SALUTE
I have barely watched Breaking Bad
As a reminder, be sure to properly give content warnings and put sensitive subjects behind proper spoiler tags. It’s for the mental health of not just your comrades, but yourself as well.
Here is a screenshot of where to find the spoiler button.
Let’s have another good week everyone 
struggling with my mom, long post
okay so the thing with my mom is. things will be calm for a while but once every 1-2 months she will seemingly randomly blow up at me. Then she will tell me that actually, it’s my fault because she had been enduring a lot of poor behavior from me and had gotten to the end of her rope and that’s the reason why she starts yelling. She said she never does it randomly, it’s always my fault.
The things that I do that bother her that drain her “to the end of her rope” is stuff like, sometimes I will get into a cycle of sleeping and waking up really late (like, 1-2 pm late) and she hates that. And also sometimes I annoy her by “talking back” (which never registers to me as talking back, in my head it always registers as me just sharing my perspective.) And I don’t always proactively go make dinner, sometimes I have to wait til I’m called (though sometimes I am proactive about it!! she just calls me way earlier than necessary!!!) She also gets annoyed seeing me lying in bed during the day (something she does herself), by my messy room, by the fact that in her eyes I don’t go out enough, and because she thinks I’m just lazing about the house all day. In reality, I’m usually doing a lot of personal projects; if I’m not doing those it’s usually because I’m incredibly depressed and/or tired that day.
So I do all these things that annoy her, but she tamps it down until she explodes, and then I get hurt when she does that. Also all the things I do to her are me abusing her. Oh and today she was like “oh you’re going to go online or to your friends and complain about me, which I don’t think is fair” which… idek anymore.
Am I in the wrong here? Please, if I’m in the wrong here, please tell me. I want to give my mom a fair chance, I feel horribly guilty. But I don’t know what to do. With my various neurodivergencies (ADHD, autism, OCD, depression, etc.) there’s no way I can be 100% on top of things all the time like she wants me to. Like I would also prefer if I could wake up early and go to sleep early every day, but I just can’t. It’s basically impossible for me. And I try my best to be pleasant and helpful around the house but sometimes I do get annoyed at having to cook and I have a hard time hiding that all the time.
She says that I break her trust because I don’t have “consistency” and that me “trying” isn’t enough. But trying is all I can do, I don’t know what more I can do but try. I just can’t help the fact that some of the things she wants from me are exponentially more difficult than they are for other people. But maybe I’m the one who doesn’t have enough self-discipline or something.
Also she told me today that she expected me to take care of the house and my brother and her more. She’s disabled, I get it, but why is this all my responsibility now? I get that I’m the older child (the “eldest daughter” even if I’m not a girl) and I’m technically an adult but am I wrong in feeling that this is a bit unfair? That all the responsibility for this is on me and none of it is on my brother or my dad? And yet my mom thinks my brother is the much better family member, she goes on and on to me about how my brother is such a better person than me (mostly because he’s less neurodivergent, tbh.)
I don’t know what to do. I don’t. I can’t stand it anymore. This hair-trigger kind of anger that apparently I’m always setting off because just the way I exist is wrong.
You aren’t in the wrong, your mother is. She is trying to control you. Most of what she has issues with is your autonomy and because you do different to how she would want… it’s about her not you basically.
spoiler
I feel like this is the case too, but in the past when I’ve tried to explain things to her she always manages to turn it back around on me somehow. For example my mom absolutely hates my sleep schedule, every time she gets angry at me she brings this up. It’s always my sleep schedule, somehow; it’s like she gets personally offended when I sleep late. I’ve tried to explain to her that a lot of people have a similar sleep schedule to me and that me sleeping late is my business, but then she says that “actually, it makes everyone else’s life in the family worse because you aren’t participating in family activities like making breakfast (like your brother is).”
… I don’t have an answer to that.
mother stuff
Does your brother make breakfast? Is all she worried about is you being forced into a mothering role to provide for the family?
