Let me preface this by saying I love my mother. In spite of everything, because of everything, I love my mom and do not want to cut off contact. I've already done that, it wasn't fun for anyone.

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Since I was a child, literally talking like 8/9 here, my mother has told me, "when I grow up, I want to be like you." For the same length of time, I've told her to stop saying that because I hate it. I am not the parent. I can count on both hands the instances where she has been the adult between the two of us. I raised myself, raised my older brother (which is a whole other rant), and essentially raised her. 

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More annoyingly, this is not constant. There are times where she behaves as a parent and throws me off/makes me testy because I'm not used to it. There are times when she is neither the child or the adult, but rather a third party who couldn't give less of a shit about me, even when called on it. I have to tell her when she is being rude, unreasonable, an asshole, over or under emotional, etc. This has become more the norm the older we get.

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After leaving my father's abusive household at 15, she tried to be a mother. Emphasis on tried because she fucked up in so many way it's almost amusing. I don't blame her for that, she endured over three decades of abuse from her own family, then my father, before deciding to leave when he tried to kill us. Things could have gone a lot worse, I try not to hold grudges too often or at least to keep my mouth shut when I'm feeling bitter.

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She is just as fucked as I am, CPTSD and DP/DR at *least*. But I go back and forth between feeling sympathy and feeling furious because I would be fine if she hadn't spent the entirety of my childhood ignoring my father's abuse. And now she spends her time being an asshole with a smile. 

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If I'm dieting or even just trying to eat healthy to keep down the weird body dysmorphia I get when I gain weight, she's calling me and asking if I want this or that junk food. 

When I was trying to quit smoking cigs, she was the first person to tell me she didn't think I could do it even though when  she found out I was smoking at 14 *she bought a cartoon of cigs and told me to smoke them all*. I obviously couldn't, I was smoking like half a cig a day and her logic was if I got sick off them I wouldn't want them anymore, as though it was alcohol. That's not how addiction works. I went from half a cig a day to three. 

At the same time, she's the first person to tell me I'm the most important thing in her life and almost encourages me to give up and just live with her for the rest of it. At one point when talking about my agoraphobia, she said she thought I'd live with her for the rest of my life. It was said as a statement of fact, not a malicious statement, but for someone who constantly said she wanted me to be happy, it hurt to hear, "I think you'll never recover enough to be functional."

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I listen to her life story and understand how she ended up fucking up so much because she also raised herself and had no business having kids at that time, but Jesus I just do not care. I am twenty two in a week and that feels beyond the age where I can crave a parent but I do. She is not. She is a friend at best and an enemy at worst. I fully intended to never speak to her or my family again but she was the one who saved me when my dad tried to kill me. Literally that one instance made us both codependent on each other. And when I say codependent, I mean literally she calls me maybe four times a day, texts significantly more. And if she doesn't do it, which I ask her not to because it's annoying and unnecessary, I'm uncomfortable and do it myself. I'm doubly codependent if only because I feel I have a guarantee of not being abandoned because *she let this happen to me.* She did this. It's her fault. I both do and don't blame her because the abuser was my dad, she just neglected.

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Financially, she is completely willing to support me but that has never been what I wanted and despite my wildly mixed emotions, again, I love my mother. I don't want her to work to support me when I feel it should be the other way around so she can rest. But then she goes and does some shit. If I'm talking, I have to repeat myself 3+ times because she straight up doesn't listen until I'm upset. I'll say something and she'll ignore it to talk about what she wants to talk about and will not  talk about anything else until I've responded. There is no validation no matter what I do, she doesn't and never has cared. She does give that to my brother though.

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The worst part is I cannot stop caring. I don't give a single shit about most humans on the planet, myself included, but she and my brother have literally perfected how to sucker punch me with 100% success. My brother spent most of his time gaslighting me until a year ago when I called him out on it and didn't back down for once, thinking I was crazy. He expects my full attention and sympathy for the shit in mine but, until the call out I just mentioned, gave none back at all. Normally, that is someone I would ditch on my own time because f u u c k that noise, but I don't want to. My mother is literally everything I just wrote and then some and anyone else who treated me like that would never see me again, but I literally cannot cut off contact or stop caring. I can't even pretend I don't care because they just get to me. Because somehow even now some idiotic part of me still thinks they'll eventually be family instead of adult-children I never asked for who only behave as adults when I remind them that **I AM NOT THE PARENT HERE.**

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Hell, I could say a lot more because this barely scratching the surface but I have been running myself ragged for years trying to keep the anger at both her an my brother down because if I don't have family, the only other person I trust is 10 hours away. Ranting like this both sparks and douses the fire, but this is a bit long so I'll stop.

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Fuck, I hate every part of this.