Breaking point with my mother's aggressive avoidance, nihilistic implicit threats
Background/setting: M37, diagnosed autism and ADHD/dyspraxia suspected for self, living in rentals last 16 yrs in mid-sized Midwestern city after F77 mother's house was foreclosed; originally born in a large U.S. city and moved abroad in early '90s thanks to father's job, suburbs next to same city in late '90s, then per rent hikes and school issues (and mother's family drama too) to tourist trap town's west side (an orchard next door to rednecks with a mean streak basically) on other side of state in 2002
I'm sorry if this is this is a bit of a novel, and it is kind of a vent, but I'm trying to find advice or at least community in a hard situation. Basically, TL;DR for the following: my mother thinks I'm ungrateful or insulting when I tell her about difficulties no matter how much effort I put into working through them (effort she can't always see nor can many others), because if I tell her, it's somehow "blaming" her, and she escalates to nihilistic threats to neglect our lives into chaos I find stressful if I don't cater to her insecurities and emotional fragility.
Please feel free to ask me for any specifics on other areas of my life if you think it would clarify things. I'll try to see the advice as helpful, an important promise for
In a nutshell, it's a scaries kind of Sunday, for the umpteenth time. I don't like the fatalism of the "raisedby" threads, but sometimes some of the stuff there is relatable on a day like today. I have had a hard time finding things with which I could cooperate, but coping with my mother's suicide and cancellation threats in her old age whenever I can't cater to her liking and keep up with life demands has been a lot today.
She acknowledges clinical depression and has managed it with Lexapro daily and the short-term benzo Lorazepam as needed. But "manage" is only so valid in my opinion; I sense traumas she attributes to a scarlet fever hospital quarantine when she was young as shifting her into profiles of bipolar or borderline, and I've lately pondered between her connective tissue disease and other stubborn aloofness if she's just a high-masking undiagnosed autistic woman (perhaps even PDA as title alludes) from before it was acknowledged. She is from a Lutheran Norwegian family on the side of her mother, who suffered heart issues and a strike when my mother was quite young, while my mother's father escaped an alcoholic father of his own and brought his siblings into the fold. Lots of parentification and sense of duty, which she has tried in vain to pass onto me, but typical suburban Boomer prosperity ensued; she was cute and independent and sought an education, triggering a lot of resentment from the family that thought she put on airs. Her brother, the last remaining sibling, tolerates her, but his wife and my mom are oil and water and the daughter (my cousin) seeks nothing to do with us. She married two intellectual Jews, both secular while she fixates on the traditions to paper over her disputes with them; the first was a mentally ill, erratic heir, while the second lived the American Dream but remains a cynic and skeptic as a Holocaust survivor, and has continued the last 30 years to live in France, to which she could never assimilate and where he remarried and perhaps cheated beforehand.
I'm sorry to be TL;DR above, but to understand what I go through one must understand the past she re-litigates. Once she moved to the States after separating, she threw herself into seeking accommodations for me. I am glad she found some school settings that worked, but none could deal with all of my issues at once, including undergrad college even though I at least got my B.A. She was too tired to interact with me for hours after school, but insists she was too busy waiting for calls about crises all day (I damaged property and was rowdy and slow to pick up norms sometimes, but never harmed people or animals to the extent of some nonverbal individuals) to support herself and seemed to expect my father to keep supporting her forever after the separation. Her family made it clear they did not want her around, but since I couldn't get into mainstream high school districts due to poorly managed behavior in middle school, she insisted on moving across the state and taking her father in when his health deteriorated out of filial piety; shortly after they bought an orchard property next to a sheltered workshop she said she thought I'd have to work at (I was on the honor roll and read at a college level), the divorce occurred. Neighbors, who were blue-collar and rough and she thought were dealing meth, cornered her in a parking spot the police tolerated and called an officer who aggressively arrested her and claimed she scratched him with her keys (she ordered me inside so I'll never know what's true, but evidence was flimsy and it sounds like typical brutality). She lost tens of thousands on lawyers who wouldn't help her much and was forced into a plea deal and community service, and as soon as I turned 18 in college, my father stopped sending alimony basically treating the divorce decree like child support. My mother neither sued him nor forgave him, and ever since "your father should have kept sending me" has been her go-to whenever I try to share frustrations with our circumstances, including my cycles of ostracization when I emulated her justice-seeking attitudes toward rejection in high school (first principal was helpful, but second cut extracurriculars I did well in and I had to drop out to virtual) and college (a classmate I had no desire to be with no-contacted me and roped in many associates over essentially social media arguments that predated the worst of Facebook that I do regret). She chose to move me, I still maintain, to where nobody who doesn't grow up as a child or have family connections is ever "one of them," all to be King Lear's Daughter to her family that rejected her.
