It's never really about you

I spent a number of years wondering what was going through my stepfather’s mind the first time he visited my family’s home.

I finally found out when I spoke to him in December 2023, the first time I’d seen him in 18 years. His answer surprised me more than it should have and provided a reminder of the one thing you must remember when dealing with even a moderate narcissist: It’s never really about you.

Saturday, Sept. 24, 1988

I know the exact date because it was my father’s funeral. He had Still’s Disease, an inflammatory condition that usually consists of extremely high fevers and arthritis. He first experienced symptoms in his early 20s, and it progressed to the point that it was painful to move by his mid-30s. He could barely leave the house during the final year of his life, and in the final weeks, we brought him a plastic jug so he could relieve himself in bed without getting up. He was 38 when he died.

I was 13, the oldest of the three children he’d had with my Mom. The fact we called him Pop could be traced back to the fact that my pronunciation of “Dad” sounded like “dog” when I was learning to speak.

I can’t tell you whether I wore a tie to Pop’s funeral. I don’t what my brother, my sister or my mom wore, either. I know that the ceremony was at Sacred Heart, the church that was attached to the small Catholic school we attended in southern Oregon. After the funeral, we loaded into the backseat of my grandfather’s Cadillac, and I do remember the creamy leather interior being cooler than I expected. Grandpa must have parked in the shade. We drove east to Mt. Calvary cemetery, where my father was buried.

Afterward, friends and family gathered at our house. People congregated mainly in the backyard, but at some point I found myself out front and I watched as the principal of our school pushed open the screen door and stepped onto the concrete porch.

I heard my Mom before I saw her. She called out the principal’s first name.

He stopped, turned around to look back toward the house.

Now, Mom came through the screen door.

“Thank you so much for coming,” she said.

She reached out to him, taking his hand in both of hers and looked at him.

That’s it. That’s the memory I have. The meaning I drew out of this moment, however, has changed. Repeatedly.

At the time: I felt kind of flattered the principal was there. I wouldn’t say that I knew him. In fact, I can’t remember having a conversation with him before that. The fact he came to our house felt like proof that our loss was seen as significant in our community.

That changed when: My mom began dating the principal the following year. They were engaged by the fall and married on Jan. 27, 1990. That summer, we moved to the central coast of California, leaving the small town in southern Oregon where I had been born.

Then I began to feel: uncomfortable.

I never talked about this clear memory I had of the principal at our house on the day of my father’s funeral. It wasn’t a secret per se, but I worried what people would think if they knew the actual timelinen of events. I thought they might assume my parents were no longer married when Pop died or they’d think that my mom was already scoping out alternatives or perhaps they’d believe I was inferring the principal was looking for an angle into my family.

Even as I grew to dislike the principal in the years following his marriage to my mom, I remained protective of him to a certain degree. I didn’t want anyone to think his courtship of my mom was anything other than straightforward and earnest because I didn’t he was anything other than straightforward and earnest. At least not until the marriage came apart.

That changed when: my mom divorced the principal.

She found evidence he’d been unfaithful back in 2001, and after she confronted him about this, he moved out of the house. He left on her birthday, and she was confused and heartbroken he wasn’t staying to work through this difficulty.

For the next two years, the principal remained adamant he had not cheated. He swore that she was wrong and didn’t understand the situation. Then in the summer of 2003, after he’d made his biggest push to reconcile, he informed my mom he had tested positive for HIV and she needed to be tested. She tested negative and filed for divorce shortly thereafter, seeing this as confirmation of not just his infidelity, but a years-long refusal to be honest.

All of this coincided with the fairly public and thoroughly spectacular collapse of his career. He’d resigned his position as a public-school superintendent after both county officials and local reporters investigated his district’s spending practices from the BMW that had been purchased for his use to the $462 Cartier fountain pen charged to a district credit card. He was the subject of a seven-minute investigative report that aired on the Bay Area’s ABC affiliate and covered repeatedly in the San Jose Mercury News. A story about him continuing to teach college classes at San Jose State while he was on medical leave from the district wound up on the front page of the paper.

