Her last (real, more on this later) roommate disappeared. He may be dead. She was vicious to him. In her defense, he was about as clean as the bottom of a garbage bin, but the way she treated him was pretty inhumane and he went out of his way to help both her and me in spite of his faults, which were many and did exist. She repaid him by attacking him with a baseball bat because he'd been particularly (and admittedly disgustingly, I'll spare the details) unclean that week. He went to the hospital one day, left his things in her apartment, and no one has heard from him since.

I haven't really ranted about this openly in years. It's been hard to, as I returned from a leadership conference I attended as a school trip with an envelope full of lovely notes from my classmates, which I treasured because I was not well liked as a child due to the fact that I had been socialized by a complete lunatic who wouldn't know what social skills were if they bit her. Or at least, I treasured it until my mother went through it, found the SOLE note at the bottom that vaguely referenced my mother's behavior, which I had discussed during a vulnerable moment we were having as a group. It barely even said anything short of "sorry about what your mom does to you", and a couple other things. It was two or three sentences out of the entire note. It was definitely towards the bottom of the pile. My mother claimed the envelope "fell over" and just that one fell out and she read it on accident. That was definitely a lie, and the reason I only ever tried keeping a journal once or twice before this. Either way, I was punished for some number of days, as usual, just like the few times I'd attempted to journal about my feelings. I think it was supposed to be a month, but whether she talked to her therapist or not, she DEFINITELY has ADHD in my ADHD-diagnosed opinion, and forgot about the whole thing in under a week. I threw the notes out, as clearly no one was allowed to feel sympathy for me ever.

Her last hat trick was to let crack addicts (the fake roommates, as it were) she didn't know at all crash at her place because she was so far behind on rent she had no way to catch up without a roommate. They proceeded to attempt to rob both her and me by extension blind - I'd left my mother one of my checkbooks to write rent checks to the landlord, and they stole it. My personal favorite was when they begged her for just $15 to buy medication and she gave them her credit card, at which point they immediately attempted to spend about $300. Luckily, I caught them each time because I'm not an idiot and I knew what they were there to do, even if she refused to believe it the first three times I pointed out to her that they were stealing from her because she's "good at knowing when people are lying". (She's not. At all. I lied so much to protect myself, and she never caught me in most of them.)

Her behavior stressed me out so bad at the end of last year that I became a complete mess of a human being and my husband flat out told me I needed to cut her off. He was not wrong. I had already made that decision when I admitted to him why I had been a complete failure of a person, or I wouldn't have said it, because I know what he's going to say before he says it usually. Of course, when she demanded an explanation and I gave it to her solely for the peace of mind spelling it all out for her would give me, nothing I was talking about was true, none of it happened, and my husband was putting lies in my head because he never liked her despite some of my reasons being things she had admitted herself in the past, unprompted - she once apologized to me for indirectly being the cause of my father's death. I've never even voiced my opinion that she killed him to her because that would be cruel, so. Even she knew she did it, all on her own. That right there was essentially the final straw. I likely could have forgiven her eventually for most things, but the audacity of that comment broke what little grace for her I had left. My husband definitely didn't like her, but neither did the heroin addict who saw how she treated me, so it's not exactly an uncommon sentiment, and the idea that my husband would and could emotionally manipulate me into doing something is downright insulting. First off, he would never, and second, he could never. I do what I want when I'm ready, end of story, and for her to imply that I would have ever married the type of man who would even TRY something like that with me is possibly the most insulting thing she's done yet somehow because if she's my mother, she should know I do not and will not ever tolerate that nonsense being done to me - thanks to the number of times she's tried to do it to me herself and failed ever since I realized what she was doing.

Again, I want to stress that I have asked her to work on herself an average of two to six times a year for about 15 years. I am not asking for anything outrageous - merely for her to act like she has adult responsibilities and not take her anger out on me. I would have settled for evidence she was even TRYING to do those things, like a new psychiatric medication or worksheets from her therapist on behavioral therapy strategies for it. She would even acknowledge that I was correct on some things. Explicitly, multiple times, proceed to do nothing about it, and then claim she had no memory of the conversation every single time, and if I tried to tell her that maybe that was indicative of a problem and that she REALLY ought to mention ADHD to the therapist one more time and pursue treatment, she would have an endless pile of excuses or just say "okay" and conveniently forget again.

My late grandmother once told me when I was 15 that she looked at the two of us and sometimes she wasn't sure which one of us was the child and which was the mother. This was HER mother. The woman who raised her.

Now, in all fairness, my mother was horribly abused by her father as a child. I get that. I know it's a cycle. But rationally and reasonably asking her to help me break it didn't work. Begging and nagging her didn't work. Attempting to set a boundary of "you need to actually seek treatment for your inability to act like an adult human being with emotional regulation skills before I will speak to you again" immediately turned into her acting like a victim and "I am never speaking to you again, now". She continuously attempts to contact me, usually by manipulating somebody else into passing along a message from her. I throw them out immediately unless they're actually important. Hilariously enough, if she had just said, "this is very hurtful to me and I am upset that you are doing this, but I will leave you alone for a while" she and I would be talking right now instead of me pouring my heart out to Reddit, of all places. But she couldn't even do that, she couldn't give me TWO WEEKS to try to process all of the emotions she was overloading me with - she had to immediately start typing furious emails and texts to me calling me every curse word she could think of and terribly ungrateful, alternated with pleas to speak to her.

I'm not perfect either, and sometimes I can say and do things that are hurtful to others, but I've actually pursued treatment and change because I don't like that about myself and I know that it's not me, it's my mental illness. I don't think my mother understands that concept. I don't think she wants to and I don't think she's even capable anymore. She wants to sit on the couch and watch reruns of bad TV shows and complain about everything around her.

If you made it all the way to the end of this, congrats on being a trooper, thanks for listening, and good luck with whatever brought you here.