Good morning @Coco-star ...
Ugh what a doozy.
First up what I pick up from your post apart from your very obvious frustration and grief is this:
That your mother is showing very obvious signs of...in her head...."I'm a special person who doesn't need to follow the ordinary rules of society, nor display interpersonal respect/common decency within my relationships."
It's easy to go down a wormhole and ascribe names, labels and disorders with these people and with my own mother, I have gone down that wormhole myself. But, what's the takeaway with the situation?
---> The other person is oblivious to their greater responsibilities that allow priveleges to them, and that their need for control/emotional parasitism/"I GET WHAT I WANT WHEN I WANT IT" exceeds their ability to follow the basic courtesies of life.
I personally get a lot of peace from studying that "certain personalities" have extremely common and predictable behaviours. My own mother does the "COME AND GET YOUR STUFF" trick, and my stuff is STILL at her house because she made my life so horrible from birth that I never been able to afford the physical space to store my stuff, the time to sort it out, the space to reconcile EVERYTHING and last but not least....the physical cost of having a vehicle and time to pack, transport, deal with "my stuff".
So, they are each UNREASONABLE in their DEMANDS.
I am certain you would be familiar with the FOG, Fear, Obligation, Guilt mindset which is probably part of why you distanced yourself with your mother. Not to bring it back to be all about me but, I made a similar and utterly heartbreaking decision in my own life..."If I am trying to grow up from a completely dysfunctional person, and you keep attacking me every single breath I take...every move I make...."(you are watching me....do-doo-do-do, and lol-not-lol)......then, I have to simply remove myself from being a target of crippling mental, physical, emotional abuse because it was the same abuse that caused the dysfunction...and it's the same dysfunction holding me back in life......and when we grow up, LIFE IS HARD AND THERE IS VERY LITTLE SAFETY NET.
I have been in HORRIBLE situations due to my mother's behaviour and attitude towards me, lack of resources at home and in hindsight, I hold no guilt nor shame in fairly allocating the problem to HER. Yet, it is and always has been, always will be my responsibility to fix up my life.
Her attitude: You were born and ruined my life so you owe me and I am big you are small and I will doggedly compete with/strategise against you so that I am always bigger than you and you are always smaller than me, and that you're not allowed to need me but I am ALWAYS entitled to need you.
UGH. OK my mother had a bad childhood but, I am not her mother.
I suspect that in these people, if they were an empty bucket, they NEED to be filled up with a "mother substitute" before they can even function as an actual bucket. Combine that with self loathing/projection/woe is me victim attitude, Mothers and all people who take the same road will always have "an empty bucket in their head" and they will ALWAYS look for an external source to fill their bucket.
It's almost as if..........they were a tiny baby who needs an adult to take care of them and they will cry, kick, walk around looking for that missing piece until they fill it up or perhaps they are too far gone, their brains have formed and it's hard wired into them.
I suspect that if/when you outgrew your mother, the tables turned in her mind and she decided that "I gave to you, now you need to give to me".
TRANSACTIONAL RELATIONSHIPS. "I'll let you go to school camp if you be good and do all the chores for me and toe the line, etc".
It might be helpful for you to meditate, discuss, journal, etc, find a way to fully contemplate both what she has done and not done for you, and to also believe this: when your own grief is healed, when your own life is properly independent, you might have the strength to tolerate your mother.
That you are now finishing and fulfilling the independent stage of life where you NEED to learn how to survive as an adult in a very complex society.
That in your mind, from any available moments of history, you love and honour your mother for the times she was kind/nice/giving yet....current reality is that you are still completing the separation stage that she couldn't assist you with, and it's a matter of survival to do so.
A story from my own journey: When I realised some of above, I also managed to convert some of the shame, guilt, 'i left her alone, i am a bad daughter' feelings into "I need to complete my adult development in order to become the person whom I truly should have been".
After 7 years of distance which began with "After my life was at total rock bottom I asked you to simply stop attacking me so that we could have a 'nice' relationship if nothing else. You could not refrain from attacking me, I could no longer tolerate a relationship based on abuse, tension, obligation, where no one benefits.....she got validation she could control and hurt me, I got validation she did not care about my reality, AT ALL".
It was beneficial to me to realise there was a lot of pain there, and the same pain deserved to be healed and honoured within me. I used to cry at soppy songs or viewing happy families or wishing I had a mother, now I can say to myself "I love my mother for the good times, and I acknowledge she is a very damaged and limited person who does not have, and doesn't see the need to develop any skills in order for us to have a better relationship. I am at peace with the fact my existence burns her soul and creates pain within her that she takes out on me, but I refuse to play a part in a horrible blow for blow conflict because my values are that I do not wish to abuse people, nor be abused, and I cannot heal her pain by taking her abuse therefore we are both better off without each other."
Re Feeling triggered, some of the darkest moments of my life were saying horrible things, reacting from a place of deep anger, to engage in mutually abusive fights with my mother and other family members due to just.wanting.them.to.stop.and.go.away.if.they.cant.be.nice.
(exhausted....just stop....we need this energy for work....its illegal and immoral to treat people this way....I can't go to work and treat people like this, I just dont want it in my life. I have paid too much, lost too much, been unable to have too much due to this horrible behaviour which once was ingrained in me which caused problems all through my schooling.....please......begging......desperate............)
Not surprisingly, once you start getting treated with respect, it's VERY hard to go backwards!
Would it be too much, too far to notify police she is putting herself and others at risk by driving unlicenced? That would cause her to face consequences of her behaviour, and to stop it. It might give you peace of mind to have taken a big responsibility to stop risky behaviour.
One of the topics that looms large in my mind, is how much society has changed since I have been an adult - and how much it has changed since she was a child. What does that mean?
---> That society is so complex, consequences are so great, responsibilities so heavy that I can't commit to doing anything that doesn't help me engage with the current societal demands.
Choice: be my mother's daughter and probably be unhoused (no judgement to anyone currently, past or future unhoused)
Choice: rise up into everything I know I need to do and stay afloat, punching on, every single day.
I know and I can see that you're choosing to stay afloat.
I know from swimming, that if a person is drowning - before we help them, we have to make sure that we don't drown.
My dream is that one day I will be a strong swimmer and I can help my mother come back to shore.
But my reality is that she threw me out to sea a long time ago, blamed me for drowning then threw bricks at me. She didnt do it on purpose (I am not a victim)...she doesn't know any other way of life due to the way she has been treated.
But if I follow her footsteps and become a completely broken person, I have not honoured everything she has done and sacrificed for me.
If I break away and become strong, I have honoured all that she has done and sacrificed for me and one day I will be a lighthouse for her, IF she can overcome her own ego and come back to the person she threw away.
I hope that I have not made this too much about me but it's hard to be able to directly relate to an experience and NOT write about a similar experience, as it's relating that gives a feeling of 'i am not alone' and it's relationships that get us into and out of the hard patches of life.
So today, I hope you can find a way to feel strong, to blow off any emotional hangover, to stick to your guns and if anger/sadness arises, give those emotions time to exist, unpack whats there and turn dark thoughts into an identified thing that isn't chewing up your limited time and energy.
All the best, keep on making your own life the best it can possibly be, while knowing that a long journey requires frequent rest stops and can be hard and can bring up WHY DO I NEED TO DO THIS WHEN i WANT TO DO THAT? conflicts.
You need to do it to survive. Therefore you need to do most of this, and a bit of that, and keep on keeping on.
