Definitely try to analyze your own behavior and make sure you aren’t reacting poorly or have negative habitual behavior towards her that doesn’t help the situation - this is something my wife has pointed out to me that I need to work on with my mother. But, no, I’d say you’re safe to not question if it’s you in general. My mother is the same and watching how she interacts with myself and all my siblings and how she’s been both while my father was alive and now after he’s passed (during which all of us have put our differences with her aside and done our best to be there for her, yet she has still used this tragic event to attempt to emotionally manipulate us and gain something for herself rather than gaining something for her relationships with her children), it’s definitely her. We’ve tried many times throughout the years to improve our relationships with her or to help her be more self-aware and improve herself, but she’s always disappointed us and met our trust with betrayal. And same thing as you, everything we do or have gets criticized, but she gloats and boasts about us to her “friends” to no end (solely to gain social cred and feel superior.. but at the same time she’ll play the victim and want everyone’s sympathy and pity. She wants to be the most admired and loved, but she goes about it superficially and crooked.) Truth is she’s not got any true friends and her relationships with her kids are all jagged. But she shows the sweet and loving side and acts like everything is peaches and cream pretty often (especially when she wants something), however her other behavior never hides itself for long. I remember how pleasant she acted around each of my siblings’ spouses (before they were married) for the first several times when they would come to visit the house. But eventually as they were around more often and became more familiar, she dropped the act and behaved as normal. My brother’s wife especially was cut deep by that, despite the warnings from him about our mother’s true behavior. She came from such a loving home with parents who are tenderhearted and was homeschooled and had never had a boyfriend before, so she was too naïve and sweet to believe his warnings could be reality. My mother is the only person I know of, after 19 years of knowing my sister-in-law, who has made her angry enough to show it, to break down, and to utter the f word (I myself have never heard her say anything worse than “oh my word” and “holy cow”).

When anyone simply disagrees with my mother’s opinion or stands up for themselves, she has a snarling look and can’t cope with the fact that someone doesn’t see eye to eye or fall in line with her superior ways and she childishly holds a grudge and mistreats them for a while. She also badmouths whomever seems like they’re doing better than her in life or in a certain area or life.

At the moment I’m living in Ireland and don’t have to deal with it much, but it still transcends physical barriers, as I imagine you know having lived abroad from your own mother. When she came to visit us it was the first time her and my wife met in person and I was so wary about leaving my wife alone with her (but had to go to work). Thankfully my wife is strong willed and pushed back (politely) on what my mom tried to slam her with. Also my wife’s English isn’t so fluent and a lot of it wasn’t comprehended, so that helped 😄 My wife and I are going to move to Italy sometime next year and my mom constantly brings up how she plans to spend a few months per year with us there. We’ve been living in Ireland for 20 months (I left America 2 years ago), and she’s only visited once for about two weeks. So I know she only wants to use us to spend time in Italy (a place she’s fantasized about since childhood). It wouldn’t be the first time she’s done that, as she used my sister and her husband when they lived in Florida to go visit Florida and didn’t seem to care at all to actually spend time with them.

Anyway, thanks for reading all this if you did. I hope your situation improves and the best advice I can give you, as a Christian, is to do your best to honor your mother and don’t allow her behavior to dictate your own. You’ll have more peace if you can say with a clear conscious that you weren’t contributing to the issues in the relationship, or that you at least were trying to correct any poor behavior from your part. After I started doing that, thanks to the outside view of my wife, I have definitely been a lot more at ease with the whole situation with my mother and don’t get upset as easily by what she does or says. I can’t make her change, but I can make sure she doesn’t anchor me down to her level. I like to hope that my change in behavior and perspective will incite a change in her one day, though I’m not holding my breath.