enough, not ready to decide things for myself. The striking thing is not that a mother says that to a child. It is that the age at which it would stop never came. The decisions about my schooling were made over my head on exactly that basis: boarding school, which she chose, and later a business program in London, which she also chose, each presented as a chance I should be grateful for, each with assurances about coming home that were forgotten once I was there. When I argued, the answer was that I would do as I was told and that I would wreck my future if I went my own way. I was fifteen the first time and about twenty the second. By the time I was being sent out of the winery office I was an adult doing a good part of the company’s paperwork, and the vocabulary had not changed at all: not ready, not serious, not able to understand how things really worked.

I sometimes recognized how much control she had over my decisions, but I also believed what she had been telling me for years: that I wasn’t mature or experienced enough to make them myself. Those two things lived side by side for a long time. When I failed exams in a business program I had never wanted, I did not conclude that the program was wrong for me. I concluded that she had been right. It took finishing a degree in a subject I had partly chosen myself to put even a small dent in that.

There is a word for this. Infantilization, in the psychological literature, means treating a competent adult as a child, and in parents it describes someone who cannot accept a child’s normal movement toward independence. A 2023 study in Motivation and Emotion of 32,118 people who had taken an online test on the subject found that the emotionally abusive kinds, meaning criticism, insults, and guilt, went together most strongly with a weaker sense of control over one’s life and with lower personal and professional success. The people who took the test chose to, and the results are correlations, so the study says nothing about how common this is or what causes what. One clinician quoted in a Psych Central piece put the parental version in a sentence I recognized: such parents want their children to excel, but not to exceed them.

What It Left Behind

What all of it left behind was a particular hesitation. Long after I had left my mother’s house, and I left it with debt, a patchy work record, and nowhere settled to live, I would know what I wanted to do and still go around asking people, putting the decision off, reading one more thing, as if a decision were only safe once enough other people had signed off on it. A hard piece of work could still bring up the old verdicts about what I could not do, a reflex I have described in an article about anxiety. I have written the fuller account of those years, and of what they cost, in my book, Leaving Hell: Escaping the Toxic Chains of a Narcissistic Mother.

I still do some of that. I ask more people than I need to before I decide something, and I notice the urge to get permission from someone, anyone, before I act. The difference is in what happens afterward. When I get a decision wrong now, it costs me the mistake and nothing more. Nobody treats it as the latest evidence that I should not be left in charge of my own life, and I have slowly stopped treating it that way myself. The hesitation has not gone. I have simply stopped waiting for it to pass before I act.