Mother thinks I hate her - is this abuse?

About 18 months ago I moved back in with my mother temporarily for the first time in almost 10 years, and I'm seeing problems. I've noticed that she tries to get away with treating me the same now as she did when I was a teenager, and as a result I'm having a hard time interacting with her as an adult child. Growing up with her (she was a single mother) there was a lot of encouragement to voice feelings and not keep things bottled up, but every time I tried to talk about negative feelings, especially ones towards her, I always became the villain. Since moving back in with her, things have picked up right where they left off.

Our arguments are pretty explosive, and they're happening more and more. I feel like there are a lot of double standards, and that she places herself on some kind of victim pedestal. When I talk about work being hard, hers is always harder (even though she once complained to me that she only works a few hours a day at her office job, while I spent my entire shifts on my feet doing a lot of manual labor and customer service). If I dirty one dish and she dirties two, my mess is always somehow bigger. My freelance work is consistently devalued as not real work, and that my time would be better spent doing chores. That sort of thing.

Our most recent altercation, which prompted me to leave the house and stay with a relative, came from me leaving a piece of lettuce on the kitchen counter next to the compost after making a sandwich. I remarked that when I came home after my weekend away recently, the compost was overflowing onto the counter, and that there were maggots in it when I dumped it out - all her mess. I asked why I couldn't leave a piece of lettuce while she could literally have rotting garbage sitting on the counter for several days, and I get my head bitten off. This is just one example I used out of several over the course of the argument; all of which, of course, she had a justification for. When I used the same excuses as her for my far more minor versions of her same actions, they weren't good enough. (ie. she didn't take the compost out all weekend because she was tired and busy, which to her is reasonable; I didn't put the piece of lettuce away because when I came home from work, I had to work some more and forgot, but this is unreasonable.)

Things escalated and for the second time in 6 months she tells me that she's convinced that I hate her and have no respect for her. Last time these thoughts came up, she also tried to allege that I not only wanted her dead, but that I was threatening to kill her. I left the house that time too.

I don't want to diagnose my mother or anything, but it seems that she is extremely paranoid and getting moreso as the years go by. I admit to being passive aggressive sometimes, but living in a situation where I have no opportunity to address her behavior toward me without being painted as some horrible monster has left me with no other way to vent my frustrations at her micro-aggressions. Every time we argue, I have to either admit fault or she pretends it never happened.

She's also heard voices for most of her life, but I've never known them to say things typical of schizophrenia... they say mostly benign things, talk in languages she doesn't understand, or talk randomly to each other as if she wasn't there. She also, as far as I know, has never gotten this way with anyone else.

I guess I'm just having a hard time processing what's going on because every time I walk myself through what was said in these arguments, I tend to want to just paint them as being the result of two normal people who are just stressed out. And then I remember her repeated accusations that I hate her and want her dead, and I KNOW that's not normal.

Any advice??

I went through this with my father years ago. I moved home for a while when I was college after getting out of the Air Force. I ended up finding a cheap, older apartment that I could barely afford, and moved. It was what I had to do. I was broke most of the time, but I was happy, and when I did see my parents there were no longer issues because I could leave any time I wanted to.