My mother seeks enmeshment; I'm grown and it feels wrong

I grew up in a small town, in a household with a Mom and an older sister. My sister was a tyrant, but I still had to follow orders when we were much younger. My dad was kind of like a family acquaintance. However, it was always very clear to me that he loved me and here was there when it counted. He and I got a lot closer once I turned 18. My mom lived a solitary life, expressing zero interest in dating from when I was about 8 to 15. When I was 15, she appeared to have what most people would call a mid-life crisis. She called up her boyfriend from high school who lived in LA, and started taking flights to see him, sometimes for weeks at a time. We lived in Oregon. I still do.

As a child, I remember being pretty relegated. My older sister was completely authoritarian, and she really couldn't be trusted in charge. She was like that really shitty manager we all worked with, but our hands were tied because they were close to the boss. She was a dirty fighter and had a massive control complex. Once, when our folks were out and I was about 4, she solicited me into sexual acts with her on the floor of our bedroom. I don't remember much of that happening, but the more I look at my adult behavior (I'm 36), the more I wonder if it really did and that's just the only time the memory stuck.

I always had plenty of food and water, and there was electricity and the basics. We lived a lower-middle class life in my teens because my mother inherited $300,000 when one of her relatives passed. Coming from a place of not having much from early childhood, I suspected the way she spent money was indicative of a way she found it suitable to express love. She had a vehement objection to doing any cooking in the house. Getting that money dovetailed nicely with this, and it was pizza, Mcdonalds, burger king, and taco bell every night from the time I was 13 to when I left for college five years later. She had a 48-month period in which she purchased three brand-new cars. She also picked up smoking out of nowhere, and despite my begging her, smoked in the house.

My mother was not gifted with administering discipline. She'd throw out some baseline half-assed punishment, then roll it back a few days later. She must not have felt comfortable in the role. I can count on one hand the times I did something that merited punishment and she kept her word about it.

I always got the distinct feeling that she was leaning on me emotionally. As early as 9 or 10, I remember us being parked in a parking lot at night, eating fast food. She'd ramble endlessly about her job or her manager or what she did that month that set her apart. She never had any friends her age, never went out to parties, worked from home. It was clear to me from a young age that she had supplanted me into the role of confidant, peer, and even mock-therapist. She never went to therapy. I felt that it was my place to accept the treatment and try and be some kind of precocious psychological wizard. It never seemed like she had any other intentions like say, investing in her kid's mental well-being, helping him approach challenges with novel solutions, or finding the footing to develop resilience with the things I dealt with. She didn't seem particularly interested in making sure my emotional needs were met. This deadening, numb sensation always crept up in our conversations when she'd steer the content to the issues /she/ dealt with. It always felt incestuous.

As a result of all this, I just developed a sense of personal protection. At puberty my behavior just demonstrated a big 'fuck-off' as I leaned more deeply into myself to culminate a sense of support and concern. I would never have been able to describe it as such, at the time. So, we lived tentatively, two weird strangers in a house (after my sister left for school) from when I was 14 to 18. Then, I left for school too, 70 miles away.

Within six months of my leaving for school, she moved to LA to be with her now husband, and decided to rent the house out to help pay the mortgage that way. School didn't work out for me, so I moved in with my Dad just over a year after that, and honestly felt like I got a taste of what family was really like. I was treated with patience, dignity and respect. And my dad never once rambled on about his own problems. He was firmly rooted in making sure anything he dispensed could be of use to me.

I wasn't close with my mom for years after that. We'd talk on the phone every few months but it was always the same thing. A couple questions about me, then a deluge of how things had changed for her and what her concerns were. After an hour on the phone I just internalized this sense that nothing she shared would ever seem to come from a place of invested parenting. Rather, I felt like she treated me as a peer. A peer who apparently wanted to hear all about her life and her psychology whenever we talked. I developed a numbness toward her because she was so selfish and my whimpering concerns and calls for support fell totally on deaf ears.

Fast-forward to my mid twenties. Apparently, I came to find she and her husband had been doing a TON of drinking for the better part of a decade. I lost my dad and I know it's because of this that she and I became closer. I forgave her for everything. I was 27. Personally I'd just realized how useless and harmful holding resentment really is. It was certainly harmful to me. She came up to visit and it was great - I finally felt like I was being recognized for the adult I was, and it felt like we could become good old friends. We have been able to write emails and be sincere with one another since.

