Even on my wedding day, my narcissist mother couldn’t be happy for me. Everything had to be about her – and I still bear the scars

For a bride, it is one of the big heart-stopping moments of her day. Long before she has gathered her skirts and taken her father’s proffered arm. Way ahead of the first glimpse of her husband-to-be, waiting at the end of the aisle.

It’s the moment all the primping and fussing is complete, and she walks into her parents’ front room, in her wedding gown, to collective gasps from her family – and more than a few tears from her mother.

That wasn’t the case with me. When I emerged in my dress, my mother looked right through me. I could have been standing there in jeans and a hoodie for all the reaction it elicited. At first, she avoided meeting my eye completely. Because for her, my wedding didn’t spark pride, or feelings of shared joy, but jealousy and resentment.

All attention was on me – and she hated it. She simply couldn’t bear to share centre stage with anyone, not even her own daughter on her wedding day.

My mother was a narcissist, yet it took me half a lifetime to recognise it. Looking back, I can’t think of a single occasion when she put me first.

In contrast, the examples of when she muscled into pole position are legion. And I know I will bear the scars for ever.

Narcissistic partners are a common topic on social media, with vast support networks for those affected. However, it is much more challenging and painful to recognise that your own mother exhibits this trait, as I have learned from personal experience and conversations with hundreds of women in my situation.

I’m not a trained psychologist but, thanks to years of research, which has seen me build an online support network for daughters of narcissists, I am acutely aware of the traits.

A narcissist is likely to have a grandiose sense of her own self-importance, be convinced that she is special, have an insatiable longing for limelight and zero empathy or interest in anyone else – even her children, unless they are seen as an extension of her.

Wedding days – other people’s – are a narcissist’s idea of hell.

Mine, in March 1991, was no different. Aged 27, I was still young enough to believe I was somehow to blame for her cold indifference towards me.

All I wanted was her to that tell me that I looked nice. It didn’t happen. And while friends and relatives were in tears during the beautiful church service, my mother remained dry-eyed and sulky throughout. ‘Oh, I never cry at these sorts of things,’ she announced.

I felt utterly crushed, but my humiliation was not yet complete.

My father had spent 28 years as the husband of a narcissist; he knew which behaviours would soothe her, and which would result in tantrums or days of ‘the silent treatment’ (a narcissist’s weapon of choice).

So later, at the reception, as he toasted ‘the most beautiful woman in the room’, he wasn’t referencing me. It was my mother.

She’d done it. Through her own nastinesses and my father, her enabler, she’d found a way to make my day about her. I was utterly crushed.

I believe the seeds of my mother’s narcissism were laid in her own childhood. She was born in 1932 into a wealthy family and, from the things she told me, I suspect her father was a narcissist, too. And whether such things are down to learned behaviour, genes or some mysterious cocktail of both, she adopted his damaging behaviour in turn.

She would roar with laughter when she recounted a family story of a time when a maiden aunt was desperate to leave the dinner table to go to the toilet, but too modest to say. My grandfather cruelly played on this to amuse the other guests – and be the big showman – refusing to let her leave until she said why.

Even as a small child, I couldn’t understand why she found it so hilarious – it just seemed nasty to me. My mother had wanted to become a nurse – a terrible career for a narcissist, where putting other people’s needs first is key – but her father maintained he would miss her too much to let her leave home to train. Instead, she worked in the offices of the Aer Lingus airline where, aged 28, she met my dad.

By the time they married in 1963, she was 31. Nevertheless, she maintained she would never have married if her father (who died the previous year aged 59) had still been alive.

Dad was six years younger than her. Perhaps this, and the fact that he came from a much poorer background, made him put my mother on a pedestal. To his dying day, he wouldn’t hear a bad word about her.

I was born exactly nine months after their wedding day, in June 1964. My brother and sister followed in quick succession before, finally, my baby sister arrived when our mother was 44.

My mother delighted in telling me that I was a peculiar baby who didn’t like to be cuddled. In truth she showed zero interest in me or my siblings. Narcissistic mothers fall into two categories – smothering or neglectful. She was definitely in the second camp – we were the grubby kids at school that the other children made fun of.

I was six when my mother – who struggled with her weight – looked at me disdainfully and announced: ‘You’re getting fat. You want to watch that.’ Maybe I had a little puppy fat, but she did nothing to help.

Perhaps a part of her rejoiced that I might turn out to be fatter than her; if that was the case, then her wish came true. Her words kicked off a lifetime of yo-yo dieting. By the time I was ten I was seriously overweight, and bulimic by my teens.

Yet, despite all the knockbacks, I persisted in pathetically hoping my mother would one day be like my friends’ mums who seemed genuinely to care about their daughters.