Then I began to feel: angry and very confused about why he’d courted my mom.

The principal had a penchant for positioning himself a savior of sorts. As a son, he’d stepped up to help his mother care for his younger brothers after his father died. As a teacher, he sought to mentor young men who lacked direction. My mom wondered whether she had been one of his “rescue projects” as she phrased it.

I began to wonder, too. And this brought me back to that first time he came to my family’s home.

The principal had been 18 when this father died. He was the third in a run of five boys. He’d planned to go away to college, but after his father’s death, he remained home to help look after his two younger brothers who were still in grade school.

Did the principal see some shades of his own history in my family? Maybe he felt pulled to step in and provide a fatherly presence that his own family had lacked after his dad’s death.

He certainly didn’t view me or my siblings as baggage. He was absolutely willing to be a full-fledged parent.

Even after the divorce, if I squinted hard enough, I could occasionally see through my anger and concede that perhaps the principal had nothing but the best intentions. He might have tried as hard as he could to fill this role as a husband and father, but ultimately couldn’t hold it together after 11 years.

Perhaps he deserved more credit than I’d initially given him.

I’m skipping ahead quite a bit at this point.

We’re zooming past the 17 years during which I remained actively angry at the principal. We’re jumping over my mother’s cancer diagnosis in 2015 and her subsequent death in 2019. We’re going all the way to end of 2023 when I flew to San Francisco and drove up to Napa, Calif., for the specific purpose of interviewing the principal.

December 15, 2023

He was in his 70s now, I was approaching 50.

It had been more than 10 years since anyone in my family had spoken to him. I had not seen him since 2005 when he attended my younger brother’s college graduation.

He knew I was coming. I had spoken to him on the phone three times over the preceding year. In our last conversation, I had asked if I could interview him, saying I was writing about my adolescence, and he was certainly part of that. He was agreeable, enthusiastic even over the phone. He hedged once I was there.

He said he didn’t think he was ready to talk about his time in our family, his marriage. He said he’d just learned of my mom’s death and was still processing it. He said he was worried it would be too emotional and I would get angry. He expressed reservations about being interviewed for the purposes of “a product” as he put it, meaning my writing.

My initial reaction was one of disbelief. He had agreed to the interview, and now—after I’d flown across the country and driven up to see him—he was backing out. I thought about saying something to apply some of type of pressure for him to follow through on his commitment.

That’s not what I did, though. I made a conscious effort to keep any emotion off my face. I kept my voice calm. I said that I’d been pretty clear about my intentions. I was planning to write about my life, and his time in it. I felt it was only fair to ask him if he wanted to share his perspective and what he remembered from this period.

It was up to him, though. I couldn’t subpoena him. I could not treat him as a hostile witness. This was his decision.

We resumed walking and then went and got an afternoon snack at a nearby restaurant. When I indicated that I was getting tired and planned to return to my hotel, he raised his hand—pointer finger extended—and said, “Stewardess.”

“No, no, it’s OK,” I said.

I was embarrassed he’d done that. I also knew it would make my siblings laugh when I told them about it.

The sun had set by the time we left the restaurant, and as I drove him back to his home in my rental car, he told me we could do the interview the following day. I made sure to provide only minimal reaction.

“OK,” I said. “We’ll see how you feel.”

The next day, we sat down in the living room of his second-floor condo the following day. I used my iPhone to record a conversation that ultimately spanned 5 and one-half hours. The television was playing in the background, tuned to the History channel which was airing a series of World War II documentaries. I didn’t ask him to turn it off because I didn’t want him to become more self-conscious of what he was saying.

He had a bulldog, whom he referred to as “Snuffers.” He said the dog’s full name was “The Earl of Snuffington.” The dog would periodically jump on the couch, his labored breathing audible on the recording. At one point, Snuffers humped the principal’s leg.

