My Narcissistic Mother and My Miscarriage

I’ve figured for some time that my mother is a narcissist. Her mother is a full-fledged one, so it’s somewhat natural to have certain traits carry on in her. My personality is very different from my mother, however. I moved far away from her and my family, and I’ve always really done my own thing. That being said, she’s still my mother, and we talk regularly on the phone together and are close. But when I’m around her and I see those traits come out, I remember that I think our closeness is because we mostly deal with each other over the phone.

When I had my missed miscarriage, I did confide in her. But she said all the wrong things. The week of my surgery, she told me I should stop being sad, and to just get over it. She has also brought up babies regularly and keeps pressuring me to try again. It’s gotten to the point that I change subjects or tell her I have to go just to get off of the phone. Because we do not speak about the emotional toll of what I’ve been going through and she lives so far away, perhaps she just doesn’t get it.

I told her expressly that my husband’s family did not know about the miscarriage, just his immediate family did, and we had asked them to please not discuss or tell anyone else in the family about it. We didn’t want everyone contacting us, talking about it, etc. until we felt better about the situation and had healed. Three months later, we still are asking to keep it a secret.

My mother instead told my cousin, my aunt, my brother and his girlfriend, and my grandmother. She talked about it like it was news happening to her, like it was the new talking point for everyone to feel bad FOR HER. I let it go because it was the family far away and it didn’t effect me where I live.

But then she came here for a visit this weekend.

And at a family bbq, where I was struggling because it was the first time I had been around pregnant women (one of which is the number of weeks I should be) and babies, instead of finding me when I left and asking if I was okay, she went and gossiped with one of my husband’s aunts about my miscarriage “and how it must be so hard” for me. Nobody knew until then, and this particular aunt loves to talk. So now it is safe to assume the entire family knows.

My mother admitted this happened yesterday to me this morning, prefacing it by saying “I probably said something I shouldn’t have said” and then acting like it was no big deal when I told her that she “knew we had asked everyone to keep it a secret, that that was the worst person to tell, and that that was inappropriate small talk and not okay to do.” She tried backtracking by claiming she didn’t know we were keeping it a secret 😐 which of course she knew as we discussed it a lot.

I was very upset. I had a panic attack, I screamed and cried. Because again, like everything else in my life, she found another way to make things about her. She found a way to take my miscarriage and make her the center of attention for sympathy. Afterwards she acted like the victim, threatening to leave on an earlier flight and that she would never do anything to hurt her daughter. She literally found a way to make even her screw up all about her, as if I and my husband weren’t the victims here.

It’s made me decide I will not be talking to her about anything related to my future pregnancies, that she is not emotionally supportive or healthy for me to be around. It’s made me relieved we live far away. But I’m struggling on how to forgive her when she just talks about it like it’s nothing and then rolls her eyes when I get vulnerable with her. We are supposed to go and spend a week with her and my stepdad next month, and I’m not sure I can do it, at least not for that long. She cried during this whole ordeal after she realized how upset I was and then now my brother is blaming me and saying I’m in the wrong. Now she’s a victim.

Has anyone else gone through anything like this or have a narcissist for a mother?