I will try and keep this concise but apologies if I fail! I've found this topic so incredibly helpful so I am hoping the collective wisdom here can help steer me through a challenging situation.
My mother and stepfather (who is now dead) were active alcoholics throughout my childhood and teenage years. Before my mother met and married my stepfather, I often took a parent role with my mother. From around six/seven years old, I took on a lot of responsibility for my own care and helped her when she was very drunk and unable to cope (helping her take out her contact lenses for instance and preparing my own lunches for school). My stepfather was also an alcoholic and though a gentle and generous person, I discovered he was deeply dysfunctional when I hit my teen years and he became a peeping tom when I was undressing/dressing. Obviously this was distressing but it was also hard to prove (he'd peep through cracks in my door and then shoot into the bathroom next to my room where he left the tap running as an excuse to be there). I felt a weird sense of relief when I caught him and he eventually admitted it. I eventually told my mother but she felt unable to leave him -- I think she was terrified of losing the security she had got for us. I understood at the time, or thought I did, but once I had my own children, I struggled with her decision not to protect me. However, at the time I recognised that other people had gone through much worse and that he never physically abused me. (There were also problems with my father and stepmother but these aren't relevant to this thread so I will spare everyone that bit!)
My mother ticks almost every box on the narcissist personality disorder list. It is only recently (I'm now in my 50s) that I realised that much of my personality has been heavily informed by being the child of a narcissist (parentification/enmeshment etc.) and the child of an alcoholic (people pleasing/fawning etc.). And I just thought I had a bit of a pushover personality :)
I've tried for decades to establish a healthy, positive relationship with my mother despite her following a regular cycle of using me as an emotional punchbag and alternating controlling and criticising behaviours with a form of love bombing. I kept empathising with her because she is so obviously deeply unhappy and she had an unhappy childhood herself. She has lost nearly all her friends with her behaviour, her family is overseas (and she falls out with them too!) and so I am all she has (no siblings). It's always been clear that I am her focus and she has often said I am her reason for being (as well as saying how different her life would have been if I had been her mother). I felt that it would be cruel to withdraw from her even though she has become increasingly difficult. The decision to keep trying to make the situation work was made even more difficult when she minimised what my stepfather did during a row and showed that she really didn't see it as a big deal. But recently I realised that her behaviour was also starting to affect my daughter (who has MH issues of her own) and that was my line in the sand. After an interaction with my daughter that left her upset and anxious, I realised that I was in danger of letting my mother damage another generation and my own loving nuclear family which I have worked so hard to create and make happy. My long-suffering husband has struggled to see me hurt by my mother's behaviour over the years though he is always supportive. I have realised that he has often fallen down my priority list in favour of trying to keep my mother happy and I hate myself for that. Two months ago, when I realised that my mother had trampled over some boundaries I set up for my daughter I decided that that was enough and stopped communicating with her. My husband was completely supportive and my daughter relieved (she finds her VERY hard). The situation is also difficult because we look after a property of my mother's, I order all her medication (which we continue to do) and she has been contributing to my son and daughter for uni etc (we expect to be cut off soon).
But getting to the point (finally!) the advice I need concerns my son. He is nearly 18 and has an okay relationship with my mother. He's fairly oblivious to what has gone on and I only recently told him about her drinking (she stopped for good maybe last summer). He doesn't know about my childhood and my daughter (who is a bit older) only knows some of it -- neither of them know about my stepfather for instance. My son commented the other day that we hadn't seen my mother for a while and my husband told him that we'd fallen out and said she had been difficult. My son finds it difficult to express his emotions so this will be difficult for him to manage. He's not yet mastered reading the room in terms of how people are feeling though he can be observant and kind.
I don't know what is appropriate to do here. I don't want to taint my son's relationship with my mother if he wants to see her -- but equally think she may try and use him to make comments/turn him against us (she has form for this). I don't want to upset him by sharing too much but also feel he is probably old enough to handle the idea that adults can have difficult relationships.
The whole thing is complicated by my daughter's struggles and the fact that my husband is also a little fragile (he had a breakdown some years ago and so relates to our daughter's struggles painfully well).
I want to do the right thing by everyone but also know that I can't go back to the way it was with my mother before even if we do re-establish contact at some point. I was giving her so much time (despite being the primary earner for the family so I was already time poor) and know that my priority really needs to be my daughter and the rest of my family. I'm also struggling not to feel overwhelmed by the emotional impact of all the different elements.
I've probably put too much in here and sorry if it's all a bit garbled.
So the TLDR version would be: if you have gone NC with a parent, how did you handle the relationship of the parent with your children if they were older teens? How much did you share? Did you encourage them to continue the relationship or not?
Thank you and sorry for the lengthy post -- I didn't do very well on keeping it down I realise!