Tirza ~ May 2

 

Two narcissists get married.

Sounds like the beginning of a joke, as in “Two narcissists walk into a bar with a rabbi…”

With the promise of a punch line soon after.  

Instead, it’s a forty-year marriage, followed by a NY Post-worthy divorce. 

And marked with emotional carcasses like so many monuments lining its path. 

 

Introducing (drumroll please!) my parents, Esther and Shela (nee Schlomo, later Shelley).

Like electrons and protons, narcissists can have negative and positive charges. Esther had a negative charge. Her mother didn’t die when she was a toddler, she abandoned her. Her no good father, nose always buried in Schopenhauer books, scooped all five children to Palestine, subjecting them to poverty, orphanages and hard work.  Never mind that her father had saved his Cinderella-in-rags from the Holocaust.

Shela had the positive charge.  He had to prove to the world that he was great and better than anybody, and not just because his parents were so busy doing good works.  Bragging was just his way of telling the truth.  If people didn’t get it, there was something wrong with them. 

 

According to reliable witnesses (aka uncles and aunts), they fell madly in love circa 1939.

Esther had a suitor, a blond athlete away in Germany for an Olympic event when they met.  Heartbroken, he decided to return to Germany, a bad move that year. Throughout her life, the regret over her choice was palpable.  Ah, the road with no return.

My mother had a Greta Garbo beauty with green eyes, high cheekbones, curly blond hair. Her deep sadness made her a real-life damsel-in-distress for any man tempted to play the hero.  My father fit the role - tall, dark, even handsome.  His good family, the wad of bills easily flashed from his pocket, his intrepid motorcycle maneuvers, and his unstoppable confidence ignited something almost unrecognizable in her – a ray of hope.

 

The set up for a disaster - of which I am part – was akin to an immutable law of nature. For every action (force) in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction.  I can hear the yin and the yang, victim and savior, truths and delusions, clicking into place.