Hi Anita,

Thank you for your response again.

Well with my mother… Oii… It’s always been difficult. As far as my earliest memory, I remember my mother has always been this angry and anxious person. So I always got yelled at. As a child, this would fill me with this “I have done something wrong” sense. I am an only child, so I  always got the full force of her anger. I was terrified of her. As I grew older, the yelling continued. But with growing up, my tolerance for her screaming reduced, and I started arguing back. Now, when she yells, I yell too. Honestly, because I just can’t take it. Don’t get me wrong; she loves me and takes care of me in every way she can. But yeah, she screams a lot. I am very different than her in many many ways; different ideologies, different thought processes, different way of doing things. This doesn’t help at all, because I have kind of observed that she has this “if it’s not my way, it’s wrong” thing. Not all the time. But most of the time. So I sometimes get scolded because of that too. We’re just two of us in our family, so it’s difficult. When she yells, mostly it leads to a fight, because I simply can’t take it anymore. I try not to yell back, but sometimes I just can’t help it.  She scolds for the same thing again and again.

She… kind of… has been critical of me as well. I’d score a 95/100, but she’s say “I thought you’d get a 97”. She always expected me to be in the cream of everything I did. She comments on my body, how I am too skinny, how my hair is too thin, how my makeup is too much, and the such. I hate getting ready for parties in front of her. She kind of brings me down as well, telling me things I can’t do. Even if I do something really well, she has to comment on something I did wrong with it. It is extremely annoying.

She has always been quite controlling as well. I wasn’t even allowed to wear my hair the way I wanted until I put my put down. It seems that all she wants me to do is what she wants me to do. I have different hobbies than she does. When I pursued one of them, it literally was hell. She didn’t speak to me properly for months. She’d also give me the cold treatment: not looking at me, not answering me, behaving like I don’t even exist, if she would look at me, it would only be to look at me with absolute hatred, if she would talk to me, it would be to yell at me. I didn’t even understand what I had done wrong to be honest. It took us a while to get over that.

I also noticed that she treats me like her emotional punchbag. When she is really stressed out, she tends to start screaming at me. Say something happened at work, she’d come home and scream at me for something as silly as my bag being on the couch. After she’d scream, her mood would drastically flip onto a positive one, and then she’d tell me what happened at work, and then I’d understand why she was screaming.

She’s breached my privacy too, reading my diaries. So I stopped writing them.

So yeah… I’ve had a difficult relationship with her, made worse by my father passing away when I was in my early teens. She wants us to be friends, but I’m not really comfortable telling her things. I only tell her stuff when I’m extremely anxious. She is an ultra-introvert, has barely any friends, doesn’t speak to relatives much either. She tells me I am her only source of happiness, which, to be honest, is immense pressure. She never seems to be on board for anything I wanna do.

To answer your question, yes I live with her. Currently, we’re together all day due to lockdown. She does all the chores and work, never letting me touch anything. It makes me feel like a pampered brat, and she knows I don’t like it. But I can’t help it, she wants everything done by 8 am in the morning, and I can’t wake up that early, by 6, and do it. But it just doesn’t work with her if I do it after I wake up by 8. So then, I’ve chucked it. And then she tells her friend I do nothing. Imagine my frustration.

Hope to hear from you…