This sounds like shes forcing misogynistic parental roles in this case her role on to you.
You are within your right to sleep however you want and you can always skip breakfast so they can get their own, you aren’t your mother.
Why can’t she do her morhering role and provide breakfast or everyone get their own?
I had a controlling and narcissistic mother and she would try imposing her will and wants on me growing up.
I had this kind of stuff from my mother, she’d tey to foce me to clean the whole house when I was going through deprssion. She’d nevee show me who to do anyrhing then give me shit when I wasn’t able to do it her way or up to her standard…
She threw me out soon after.
Even taking your mother at face value, it’s really not healthy or productive for her to just bottle everything up for a month or two and then yell at you. But to be honest none of the complaints you’ve mentioned actually sound like a big deal. Like sleeping in and having to be reminded to make dinner every now and then isn’t the sort of thing that buries itself into your mind and builds until you have a breakdown you know? It kinda seems like she’s just using those things as excuses to be mad. Also, you’re right, trying is all anyone can really do. It’s not your fault that certain things are harder for you, and if your mother has unrealistic expectations then that’s on her.
Also
spoiler
Whenever my mom gets angry at me she always tells me that she’s actually really lenient on me and her expectations should be easy to meet, so actually it’s my fault for not being able to meet her easy and lenient expectations. But they’re so hard for me… I just can’t always wake up early with consistency or go make dinner without being asked. But my brother is able to wake up early and participate in the breakfast-making ritual (which is very little work in comparison to cooking dinner) so my mom thinks that I should be able to as well.
Thanks for the support. I just, I don’t know.
The reality is that all anyone can do is try their best, and if you just can’t do something then it’s unreasonable to expect it of you. Like, imagine being asked to grab something off a shelf that’s too high for you to reach. It doesn’t matter how hard you try or easy it is to just pick up things or how little anyone else seems to struggle to reach it, you just can’t do it and it’s unrealistic to keep expecting you to be able to.
And the thing is, you’re genuinely trying! I know how much you hate cooking (for good reason, it’s not fair to make you do all the cooking), but even then you haven’t said you’re trying to get out of cooking, just that you sometimes need to be reminded about it, and it really sucks that instead of recognizing that and acknowledging how hard you work to feed everyone your mom focuses on the parts that you need help with and tries to twist it around into you being lazy
spoiler
You are literally not built to be “consistant”? Does your mother not know about any of this or is she ignoring it on purpose? Expecting you to take care of everyone else by yourself would be unreasonable even without various mental disabilities.
spoiler
She knows, but to her it’s “not an excuse”. I think she thinks that I should be able to power through it if I had more self-discipline or something.
I have to agree with Magi that this is a control thing.
My wife went through the same thing with her mother. She’s the eldest daughter with a younger brother. She was expected to do everything around the house and live within very strict boundaries while nothing was expected of the brother or father. Her mother would constantly verbally degrade her for seemingly no reason. No matter what she did, even though she was the only one who cared for her mother, it was never enough.
This was not resolved until my wife moved out. Once her mother realized she no longer had control, the relationship healed. They have a great relationship now, but it’s only because they’re not living together.
Yeah, I definitely need to move out. When my parents are away, we have a great relationship; when we live together, it deteriorates. There’s also something in here about immigration and family trauma, so I feel like this story has been told many times before. Only that when I see other peoples’ eldest daughter stories, they all sound much worse than mine (at least I wasn’t forced to shoulder a lot of housework as a kid).
If I was being uncharitable, I could also joke that both of my parents are youngest children, lol.
Lol her father is the biggest man baby. He’ll literally throw tantrums in public when he doesn’t get his way
Angry
Oh. Oh she’s even like mine than I thought.
