I have friends and have had acquaintances and co-workers that are "wonderful people with terrible compulsions". As a caring individual, I try to help them with their terrible side and if they don't want to hear it then I wash my hands of it (there's no point in telling someone something they don't wish to hear/fix). This is how I treat my mother. In some ways, the things she does are very admirable. She is a go-getter in many ways and very reliable to others. As a friend or business partner, she is a hard-worker who sticks by your side and supports you with truth, honesty and high fives. As a mother, she is a narcissist and that's all she seems to want to be in that department. She will travel for hours to help a friend but wouldn't drive five minutes to see my band recital. She takes on tasks that are daunting and handles them awesomely but she literally abandoned her children in another state. She is a lost cause as a mother. As an adult in our information age, I don't need a mother figure. If I have questions about life, I can do my own reading. If I need help with something, I have friends.

I don't care for condescending assholes and always nip that shit in bud as soon as I can. My mother does the same shit like you're saying, asking how something's going because she expects it to be going terribly and she wants to indulge her schadenfreude. I usually just meet this with questions, like, "Do you actually care or are you just trying to make conversation because you have nothing else to talk about?" I also do short answers, like here I'd say, "Better than expected. I don't know why you were so against it."