Everyone (including myself) has always focused on my father as the more obvious abuser but I'm beginning to realize just how much damage my mother's inability to be a mother has affected me.

Sheesh, being invalidated and made to feel like you're worthless is one of the major traumas considered to cause BPD and she's still freaking doing it to me now. If now as an adult her ignorance of my feelings can cause these feelings imagine what it could do to a kid. Scratch that. I know what it could do to a kid.

Right now all I want to do is grab her and shake her and scream at her about how she is the mother, I am the daughter why can't she get that!?

Time and again I've asked her not to do something and have tried my best to explain why I don't want her to do and how it makes me feel. Time and again she does exactly what I've asked her not to do.

When questioned about why she does it when she knows I don't like it her only response is "I don't know." Apparently my feelings don't even matter enough for her to have a good reason for ignoring them.

When I was 15/16, shortly after my parents separated she became social with some distant relations. One member of that family would visit us a lot. He liked to 'tickle' me. I would beg her to keep him away from me instead she would go out of her way to make sure he could spend time with me. To the point where if she saw him while she was out she would tell him I was at home alone.

Now as an adult I think I can follow her train of thought. See, she enjoys 'getting a bite' out of people (a reaction in layman's terms) whether or not it is a good reaction or a bad reaction she doesn't care, as long as the focus is pointed at her. (It's something I've noticed much of now. She will do something I don't like and then when I get angry turn to the person she's with and say "See, told you I could get a bite.) Anyways by begging her to keep him away from me I was inadvertently giving her a reaction especially when I would become angry at her letting him near me.

Now I am less affected by what he did than by my mother's failure to protect me even though I honestly believe she didn't know what he was up to.

I've recently started a new job. A job I took purely for the opportunity to move from where we are now. It's only 45 minutes away but my mother has dug in her heels and is refusing to move. Despite the fact that I do not have my drivers license (driving scares me.) and it requires her to travel back and forth twice a day.

I can't talk to anyone about her because they almost always respond with that's just the way she is just let her be. They clearly know there's something not quite right with her.

Yeah, that's fine when you only have to deal with her every so often. Not when she's someone you are supposed to be able to depend on to look after you.

I can't even move out because she is incapable of living on her own. She is financially useless. Has never held a proper job in her life and is now living on a pension she receives because my father beat me.

It's not fair.

Why am I the one that has to support her.

During some of the biggest crises in my life it's been me trying to protect her (75% of the arguments between my father and I started because I was trying to defend her and now I'm beginning to think maybe he wasn't so in the wrong. That there is every chance she provoked him as she does me.) and I'm tired.

I want someone to look after me for once.