I just wanted to add something else here too that is a big part of "why" you feel crushed. I touched on this when I compared your mother with those girls in school that hurt you too. What both actions are expressing is "not caring about "your" feelings". From the behavior you have discribed of your mother, she is constantly saying "I feel this and I feel that" and I don't see her acknowledging "your feelings" in these interactions. Well, a "mother" is supposed to know how to acknowledge her child's feelings, it's a big part of "nurturing". A mother who raises a child and is always insisting on "her" opinions and feelings being recognized the most is raising her child to be a "codependant".

There is a book called Codependant No More by Melody Beattie. You gotta have a library near you, go and see if you can join the library and see if they have a copy of that book and take it out and read it.

Also, another good book to get and read too called Honoring the Self which a good book about self-esteem. The author is Nathaniel Branden.

Here is some of what he writes;

" Of all the judgements that we pass in life, none is as important as the one we pass on ourselves, for that judgement touches the very center of our existence.
....No significant aspect of our thinking, motivation, feelings, or behavior is unaffected by our self-evaluation......
The first act of honoring the self is the assertion of consciousness: the choice to think, to be aware, to send the searchlight of consciousness outward toward the world and inward toward our own being. To default on this effort is to default on the self at the most basic level.
To honor the self is to be willing to think independently, to live by our own mind, and to have the courage of our own perceptions and judgements.
To honor the self is to be willing to know not only what we think but also what we feel, what we want, need, desire, suffer over, are frightened or angered by--and to accept our right to experience such feelings. The opposite of this attitude is denial, disowning, repression--self-repudiation.
To honor the self is to preserve an attitude of self-acceptance--to which means to accept what we are, without self-oppression or self-castigation, without any pretense about the truth of our own being, pretense aimed at deceiving either ourselves or anyone else.
To honor the self is to refuse to accept unearned guilt, and to do our best to correct such guilt as we may have earned.
To honor the self is to be committed to our right to exist which proceeds from the knowledge that our life does not belong to others and that we are not here on earth to live up to someone else's expectation. To many people, this is a terrifying responsibility.
To honor the self is to be in love with our own life, in love with our possibilities for growh and for experiencing joy, in love with the process of discovery and exploring our distinctively human potentialities.
Thus we can begin to see that to honor the self is to practice selfishnessin the highest, noblest, and least understood sense of that word. And this, I shall argue, requires enormous independence, courage, and integrity."

And from "Codependent No More"..... We need to love ourselves and make a commitment to ourselves. We need to give ourselves some of the boundless loyalty that so many codependents are willing to give others. Out of high self-esteem will come true acts of kindness and charity, not selfishness.

OE