I left school at 18 and trained as a secretary. Aged 21, I took a clerical job at Heathrow airport. Two years later, aged 23, I met my husband, John, a computer software engineer, at a party. Three years older than me, he was kind and generous. When he said he loved me, I felt nothing but gratitude because my mother had made me feel so worthless.

Even after my disastrous wedding day, I clung on to the hope that I could make her love me. But the harder I tried, the more disappointed I was. When she found out I was pregnant with her first grandchild, she couldn’t have been less interested.

When I suffered an early miscarriage, however, that was an entirely different story. It was August 1992, and John was working away when it happened. My mother swept melodramatically into the hospital ward and begged me to cry on her shoulder.

I know now how narcissists thrive on drama, and she adored the spectacle she created.

She even found a way to monopolise the situation, going on about the ‘amazing’ coincidence that the baby had died on the anniversary of her beloved father’s death.

‘They are together in Heaven now,’ she kept repeating. I was completely dumbfounded. Somehow, she’d managed to make my miscarriage all about her.

Yet, once I was home, she never visited – although we lived close by – nor called. And when, 18 months later, I announced that I was pregnant again, there was the same chilling indifference.

Our son, David, was born in November 1995. Dad visited us in hospital, but my mother stayed away, blaming a cold. I suspect she didn’t fancy playing the bit part of Granny to my starring role of proud new mum.

Every one of David’s baby milestones, she bettered. When he sat up at four months, my mother nonsensically claimed my brother had done it at three. When he walked at eight months, then the narrative was that one of her babies took their first steps earlier. If I ever challenged her, she played the put-upon martyr or burst into tears, leaving me obliged to apologise.

It was the same with my career. I’d always enjoyed writing and, after David was born, I threw myself into novel-writing in earnest. I was ecstatic when, in 2002, I won a prestigious prize and was awarded a publishing contract.

Predictably, mother managed to hijack even this. ‘It’s in the genes,’ she crowed. ‘Remember, I am related to James Joyce.’ It was rubbish – a fantasy born of the fact that her grandfather bore a passing resemblance to the great Irish writer. But there was no arguing with her.

My younger brother and one of my sisters eventually had enough and cut contact – my sister even emigrated to the other side of the world to escape her, but I still persevered, despite every visit leaving me drained.

But the last straw came in September 2008 when David was 12. It was my parents’ wedding anniversary. My youngest sister and I agreed to organise a restaurant meal with the proviso that a girlfriend who was staying with us could join. 

All four of us duly trooped along to the restaurant where my mother spent the next three hours talking at us. There was one topic up for discussion, and one only: their recent holiday in Germany. Not how her grandson was getting on, or even my friend’s name.

We sat in stony silence before finally paying the bill and being released from our misery. Driving home, my friend said five words that changed everything: ‘How can you bear it?’ she asked.

I’d become inured to my mother’s behaviour but, in that instant, I saw her through someone else’s eyes. I saw the endless pain and stress she caused, and I realised I didn’t have to tolerate it a day longer.

It took all my courage but, when my mother rang two weeks later, I told her how upset I was at her behaviour. Predictably, she refused to admit any blame before bursting into tears and putting the phone down.

There was silence for nine months until a birthday card arrived containing only the printed message: ‘Life’s too short to bear a grudge.’ I knew then that I had made the right decision. I wrote to my parents asking them not to contact me.

I knew my father would never take my side over her – so I cut ties with him, too.

I never saw my mother again. When she died seven years later in 2015 when I was 51 – I found out from my sister – I didn’t attend her funeral. I can honestly say I never felt a shred of guilt. In fact, I felt nothing but relief. My only regret was not cutting off contact years earlier.

Three years after my mother died, I had to take over my father’s care. He had dementia and could no longer live by himself, so out of duty I stepped in and got him into a nursing home, overseeing his final years.

There was no point in discussing the past and Dad died in 2022, still maintaining that my mother was perfect. Although I knew my mother’s behaviour was strange, I only understood that she suffered from a personality disorder when, shortly after that fateful meal, I started researching for a novel. Trait after trait described my mother.

It was a lightbulb moment. Since then, I have written a great deal about narcissism, including a series of self-help books.

Through my writing and my website – Daughters Of Narcissistic Mothers (daughtersofnarcissisticmothers.com) – I have come into contact with hundreds of other women like me.

I am still paying the price. My marriage collapsed and John and I divorced in 2012. I see now that thanks to my upbringing, we were destined to fail. I am overweight and still struggle with food issues as well as episodes of depression.

On the plus side I am enormously proud that, despite my mother’s example, I have managed to be a good mother myself. I am very close to David, who’s in his 20s and thriving in college, with a gorgeous partner.

My mother may have caused me endless pain. But she didn’t destroy me, and in that I take enormous comfort.

Become A Boundaries Badass by Danu Morrigan (£9.09, amazon.co.uk) is out now.

As told to Tessa Cunningham