In an effort to curry favor with my mother, my father would often bring her home her favorite food: a mouth-watering, medium-rare rib steak from the restaurant near his store. She would never thank him for it, but would simply proceed to devour it in front of all her hungry kids. It was torture.

The rib steaks, or other little gifts, were my father’s way of appeasing my mother for saying something “hurtful” to her. For instance, after she would harangue him incessantly about what a schlump he was, and how he never cleaned up after himself, he would finally reach the breaking point and shout, “Enough! Leave me alone!”

“How can you scream at me and abuse me like that?” she would sulk, looking deeply wounded. Then, she would give him the silent treatment, and would refuse to listen to any apologies from him.

If his rib steak or other offering didn’t make things better, he would send us, the children, to “apologize” to our mother and try to get her to talk to him. This tactic accomplished nothing, but left us confused and miserable, certain that it was our fault that our parents were always arguing.

It was obvious to us that we were to blame for anything that went wrong in our mother’s life. Any time she had a headache, it was because we were making too much noise. My father bought into her stories of what terrible children we are, and how much stress and trouble we caused her, and he defended her time and again. Once, when we were fighting over a game, he started shouting at us that my mother had suffered a miscarriage because we fought and caused her so much stress. Some of us were too young to know what a miscarriage was, but we still knew that we had done something terrible.

You would think that being subjected to this treatment would have made us rebel or at least stop caring about what my mother said. In fact, the opposite was true. As a child, and even as an adult, I felt guilty any time I entertained the thought that my mother wasn’t a good mother. The more she told her kids how ugly, bad, and disloyal we were, the more desperately we tried to earn her approval.

If there was one way we could win some points with my mother, it was by tattling on our siblings. My mother enjoyed it when her kids tried to prove their loyalty to her by snitching on a brother or sister, and by the time we were in our late teens, not one of her children had a normal sibling relationship with any of the others. It was all about who could please our mother the most. Shira, who bore the brunt of my mother’s disapproval, was insanely jealous of the other children, the ones my mother “liked,” and she would often invent tales of how we had misbehaved, in order to ingratiate herself with my mother.

Any time we did something that displeased my mother in any way, she would lecture us about how we were going to be punished for not fulfilling the mitzvah of kibbud eim. If I complained that she frequently went on vacation, leaving us with a teenage babysitter, she would point to the trinket she had bought me while away and tell me that I was an ungrateful child. I believed her.

As I grew older, my mother denigrated any attempt I made to enhance my appearance, even as she continued to make stinging comments about my looks. “You know, Chaya,” she’d tell me, “your freckles are just hideous. You think that makeup hides it?” One day my skirt was too short, the next day it was too long, the next day the color of my blouse didn’t suit me.

She would also make disparaging comments about my friends, effectively snuffing out my social life. “That girl’s father is a driver, for crying out loud,” she once told me. “How can you be friends with her?” There were also kids whom she forbade me outright to associate with, usually because she didn’t like their mothers or because she claimed their mothers were jealous of her. And if we were caught talking to someone whom she had branded “the enemy,” we were accused of being disloyal to her — the ultimate sin.

After hearing her tell me countless times that no one is ever going to want to marry me, I was convinced it was true — until miraculously, I got engaged. In the beginning, my mother was super nice and friendly to my chassan, Shimon, who thought at first that he had the greatest mother-in-law in the world. After my wedding, though, her true colors began to show. “You gained weight so quickly after your wedding,” she told Shimon one day. “It’s barely a month after your wedding, and your suit is already too small!” The first Yom Tov we were married, she commented that Shimon’s parents had bought me cheap machzorim. “Those machzorim are something you buy for a girl who’s bas mitzvah, not for a kallah,” she said loudly, in front of Shimon.

If we spent time with Shimon’s parents, she would be deeply insulted, and accuse me of abandoning her. Wishing to be a good daughter, I prevailed upon Shimon to spend more time with my parents, which made him resentful and caused tension in our relationship.

He hated being in my parents’ home, where his mother-in-law was always the center of attention, with everyone catering to her every whim.

When my third child was born, my mother decided that we should name him after her uncle. But Shimon’s grandfather had passed away less than a year earlier, and it was only natural that we should name after him. So when my mother asked two days before the bris that we name the baby Yaakov after Uncle Jake, I gently explained to her that we were planning to name after Shimon’s Zeidy.

