Hi Tee, it’s like you’re reading my mind…

You feel responsible for her well-being, while she refuses to take responsibility for it. 100%

Even though she is telling you she wants you to have a life of your own, she doesn’t really mean it, because in her mind, it would mean like being abandoned and helpless and alone. …you don’t want to cause harm to your mother. You feel trapped, because you really believe that she won’t make it without you.

Yes, yes and yes! She was never in a happy marriage with my father. It wasn’t an actual arranged marriage, but pretty close. So yes, I was her everything emotionally and friendship-wise in place of him. She made excuse after excuse why she couldn’t leave him, but never actually did. So yes, there was definitely a lot of neediness even prior to my brother’s death (he was 15, I was 13).

Anita, to your point, years ago I tried talking to her about all this dysfunction in our relationship, and she got horribly defensive, called me all horrible things, and we got into such a wicked fight, I never brought it up again. I just tried to slowly detach more, but the same patterns always crept back in. Then when all the caregiving started, it just got that much worse.