I can relate to the comment "she did the best she could ", but I don't think "myself" meant it the way some people use that phrase.
My mother was also a torture freak who abused me and my brother regularly, but some people when you tell them that, like my relatives, they don't believe you were abused, maybe just spanked, and they tend to say, well she did the best she could.

So hearing that phrase is a little triggering to me as well,
because it sort of excuses my mothers abuse because she didn't know better. If only people really knew the truth.

But then again most people were not abused, just maybe spanked , but not tortured . So I can see why they say well I went through it and it turned out fine. But it is like compairing apples to oranges.
Plus people just can't get their head around that a mother could do such things, yeah, when they hear child abuse, most assume it is the father, but not the sacred "mother".