“Oh, now stop that,” the principal said.

The principal brought up my father’s funeral on his own. He remembered coming out of the church to see my Mom sitting in the backseat of what he referred to as a limo, but was actually her father’s Cadillac.

“Your Mom was sitting recessed in the back seat,” the principal said, “and I just went to the window, and she immediately just extended her arms, she says, ‘Oh Terry! I’m so glad to see you.’

“We went over to your house for the wake.”

Actually, it was a reception after the burial.

Turns out the principal wasn’t really thinking about his family when he was at our house. He wasn’t really thinking about my family, either.

He was thinking about a letter from the church’s parish council, which the pastor—Charles Dreisbach—had delivered to him the previous week.

“He said, ‘Oh here, you’re not going to like this,’ “ the principal said. “He hands me this, I open it up and they had cut my salary in half or nearly in half because I was no longer principal of a high school.”

When the principal came to our small Catholic school in 1986, it was a K-through-12 school with dwindling enrollment. Two years later, the high school was shuttered, leaving it K-through-8^th grade.

“That was what I was occupied with as I was milling around with other board members,” the principal said.

I felt a tug of disbelief as he said this, but I was more amused than I was angry. This man had absolutely no feel for his audience. He’s talking to me about the day my father was buried, and saying that what was really on his mind was his paycheck. I tried to remain attentive to what he was saying, it is possible that some sort of emotion flashed across my face because he acknowledged the potential faux pas.

“I remember it probably was not appropriate,” he said, “but it all kind of fit.”

He then named two different families whose children were classmates of mine, and who were at our house that day.

“I remember telling them, ‘The gall of that Dreisbach, he’s not going to cut my salary,’ “ the principal said. “I’m the one that closed the high school. You want to go through that, you get somebody else to go through that. You need to compensate me for the work I’ve done.’ “

“I remember walking out your door,” he said, “and I saw that there was a rip in the screen.”

This was the moment I remembered. When my mom called his name and he turned around and she thanked him for coming.

There was, in fact, a rip in the screen. It was from our cat, a calico named Benny. When he wanted to come inside, Benny would jump up and grab hold of the screen with his claws, hanging with his back feet off the ground and causing the aluminum frame to bang against the frame, which would let us know to open the front door.

The principal said he then asked the school’s janitor—a fellow named Philip—to come and repair our screen. Then he stopped and corrected himself.

“I didn’t ask him, I told him,” the principal said, “ ‘I want you to go over to the O’Neils and repair their screen door.’ “

I don’t remember the screen being repaired, but I don’t doubt that it happened. I told the principal it was funny he’d remember something so specific.

“It’s those little things that start to sort of cascade over time,” the principal said. “So you’re Mom appreciated that and that and that.”

It seems like a nice gesture. It WAS a nice gesture. It’s also fairly telling that he was focused most on my mom’s reaction.

A final note to the story is that the principal said refused to accept the proposed cut in his pay.

“I just said, ‘No way,’ “ the principal told me. “ ‘No. Way.’ I wrote a letter, delivered it to each board member in person so they had a meeting next week or whatever and came out of it saying, ‘You’re on. You can stay as long as you want.’ “

This was at the start of the 1988-’89 school year. The principal left in the summer of ‘90, which is when we moved to California. The small Catholic school where he’d been the principal closed for good in 1993 due to declining enrollment.

How I feel now: Some people think that narcissists never think of anyone but themselves. This is absolutely not true.

They think about others. They just don’t necessarily care about the needs of those people. They certainly don’t care about their needs as much as they care about getting their own met.

The principal’s interest in my mom specifically and my family in general never had anything to do with what we were going through or what we might need. It was entirely about how my mom responded to him. She was an incredibly nice and kind woman, who shared her warmth freely. That’s what he took from that day when he attended my father’s funeral and subsequently came to my family’s home.