I'm noticing some things

I've posted before about my experiences growing up with a deeply narcissistic father and a massively enabling mother, but it's been a few years.I'm a dad now, and maybe it's a different type of self awarenesses, or maybe it's the increased stress, but I'm starting to notice some more simple things that have always caused me unbelievable anxiety that can be directly linked to my experiences with my parents.The big one that made me realize what was happening was grocery lists. My whole life, ever since I left my parents and went no-contract, I have loathed lists. I'd never write down my homework assignments, I couldn't even think of working as a waiter, and I can't count how many important things I've forgotten because I refused to make a list. When I was younger, I figured it was just the rebellion of youth or proud stubbornness. These last few years though, it hasn't simply been a loathing; it's been fear and anxiety.A few weeks ago my wife asked again if she could just write out the grocery list rather than using the note app on her phone, and it felt like my body couldn't decide if it wanted to scream or hyperventilate.I tried talking with her about it, and ended up telling her about how every day of summer vacation when I was a kid, my dad would leave a to-do list on the pool table before he went to work. It would be two or three pages, written on a legal pad, and it was always intended to be impossible; forty or fifty or more items that could include vacuuming the house, mowing two and a half acres, pressure washing the driveway and the back deck, tilling the soil around a hundred yards of shrubs and then trimming them, watering all the trees and flower beds around those two and a half acres, and anything else he could imagine.He openly told me, time and again, that summer wasn't for me; it was meant for me to do what he wanted. If he found anything that wasn't finished, I could catch a beating. If anything wasn't done in the precise way he wanted, I could catch a beating. If he felt like it, I could catch a beating.Or maybe I wouldn't, and that was on purpose. He wouldn't check the list every day, and every day always boiled down to me prioritizing the list based on what he might notice or what he wouldn't get too angry over. I'd last a few days, maybe a couple of weeks, getting by without his wrath, thinking that I was doing alright. Then a day would come where he would check, and the world would crash down around me, and I would feel like I was failing my family, and that it was a mercy that I only caught another beating.Now I see my wife making a grocery list, something that she said was just going to be a few things, and I watch that list grow, and I see my time, my very life, being wantonly taken away from me, and the chances for me to be called out for failing my family and warm a beating, and my body can't decide if it should scream or hyperventilate.For years, I refused to live a life with lists, and I never even noticed, or maybe I refused to notice; I don't know. I guess it just amazes me that I'm almost forty and I still find things, simple little things for everybody else, that hurt like a heart attack because of what happened over twenty years ago. via /r/raisedbynarcissists https://ift.tt/3kQvVki