We have remained close for the last ten years or so, and in just the last few years, it's been pretty solid. She decided to get clean, so she's done the whole 12-step thing and is living the life of a recovering addict. Things have been on the rocks with her and her husband, so she rented a cottage up here in Oregon, an hour away from the house my wife and I live in. It's unclear whether she plans to divorce him.

I noticed some odd stuff in her behavior right off the bat. There seems to be an enormous pull in her psychology toward talking about my childhood. Showing pictures from when I was a young boy, talking about experiences she remembers from my 2nd grade year, asking if I'd like such-and-such scrapbook from my first grade drawings. Then mailing them to me anyways after I declined. There's a huge focus on regression. I look at the woman across the table from me in the restaurant and her tears well up when I tell her I have no desire to hold on to any of those physical trinkets of nostalgia. What use would I have for them? Why would she think a grown man near 40 would have any interest in retaining scribbles of dinosaurs from when he was a child?

The fact she brings these things up to me at all isn't really that strange. But it's what she's done in the face of my consistent responses. I'm very clear and concise about only holding onto what I need. I've always been very practical and I have never been materialistic. I've got great memories from my childhood and I don't need memorabilia sitting around to remind me. The memories are plenty good enough. But she won't take no for an answer. It has been six years since she started bringing up scrapbooks, photo albums....etc, then appearing hurt and bewildered when I simply explain there's no use for me to have those things. I've told her in as many kind ways as I can that I have no utility for memorabilia and that I simply have no emotional attachment to the past. She continues to push, obstinately, no matter what I do. It's like she wants to relive those memories with me and somehow go back to the past to fix something.

Here is the thing: I am a grown man. I'm happy. I've made peace with my past. I'm a buddhist! I've made it so clear to her that she's forgiven and that I'd like to be recognized for the man I am now. If she's doing all this out of a sense of guilt...then that is her guilt to deal with. It's like she's asking me to help exercise her trauma or guilt center. She keeps expecting me to have a different response. But I hold no hate in my heart! I love her. I just want her to see that the only way forward is for her to see me as I am. It's borderline insulting to draw a boundary as simple as not rubbing my childhood in my face (when I clearly am not hung up on) because she needs some way to atone for that which she apparently cannot forgive herself. It just seems like the same theme from when I was a kid: leaning on me emotionally in an inappropriate manner and expecting me to want to be closer. At the very least, it's delusional.

I was diagnosed with Bipolar 2 after a series of episodes that started in my twenties. Lithium was a life-saver and I started doing regular talk therapy as well as the medication. In one instance five years ago I was working at a dispensary with a good friend of mine. He and I had been friends since childhood so he had my mother's phone number. We were having disagreements about working hours, and he called my mother to tell her he was 'really worried' about me and some of the behavior he was seeing. This guy, by the way, is a total nutball by any description (but we remain close). My mom gets the call and buys a flight up to Oregon less than 24 hours later and surprises me. Whatever the guy told her on the phone, she was panicked, and came up and stayed in a BnB for a week. I had never been more psychologically stable in my life, mind you. In my time with my mother the next few days, after long conversations that were totally bewildering to me, she finally blurts out, "I want to stand in with you and your therapist at your next appointment!" I said, "Now why in the world would you want that? You don't even come up when I have my sessions?" She responds, "Oh, I KNOW you talk about me, this is about me I KNOW YOU DO!!" She was livid, in tears.

Apart from being totally detached from reality, think of the presumption someone has to employ for this reasoning to seem appropriate.

She had trauma in her childhood. To my knowledge I don't think there was much in mine. But I do have a severe aversion to when she gets emotional, or seems to nostalgically dwell in a headspace where she's longing for the past and apparently using me to try to get the truths she needs from her emotional center. It feels incestuous. It feels like there's a part of her that still expects me to become her therapist or something. I only did it when I was a kid because I didn't think I had a choice. It's always felt incestuous, and it's not getting any better.

TL;DR: Mom seems irrevocably preoccupied by her perceived failures as a parent, and seems to employ me as a necessary arbiter for their resolution.