Your mom sounds an awful lot like mine Stopdog. Very likable, a wonderful person by all accounts, but could not understand or accept that her own child could be different from her.
Unlike you, I did spend my childhood trying to please her - take care of her really, as she's very needy but doesn't like to believe that she is.
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She was very likable (seriously - people loved her from friends she had from grade school until she died to grocery store clerks who came to her funeral and told me how delightful she was) which is another thing that makes it so odd that I rejected her.
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FWIW, Stopdog, it doesn't seem odd to me at all that you 'rejected' her. Though I would disagree that it was you who did the rejecting. As a 'pleaser' child I was constantly jumping through my mother's hoops, so much so that I didn't even have the energy for pretty much anything else. I've been an anxious wreck, a mouse child, for as long as I can remember. It's only recently I'm starting to believe that there is not, actually, something terribly wrong with me.
I was home about a month ago and I had the opportunity to see some of her BS from a new perspective (not to mention hear from all and sundry about how wonderful she is. Again. They seem to think I'm lucky to have her for a mother. Poor clueless sods...). A couple of examples: 'that child can't be trusted to get out of bed in the morning', 'you're not the easiest person to get along with JS', 'you never listen to the other person's side JS', 'well, you know JS, she never calls anyone'. On and on and on. All with the smile of the long-suffering mother on her face. And I used to try so hard. Well, no more. I could never be good enough for her anyway.