I can’t trust my mother.

(content notice for descriptions of abusive dynamic, self harm and privileged wankery)

So for some reason, my mom started a fight with me today. She has some really fucked up ideas of who I am and why I do what I do. And she has a really fucked up habit of gaslighting me big time. If it weren’t for my sisters and my spouse, I might still believe her when she insists that I’m making shit up. Instead of asking for clarification, she jumps to conclusions about not just what I mean, but the contexts I work within.In her mind I only do things for attention and I never think things through completely.

Examples:

• she was convinced that my spouse was only transitioning because it was my idea. It didn’t matter that I had repeatedly told her that my spouse’s gender identity was something I knew prior to our romantic relationship starting. She also rattled off an outdated list of how transition works assuming that neither myself nor my spouse had bothered a fucking google search before coming out to her.
• when I was seven, I told her that a toy always seems special once its broken, a seven year olds understanding of “you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.” She has thrown that back in my face ever since, claiming it meant that I’d break things on purpose. 
• I needed her tax information on my financial aid forms a few years ago and she couldn’t be arsed to fill it out because I hadn’t “done it myself” before leaving the country. Apparently I was supposed to do this by being fucking psychic, since she was across the country up until a week before I left and wouldn’t give me the info I needed over the phone or via email. I came back to the US in the winter to find that my paperwork was still missing the info and had not been submitted, so my financial aid was canceled and I owed my uni thousands of dollars that I couldn’t pay. 

I asked her once what I had done to merit this level of mistrust from her. Was I that bad of a liar as a child? Apparently, I swing back and forth on the pendulum, and am therefore unreliable. When I pointed out that there was a difference between being able to admit when you’re wrong based on new information and being generally unreliable, she had no answer.

Every conversation is a gotcha game. She says she “accepts” me completely, but if I point out that she’s perpetuating harmful stereotypes of me and that doing so is the opposite of acceptance, suddenly I’m trying to force her to change who she is. She pulls the “if you just accepted yourself, maybe you wouldn’t be so oversensitive. I’m not your real enemy.” She still doesn’t understand something I’ve been saying since I was 11, that just because she’s not as hurtful or abusive as she could be doesn’t mean she’s not being abusive. She asks me about my definitions for things, then ignores them and insists that I’m using different words that I am. When I lose my cool and start getting upset, she tells me that maybe I’m overwhelmed/tired/hungry/something other than upset at her bullshit and tries to dismiss me. Lately shes been using my child as a weapon against me. I had to tell her repeatedly today to stop walking away from me with my child.

In the end she turns any disagreement into “well, I’m your mother” which is supposed to make me feel all mushy or some shit, I don’t know. I asked her what that was supposed to mean to me, exactly. I know what being a mother means to me, but she and I went into parenting for different reasons. I sought it purposefully, she “accepted the responsibility” when even taking birth control properly didn’t prevent pregnancy. She didn’t like parenting and regularly blamed me for her choices. She says she loves me to dismiss my anger and I only feel manipulated and used. I was so angry I was screaming at her that I hated her when I left today. I punched a telephone pole. I’m not proud of that, especially because it upset my spouse.

I dunno. I want to love her, but I can’t take it.