Oh what a tangled web we weave/When first we practice to deceive… —Walter Scott

We were in the car, listening to the Pandora Showtunes Radio channel during our morning commute to school. Sometimes, that channel mixes some Disney soundtrack music in with the Broadway songs. The song “Be Prepared” from The Lion King came on, Jeremy Irons’ sultry voice filling our ears as I got onto the highway. My daughter asked me who was singing the song, if it was Simba’s Uncle Scar, and if Uncle Scar was a villain. I told her yes, and this confused her.

“But Mama, wasn’t he nice? He was nice to Simba in the beginning.”

What choice did I have, but to tell her that lots of villains seem real nice, especially at the beginning?

One of the biggest problems with abusers is that they know exactly how to play the game so that they appear to be perfectly nice and normal to anyone on the outside. They are master manipulators. They are like spiders, weaving massive webs so intricate that prey cannot help but gravitate to the apparent beauty, unaware of how stuck in the acrid fibers they will become until it’s too late. Not only do we fall for their act and think they’re nice, everyone else does too and won’t be inclined to believe otherwise if we manage to escape and try to tell the truth.

My mother knew exactly how to present a situation so that she would only ever appear to be either the victor or the victim. Sorry was and still is not a word in her vocabulary. Nearly all who meet her find her engaging and endearing, and sing her praises. Over the years, those few who didn’t care for her either sensed the inherent threat to their well-being that she posed, or she sensed from them an inherent threat to her false narrative of assumed innocence, and the tangled webs she wove in order to maintain that narrative. (Or they were weaving webs of their own and saw her as competition in their own narratives.) She didn’t generally waste her time and energy on such people, or risk allowing someone in to poke holes in her web of lies.

Ironically, she’s the one who taught me the quote I shared at the beginning of this post. She is so far gone into her pathology that she had often seen fit to warn me about narcissists and even identified one of my former stepfather’s children as one, a person we frequently were at great odds with. Unable to see past her own nose to recognize her own faults, she had no problem labeling them in others. (She wasn’t wrong, really, but it all checks out — narcissists don’t like other narcissists, it’s too much competition, and a narcissist has to win.) It simply has never occurred to her that she could ever be the problem. She is just minding her own business spinning this nice beautiful web, and other people keep trying to pull it apart and break it!

I am sure that she still resents me for finally finding the strength to tear through it. But even the most intricately spun web has its fragile limits. My mother’s web, after many decades of wear and tear, had become frayed and brittle, and while I will always bear scars from its bindings, I am forever grateful to have broken free.