Feeling a bit of a fraud here as I am officially NC with my mother and I know that's not the remit of the thread as such, but hope nobody minds me sharing a bit anyway... even though I'm not in contact with her, the relationship still evolves inside my head/heart in its own way, it's still a work in progress the way I see her/myself, the way I learn to unlearn what she taught me.
My mother left me absolutely swathed in guilt. Guilt about everything, about being alive even. I was brought up to be very aware of how much my mother had suffered before I was even born - first her own mother died when she was still quite young (19), and then her second child only lived 10 weeks because of a heart condition, so she was this horrendously doubly bereaved figure whose suffering took precedence over everything and anything I might ever go through. Over me, full stop. She was a coper type, who kept herself as busy as possible all the time so that she never actually had time to feel too much or process the hurts she'd sustained - I was born one year and 11 days after the death of her first daughter, as the classic "replacement baby", so she didn't really grieve properly at all. She was so angry at the world for the loss of that child, and the other hurts she'd suffered before I was even born, and the person she took that anger out on was nearly always me. Because she could.
They didn't actually give me a middle name but they might as well have made it "guilty". Guilty for living when my sister died (classic survivor's guilt). Guilty for not being good enough to compensate for my sister's death - I knew from an early age why they'd had me, but I was clearly (to my child's eyes) failing in my job to make everything allright again as they seemed to find so much fault with me and nearly everything I did. Guilty for wanting to be happy. Guilty for having basic human needs and desires that they couldn't bring themselves to meet - I now see that to really love me would have involved opening up their hearts to all the pain they were holding at bay, and they just didn't (and don't) have the courage or the will to do that, so they kept me at a distance instead, and I grew up feeling intinsically wrong for wanting anything more, and, of course, deeply emotionally abandoned.
I am now in a pretty good place where I actually do have a very healthy "adult" at the helm in my life (after many years of therapy and a lot of hard work and self love), but I also still have the very damaged "child" inside me; looking after that damaged child is, I think, a life's work and I will just have to keep at it. With crises now and then but for the most part a pretty happy and settled life, finally with people who really care about me at its core.
For me, letting go of my family of origin was key to enabling me to finally move on and start living my own life, including having my own family, but I do realise that for most people on this thread, that's not a road you want to go down, so I don't want to try and hijack! I won't necessarily post again, given that I'm not really in the same position as those of you who want to work out strategies for maintaining a relationship with your mothers/families, but it has been helpful to me to share here and I do appreciate all the stories people have told of the shocking things their mothers have said and done, so thank you for starting the thread. As others have said, it's a bittersweet help to be in the company of others whose mothers are far from the typical; most of my friends in RL have good, strong relationships with their mothers and I do feel alone in that respect.