Tl:dr despite my mom going through a lot right now, I feel like I can’t talk to her much about anything and she could be doing more.
Growing up my mom did her best to take us to fun places, make us dinner, buy us toys, and give us a really fun childhood. My dad was an abusive alcoholic however, and recently their marriage ended after he fell for a romance scam that costed us over $600k, which was all we had.
After graduating high school I (19) started working full time (45-50 hours a week) as a waitress to help support my mom and my brother who is still in high school.
Although I’m trying to be there for my mom emotionally and financially, sometimes I have this feeling of resentment towards her for “not doing enough”.
When I say not doing enough, I mean she’s really hard to talk to her about anything regarding our mental health and stuff, she doesn’t do anything to prepare us to be responsible in life, and she only works 3 days a week at a nail salon, and the rest of the week she stays home.
Whenever we try to talk to her about how we’re feeling and stuff, she gets pretty defensive and starts talking about how hard her life is and how her life would be different if she didn’t have us.
And also, she babies all of us. She still does my brothers laundry, cleans his room, feeds him when he’s hungry, yet she doesn’t discipline him to do chores by himself or even do better in school. It’s gotten to the point where sometimes she asks if I can discipline my brother because he won’t listen to her. I feel like I have no one to look up to. My dad used to make like $300k per year when he was a salesman, but he lost his job, drank all day, and gave everything up for a porn star scammer. And my mom doesn’t have a degree or job experience. And she doesn’t push us to get a drivers license, or job, or credit card, or investments, or budget plan, so we just kinda have to figure out by ourselves what we need to succeed in this world.
And lastly, I’ve been working full time to help pay the bills because I thought my mom and I agreed to split them on this apartment after we lost our house. However, For the last few months I’ve been paying everything on my own including some cat medical bills that were like $3k because she said the nail salon was “slow” so she hasn’t gotten many clients.
But when I suggested that she work more days or find another job with more consistent pay, she just walked away saying she couldn’t work more days because she needed to pick and drop my brother from school and work, and she didn’t think other jobs at a grocery store for example were for her.
Every so often I flip back and forth to feeling bad for my mom and wanting to do more to help her because I know it’s not easy on her to resenting her because I wish she prepared us better in life and I wish she tried harder on her part to make ends meet. I still love her a lot though, she doesn’t spend that much on herself I think, and she really hates asking me for money and she tries to avoid it, so I don’t think she’s trying to take advantage of me, and obviously it’s really hard for her to handle life on her own after all the years of abuse and financial loss.
I’ve been battling this kind of thought process for a while now, I wish I could stop being so divided on how I feel about her, if anyone has any insights I’d love to hear them, thank you.