Could my mother be neurodiverse?

[Toffifee1]

I‘ve always had a complicated relationship with my now 70 year old mother and it just dawned on me that she might be neurodiverse. She would never go to the doctor but it‘d help me understand her and come to terms with how mean she has often been to me (like telling me in front of family friends that i shouldnt wear skinny jeans back when they became popular when i had a bmi of 21 and similar body shaming).

1. She lacks empathy. For example i just witnessed her telling a women who moved to the uk from another continent and who lost her father and only sibling last month „oh, your mum must be very sad because she‘s all alone now!“ .. Well, yeah, rub it in?!
2. she does not understand irony. At all. She was also often mad at me because she didn’t understand that something i said wasn’t meant to be serious. She was extremely mad at me once when i send an emoticon sticking it’s tongue out to hightlight that sonething i wrote was meant to be a joke because she thought i was being rude to her(sticking out my tongue at her).
3. she has never been good at friendships/ complained collegues would exclude her when meeting privately..
4. she studied maths and history(she was great at remembering dates)
5. she knows lots of plant names and her hobbies include gardening and painting, she used to collect coins and stamps but now she‘s addicted to the phone and will even play phone games when my dad has visitors(because he has friends)

i generally think that she loves me and wants whats best for me but there have been so many situations where she was just soooo mean and i‘d like to think that she somehow couldnt help it?

She was also mad at me because i „complained about her being a bad mother“ in front of a coworker.
What i said during a general conversation i don’t really remember was that she never bought me a pony. That was obviously not a serious complaint and she recently told me she would only visit me at work again if i behaved better and gave that pony example and scolded me like a child for it.

It does sound like she could be neurodivergent, specifically autistic. The difficulty with relationships, inability to understand irony, monotropic interests etc are all autistic traits. Lacking cognitive empathy (ability to understand why others feel the way they do) is also an autistic trait although many of us have an excess of emotional empathy which is the ability to feel the feelings of others, often without knowing why.

Also, as a friendly FYI, your mother could not be neurodiverse because an individual cannot be neurodiverse, just as an individual cannot be diverse. Populations/groups are (neuro)diverse; individual brains are (neuro)divergent. Neurodiversity is a paradigm that describes the variance of brains in society, including neurotypical brains. I see this error a lot on here and it irks me a bit as a pedantic autistic person who has a special interest in autism and the language of neurodiversity!