I love DM dearly. She is sweet and caring and loves me very much. She also had a difficult childhood and struggles in interpersonal relationships. Eg, went NC with both her parents and 1 sibling, only 1 friend. She struggles a lot to understand appropriate social responses (eg once when I was 15 at a parent's evening a teacher asked if I had siblings at the school. She replied that she couldn't have coped with more (in a deadly serious tone, not a sort of "oh goodness, no an only child was enough for me!" sort of breezy way. She didn't understand the teacher's slightly flummoxed reaction. Or she tells people she has just met about her childhood and going NC.) She also drives me absolutely crazy and I am cold and often borderline nasty or snappy in how I deal with her. I wish I wasn't.
The faultline for me is that she moans constantly - about everything- and is hypercritical of many people, especially my father (they are still together). It had a terrible effect on my self-confidence growing up. I have always been afraid to challenge her because her default response is either to clam up or say "I am only joking". I genuinely think that on one level she thinks what she does is just making conversation. I am actually afraid of hurting her by asking her not to. (I tried once, in my early 20s. It didn't work.) But it is really horrible, and distressing, for me to have to listen to. When it is my father she focuses on I often feel I cannot help but pull up the drawbridge and my cold and snappy self comes out. I hate the sense of being complicit in it. And I also feel guilty that maybe I am the one who is being hypercritical of her, rather than just letting this wash over me. And because of it, I resist getting closer to her because I don't trust her not to be hypercritical of me either. So I avoid calling her, and spending time with her. But I feel awful because she vents to me because she is poor at conversation, and is lonely and doesn't really have outlets for minor frustrations. What makes it the more flabbergasting is that when I try a tiny bit of it - eg expression frustration about something with my partner - she basically won't listen, and her response is never to take my side. I know I have to change how I react because I cannot change her.
I've been in therapy, but it's on hiatus for a few months. I'd really welcome any advice anyone has about how to be a less awful daughter, and less tangled up in resentment for this flawed but deeply loving woman who is the only mother I am ever going to have.