It's not a very good argument, is it? I don't know what you said to elicit it but sounds like your mother is frustrated.

I'm just learning about what it's like to be older (I'm 57) and to recognize where all those comments were coming from. When one is a teenager, one has no experience, can't have had very much experience by virtue of age, and yet is still an individual with one's own ideas and viewpoint. It's very hard to be young and not understand, to see forward but not understand what one is seeing because one hasn't gotten there yet.

Remember back to when you were half your age looking forward and how you have changed? That is going to keep happening. You understand now things you didn't when you were 8, an 8-year-old's mysteries and fears seem like nothing now. In your mid-20's you'll look at this period of your life and feel similar feelings toward it. There will be an "Oh, is that why!" sense of some of what your mother said and did and she will make more and more sense as you get older and older. My truly abusive stepmother makes a lot more sense to me now and that takes some of the pain of her abuse away.

Age does work wonders. If I had only known when I was your age what I know now. . .