Someone told me one time that
the mere fact I worry about whether I am a narcissist or not means that I can’t be a narcissist. It is not the
nature of a true narcissist to wonder about being narcissistic. I just googled
it, and apparently that is the case. But still there is a nagging something in
me saying I am very self-centered, and I need to do more about it, more than
just wallow in guilt.
When I
was very young, meaning, we were still living in the house on Heinrich, and
thus I was younger than 10 years old, Mom had a calendar hanging in the
kitchen. It was the kind that showed just one month at a time. One day I
noticed there was an initial on each Saturday in the month. And the initials
repeated in a D, C, E pattern. I put on my thinking cap and quickly deduced
these initials to correspond to each of us kids- Den, Clark, Eric.
Hmmm, on
every third Saturday, one of us gets some kind of attention that the other two
do not. Of course, my mind leapt to a treat!
I was then anxious for the Saturday with my
initial to come around to see what I was going to get that my brothers did not.
I don’t
recall how many cycles it took for me to figure out the significance of the
initials on the Saturdays. But I’m fairly sure I did not ask about them (for fear of being called self-centered in expecting
some visible form of attention given to me on a D Saturday). So I probably just
kept observing until I solved the mystery on my own. Maybe I saw Mom look at
the calendar and then watched what she did afterward.
The
letters referred to whose bedsheets
Mom would put in the wash that Saturday! Instead of doing everyone’s at once,
she did only one kid’s sheets every weekend, and Mom kept track on the calendar
whose were next.
What a total let-down in
what had been a somewhat fun puzzle! I mean, could there have possibly been a
duller solution?
And then I wondered why
Mom and Dad’s sheets were not part of the rotation? Well, with a little more observation,
I discovered Mom washed their sheets every
Saturday. The kids’ bedsheets could go three weeks between washings, and the
parents’ got done every week. Hmmm, good to know.
And I
think about that calendar and the tiny initials on the Saturdays whenever I change
the sheets in my present world. I won’t say whether I do this once a week, or
not. But the sheets are getting washed this morning, and thoughts of narcissism
are wafting about.
27 20180924 D, C, E
