Story time 📚 Co-parenting with Narcissists

Once upon a time, for a short period of time I delivered pizzas to make a living.

And this one time I went to this pretty nice house, and when I rang the bell, nobody answered. I could hear someone outside in the back so I kinda walked around to see if I could bring this food to the back, maybe they didn’t hear me. But it was all fenced in and I could hear a guy talking on the phone, “yeah he’s at the bar….”

I didn’t really want to call out to the guy, sounded like he was upset. So I went back to the front and was just going to leave the pizza at the door if they weren’t going to answer… But these two kids, probably 7 and 9, come out and kinda sit down on the front steps looking real bummed. They take the pizza and one of them says, “sorry, our mom was going to tip you, but she’s out looking for our dad and she’s not back yet.”

I just told the kids, “don’t worry about it, you guys good?”

They kinda sigh and say, “yeah our uncle’s here, and she should be home soon.”

So I say okay, tell them to get some of that food while it’s good and hot. And I go back to work.

This little window into the home lives of others really put some things into perspective for me. Because I didn’t know these people, but I from being a bartender for a handful of years and just living life, I know this story. But it gave me the perspective of the kids.

Their mom was so worried/angry about the dad not showing up for her kids, that she left them to go hunt this man down and tell him how to be a better parent. But what if she didn’t get so caught up in how this man was lacking, and just had a nice dinner with her kids. Sure dad would have missed out, but that’s his loss. That’s his choice. Her making the same choice for different reasons didn’t get these kids a hot meal with either of their parents that night.

And it got me to thinking, how many times I allowed myself to get so angry that someone wasn’t doing something for my kid, that I got totally distracted and ended up failing to show up myself.

We can’t allow someone else’s behavior dictate a standard for how we conduct ourselves. If we really love our kids, we gotta prioritize their experience, not by controlling how someone else shows up. But by being in control of how we show up.

Kids are going to experience life, just like we had to. There’s a lot of bad things/people/influences in this world. But we can always be grateful for the good ones. We can be the good ones. We just gotta make that the priority. We can’t erase the bad, we can’t always protect them, but we can show them what’s good, teach them how to protect themselves. And trust them to figure it out just like we had to.

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