Absolutely fuck her, you aren’t in the wrong here at all for her blowing up at you, don’t fall for her god damn gaslighting. I know it’s a lot harder to do that than it is for me to say it, but that is what’s happening, she’s blowing up at you because you aren’t her perfect housemaid 24/7, because you have the gall to be a complete human being with interests and needs of your own. Because you have your own internality. She’s not going to recognise that fact because she wants that housemaid perfect child and won’t accept anything else until you fall into that shape. You know why your brother is the clearly favoured child? Because she doesn’t have expectations for him being a family caretaker at all ever, because he’s a man and doesn’t need to. Because he likely hasn’t drawn her ire not due to the fact that he’s just better, but rather because of the fact that he, like you suspect, isn’t diverging from her perfect nt cishetoronormative family conception as much. But that’s not him being better than you at all, it’s her having lesser standards for him as a man than a (perceived as) woman. But I guarantee you if he decided he was trans or whatever else that might push himself just a bit too far out of her bounds for perfect children, then she’ll have just as much or more ire for him.
Nothing you do is going to actually make it better or worse, she’s going to perceive every divergence from exactly what she wants as a slight. And she’ll keep building that narrative of you being against her or lazy or both every single time no matter what you do.
I’m sorry this isn’t really any comfort or advice, but you’re not alone in experiencing this, and I want to help you recognise that it’s not at all your fault, she’s the one being unreasonable, and she likely will continue to be so.
spoiler
I feel like I was very easily able to recognize this when my brother was catching a lot of flak from my parents for struggling in school (this was several years ago, when I was still in high school). I was very angry at them, I did my best to comfort my brother and stand up for him as much as possible. But eventually, my brother’s relationship with my parents improved to the point where now he is their favorite child, and mine continued to deteriorate until I’ve basically become the family pariah. The thing that I get kind of sad about is that my brother in turn doesn’t really try to understand or comfort me at all. I get that he probably doesn’t want to stick out his neck for me, but he defends my parents to me even when they aren’t listening. I feel like in the past we had more solidarity as siblings, and now it’s completely gone.
There’s definitely some enmeshment going on here. I was skimming through a book yesterday that talked about how in family dynamics where there’s a preferred child, usually it’s because that child is on a more similar plane of emotional maturity to the parent (don’t know if I agree with the framing of “maturity” exactly but it’s what the book uses.) My brother is definitely less outspoken, less visibly mentally ill, and honestly, much less of a leftist which I think is a part of it (he’s vaguely “apolitical” but in the
way that a lot of teenage boys are, I’ve caught him saying slurs in Heated Gaming Moments™ before.)
spoiler
Yeah, it’s a lot easier to see it when it’s not happening to yourself because part of the control is to use your own feelings against you. It’s good that you stood up for him, having good older siblings like that is a godsend. It’s awful that he hasn’t done the same for you though. I would hope it’s just him being a typical teenage shithead and that he’ll grow out of it, but it’s unfortunate he turned out like that regardless. I would say he probably genuinely doesn’t recognise it, my brother never noticed the ways my mother parentified my sister in regards to taking care of him, again that whole idea of invisible labour, he doesn’t recognise what you’re really doing and how taxing it is so it hasn’t registered as an abuse. Which it is. God I fucking hate your family now, it’s so fucking shit that they’re treating you like this.
Interesting, I hadn’t heard of that concept before. It does seem to make sense though. I’m the most like my mother in my family and I was easily her favourite outside of being trans breaking her brain. I agree it probably isn’t the maturity so much as personality/value similarities more generally.
I hate teenage boys.
NTAH, that really sucks. Maybe I’m reaching or projecting, but I imagine she could be ADHD herself? Bc it’s genetic. It seems like a lot of the time ADHD mothers assume they are neurotypical and put a ton of burden on their children with their impatience and forgetfulness. Meanwhile they will hardly be proactive or consistent themselves. “If I have to do something I’m busy and will get to it eventually. If I think you should do something you’re a bad person for not already having done it.” The expectations on you are too much, I’m sorry. Parents also often project their own shame or regret on to their kids.