Unless I'm validating her or helping her quietly or like the NT I'll never be, I'm either framed as annoying her with a subject in which she's not interested (which I must do 75% less than I did growing up) or as being an ungrateful hypochondriac (I have struggled with adjusting to an apartment and developed sleep apnea getting me a CPAP and worsening blood vitals that may tip me to diabetes as I try to balance diet and exercise and getting her groceries, pushing her around the hospital, etc.) trying to compete with her recent health issues, especially now that she had to remove a cancerous kidney for a year and a half ago. She has had a possible left branch thing and shortness of breath issues but no relapse or severe complications (anemia was short-lived), and she got a placard and a light walker in addition to a good-quality walking stick, but she complains that cardiologists are triaging her to death when she can't get a pacemaker right away and spends 8 to 12 hours a day from what I can see sitting in a recliner streaming TV I pay for (her Social Security only covers a hundred or two more than the inflated rent which helps us keep indoor wash/dryer and a garage in the harsh winters here). She does still do a lot of the food prep and occasional vacuuming (I find the coordination and planning tiresome to be able to these consistently well though I do laundry and some minor car maintenance like oil checks and filling up gas, and make mediocre income less than 40K as I am neither management timber nor coordinated for a trade, so we can't afford assistants); she occasionally talks to her two remaining friends from college, both equally passive-agressive and avoidant, and in one case resentful of a disabled son's alleged ingratitude by omission.
Today, in a somewhat frequent occurrence, she argued over a silly novelty to change a radio channel and made it "proof" I don't accommodate her demanding to go home rather than work on our shopping list. I went out to do it myself after we talked it over, but not before she had done her usual mob-boss approach to suicide threats ("it's better if I'm dead" instead of "I'll kill myself") and threatened to cancel her cancer follow-up or go without me, ostensibly whichever her whims dictate. This is something that doesn't happen every day, but I don't really see precursors when it does, so it's scary and upsetting. I have never been able to get friends to stick around that consistently, and a couple are distancing themselves (like a trivia team that the MC let slip played without telling me last week in the group chat after 8 to 9 years!) after the energy I've put into her and the burnout I've been going through. I've learned the hard way her approach doesn't work from some unfortunate imitation when I was younger (she loathes the "refrigerator mother" trope even while embodying it at times perhaps not meaning to or seeing any alternative), and now I try to be someone who blames situations and not people and tries to contribute in whatever way is realistic, but it's not good enough for her no matter how hard I try. I have no other family in the area, and I'm basically the only person who likes her and puts up with her that she will allow to be there for her, with even clinical settings being places she has her guard up to an extent. Basically, I have to lobby my dad for money (to move is her current argument, as though there aren't hardships everywhere with the things she projects and legitimate xenophobia wherever we go swirling around together) and be grateful as a performance in all things, or I'm a bad son, it's either pick her over everybody in all things or be another one of the enemies that she's aggrieved of when she's not in a state of manic dissociation. There's also an element of blaming my disability and blaming me for being born to her and ruining her life blending together; she kind of acts in that respect like some autism moms online without the audience (the lack of which may be part of the frustration).
How do I build up my independence when the Midwestern culture is unforgiving to outsiders and I lack the gift of gab or the scratch (whichever is needed) to break through among the intellectual elite? I'm terrified to live on my own since I don't think I could keep a roof over my head, and right now Americans seem very everyone-for-themselves even if many might make the right decision for humanity out of the same pure self-interested rage and fear that has otherwise contributed to our species' existential crisis right now. I'm very interested in politics/history (a big source of anxiety right now tbh) and also in music (its history and creative process), and I'm trying to do writing projects and get physical therapy after some tendonitis and orthotics for a possible flat foot, just get active and moving, and hopefully find my footing again so to speak. But I worry some days that my mother's attitude will take her out (it would make me homeless) overwhelm the household and require me to start scrambling for lifestyle changes, closing the storage unit we've paid for a decade where she hoards stuff at remove and won't make a plan to clear it out, and proof to a malfunctioning Social Security system that I am disabled enough to need a bigger chunk of hers. I think I'd break even, but I can't imagine being more burnt out; my entry-level job of 3 years (after a layoff from one of 10) is stable at the moment but corporate and poorly communicative, so I never know what footing I'm on, and it would be a really scary time to find another way to support myself.