Another one of my memories that I typed out from my first marriage to a narcissist. He didn’t want me to have a job, but he yelled that I was lazy if I didn’t do enough around the house, (that I kept spotless!) He’d call me over and over all day to check up and ask what I was doing:
I was regularly completing my “chores” to appease him, so he didn’t need to yell when he got home from work. Still, he found reasons to be angry, reasons that seemed strange to me. He was dictating when I should sleep and wake up and eat. He was getting angry when I had differing opinions, and he was taking innocent things as a personal insult. He was also still calling every hour. So, when he called and I was in the middle of something, I let it go to the answering machine, then I’d call him back when my hands weren’t full. He got angry (maybe that isn’t really a surprise at this point…) He said I was disrespectful of him. It made me a little uncomfortable, because his phone calls usually involved grilling me about what I was doing. It was loving, but at the same time, a bit controlling. Finally, I asked him to stop calling so much. He angrily agreed to call less. He’d call in the morning to wake me up, he’d call on his lunch break and he’d call when he left work. That was the deal, but he still ended up calling a few more times in between.