“In that case,” she said stoutly, “I will not come to the bris. I can’t bear to be there and see how little respect you have for my wishes.”

I was just after birth, and the thought of my mother not participating in my simchah because I had wounded her was terrifying to me.

I apologized, I explained, I begged, but the more I tried to reason with my mother, the more resolute she became about boycotting the bris. “All I asked is that you remember poor Uncle Jake,” she sniffled. “And you can’t even grant me that one small request. You spoiled my simchah, and I refuse to be part of it.”

I asked Shimon if we could name the baby after Uncle Jake, but he wouldn’t hear of it. “Your mother is a sick woman,” he told me. “Do you realize that you have spent your entire life trying to make her happy with you, cutting off ties with members of your own family and putting your mother ahead of your kids, not to mention me? Yet nothing you do is ever good enough. If she decided that she doesn’t want to attend your simchah because you’re not giving the name she wanted, that’s her problem, not yours.”

My mind heard what Shimon was saying, but my heart refused to accept it. “No, no,” I wanted to cry out. “I’m the one who’s a bad daughter! I’m the one who never had enough kibbud eim!”

At the end, my mother did attend the bris, but she sat at the side looking dour the entire time — until a waiter spilled some water near her and she began having hysterics. “My suit! It’s silk! These water stains will never come out!”

Everyone in the family rushed to her side, trying to see where exactly her suit had been stained. As I watched the drama unfold, I suddenly realized that every single simchah in the family revolved around my mother. She always made sure to be the best dressed, and if the guests weren’t gravitating to her, she would manage to invent a crisis that sharply diverted everyone’s attention to her. I remembered the way she had carried on at my wedding about how the tablecloths weren’t the exact shade of beige she had ordered, and how she had complained loudly at my daughter’s kiddush that she was allergic to the flowers my in-laws had sent as a centerpiece.

It was then that I understood that Shimon was right: There was something terribly wrong with my mother. I began to do some research and read up on difficult people and personalities, and when I read about Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), I started to shake. The descriptions of the narcissist fit my mother to a T!

I ordered a book called Will I Ever Be Good Enough, by Karyl McBride, and I cried straight though it. It was spooky how so many of the anecdotes could have been written about my mother, even though the book was written for a secular audience and described people whose lifestyle bore little resemblance to that of a frum family.

It was frightening, yet liberating, to learn that there are so many narcissistic mothers out there, mothers who are lovely and charming on the outside but inflict excruciating emotional abuse on their children. In many cases, as in mine, the abuse is so insidious that the children don’t even realize that there is something wrong with their mother; they think they are the ones at fault.

After reading up on NPD and consulting with daas Torah, Shimon and I reached the painful decision several years ago to minimize contact with my mother. Since then, my mother has instructed the rest of the family not to have anything to do with the two of us, and any communication I have with my siblings — the ones who haven’t been entirely poisoned against me — is conducted in utmost secrecy.

I do speak to my father, but only when my mother is not around. At this point, he is aware that my mother has a problem, but he’s been held hostage by her for too long to extricate himself, and it’s easier for him to go along with her dysfunction than to fight it.

I am slowly starting to realize that I am worthy as a person despite my mother, but I need a lot of help — professional and otherwise — to overcome the scars of my outwardly wonderful childhood. I don’t expect people to understand the dynamics of my family, nor do I share the painful details of my relationship with my mother with anyone other than my husband, my therapist, and a close friend. But my mother constantly tells people what a terrible daughter I am, and how I have no gratitude and no respect. And what pains me is that people actually believe her!

Even people who have never met my mother assume that I must be at fault if my mother won’t visit us or attend my simchahs. How many times have people asked me innocently, “How can you not talk to your own mother?” If only they would know …

Over the years, many well-intentioned people have tried to make peace between me, my mother, and my estranged siblings. What they don’t realize is that there can never be an end to this “feud,” because it is rooted in a deep-rooted personality disorder that has destroyed a family from the inside.

Even though I have not spoken to my mother in years, I still find it impossible to detach myself from her completely. No matter what, she is still my mother, and deep inside, I will forever harbor the illogical hope that one day she will take me into her arms and say, “I love you.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 425)