I am not insinuating anything but read daughters of narcissistic mothers. I could believe it when I read it. See if she and you fit the bill. I am an hour and a half away and I must say the small distance has helped some until I made a demand the other day. She tries to control family outings, like going to her friends kids weddings where I hate weddings in the first place and she knows this but she wants to put on a "strong family front"...what the hell does that even mean? She tells me in a "caring" way that I am **** and I picked the wrong guy, wrong house, wrong town to live in, I am a horrible mother compared to my sister, I need a job but when I suggest that I would like to get into nails and hair she goes on to tell me that I don't look the part...I am too fat, my hair is not nice enough, my clothes aren't nice enough, I just don't look the part...but she is just looking out for me so I don't get false hope lmao. Whenever we get into it I am made to feel guilty because while what I was saying was true in my eyes, eventually it gets so distorted on how much I have hurt her with those words that I am coddling her and there thereing her.

So now that we are older and we were taught (more like brainwashed) these behaviours we have to be extra careful not to continue our matriarchs behaviours. So I definitely understand your concerns about passing it on but the cool thing is we are more aware of it than our mothers were. We can stop ourselves when we see similar behaviours in ourselves and scream NOOOOOO at ourselves to not hurt our kids the way we were.

A tattoo sounds like a good idea, inspirational phrases really keep us going sometimes.