Complicated. She loved me with all of her heart, but she moved 2000 miles away when I was just 19, after her divorce from my dad. She took my youngest sister with her and left me and my other sister (who was 16 at the time) with my dad. I was in college at the time.
The weekend after she moved, I talked to her on the phone and she said, “You didn’t even come home last week end when I moved.”
I said, “I didn’t think it would really happen.”
She said, “Oh, that really hurts.”
She was mostly concerned with the things that hurt her, not really so much with the things that hurt other people.
She was depressed and attempted suicide 3 times when I was a teenager, via alcohol mixed with some pills. On the third attempt I got angry and said, “What about US mom?”
She slurred, “Fuck all of you. I don’t care about you.”
She could be sort of mean, and it really upset me when she did it to the kids. When my daughter was 12 she’d heard that cold water boils faster than hot water. We were visiting Mom, and my daughter mentioned this. Mom snarled, “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of!” And proceeded to fill a pot of water and slammed it on the stove. Not sure what she was out to prove since it didn’t have a control, but I’ll never forget the look of dismay and hurt on my daughter’s face. I knew exactly what she was feeling.
Other times she’d go out of her way to do special things for us.