I live in the northeast, but am originally from the southwest, and after not visiting my mother for 12 years, I finally ventured out to see her after she had fallen and required hip surgery.  Although she did not want me to go visit her in the hospital, she told me to visit when she returned home.  I was able to go 9 weeks after her surgery.  When she was hospitalized and in rehab, I called her everyday, and I noticed that she was holding her tongue more, and was less judgemental about everyone around her, including my sisters who live near her.  But during the phone calls leading up to my visit, I noticed that my mother was regaining her aggressiveness, critisizing everyone including my youngest sister who is truly the only one who helps mother out in everyway possible.  I noticed that while she was layed up and vulnerable she was milder (not nice or kind, just not as aggressive) but as soon as she was able to return home and start walking on her own again, she simultaneously recovered her level of aggression and abuse.

Against my better judgement I went to go visit anyway, thinking it is my duty as a daughter to visit her mother in moments like these.  I am between jobs so I thought it would be a good idea to visit for 5 days before I start my new job next week.  But the reality is that my mother is probably more abusive now than ever before.  In the past 23 years, each and every time I have gone to visit her (a total of 3 times) she has managed to make up for my absence by heaping loads of abuse.  I often joke that she saves the abuse for me because she can't give it to me in doses like she does my sisters.  Instead she lays it on me all at once, as if to make sure I get my fair share of maltreatment as my siblings do.  Her abuse is beyond anything anyone else has ever dished out on me (my exhusband never even came close to being abusive.)  However, my mother who is 77 yrs, feels entitled to bullying verbally, emotionally, and even physically.  Everything from cursing insults at me, to actually throwing herself on the ground pounding the floor like a child when I try to safeguard my boundaries.  Each visit has ended with my leaving early because I cannot take it anymore.  Not to mention that she spends the days I visit blaming me for everything that goes wrong in the life of any family member.  According to my mother I'm responsible for my sister's two failed marriages, another sister's abandoning her only child, and another sister lying about who her child's father is for many years.  My mother also holds me responsible for my nephew's drug abuse, and etc...although I have not lived near the family since I was 26 yrs.  I'm now 49.

My major guilt is that most people (friends and others) seem to understand very little about why I won't visit my mother more often, as if there must be something wrong with me because I don't do the "right thing" like a "good daughter" does.  I'm so convinced that I don't deserve to be happy or have love in my life because I'm such a horrible daughter.  This feeling has caused me to wreck good relationships, simply because I have such insecurity about deserving love.  I have never felt close to my mother, nor has she ever demonstrated any genuine interest in me, and she has always told me that I'm no good, that I'm a horrible daughter, and as much as I try not to let that hurt and injure me, it does.  It plays a number on my self-perception.  I can't truly distinguish whether I am those horrible things that my mother says I am, or if she's just a controlling abusive tyrrant.  People tell me that it can't be that bad, but I feel that it is.  So I start to doubt whether I'm just making mountains out of molehills.  The irony is, that in my career I spent a few years working with victims of intimate partner violence, and I have learned so much about the profile of a victim and what it does to their self-confidence, self-esteem, and self-doubt.  Yet, I can't so easily shake off my mother's abuse.  It's as though I tell myself that it can't be that bad because the woman took care of my physical needs as a child (although she was competely emotinally neglectful and physically abusive).

Now, I'm back home after a very traumatic exit from my mother's house last night.  As she was berrating me because I said I do not want to gossip about my nephew's girlfriend or anyone, I tried to step out of the house into the yard just to create space between us.  However, she followed me out yelling and screaming that I am a "cry baby that can't take anything."  In the past whenever she used this as a manipulation tactic, I would try to prove that I'm not a weakling, that I can take a blow.  So I would stay put and take her abuse, even including slaps on the face.  This time I responded by saying that "I don't have to take abuse from her or anyone."  This led to her locking me out in the backyard without shoes and in the rain.  When I pounded the door for her to let me in, she threatened to call the police for destruction of property.  At that moment, I decided that I would not return to that house ever again.  No matter what.  After I climbed over the fence and rang the doorbell she finally let me in.  I gathered my things and called a cab.  But the abuse did not end there, she threw herself on the floor bawling and shouting that I'm evil, and abusive to her, and called me a bitch, and a loser, and every other name in the book.  While I waited for the cab outside, she followed me around trying to get me to go back inside, but I fled through the streets, and she followed me with the car.  It reminded me of another ocassion that this very scene played out.  Back when I was 19yrs old and on Christmas break, she refused to drive me to my part-time job for the holidays... when I ran off to catch the bus she followed me in the car, wailing and pleading for me to get in the car so that she could drive me to work.  Then once I got in the car, she berrated me all the way on the highway calling me a "cry baby that can't take a little critique."  So as you can see, nothing has changed in 30 years.  Not one notch on the needle.

As I write this, I come to realize that I'm unable to handle any of my mother's abuse, nor do I want to.  And that makes me feel like a complete loser, who in 30 years has not been able to find a better way to respond to abuse than to flee in the night.