It's really interesting that both of your stories are so similar to mine. I had a lot of loss and trauma (including my sister and my dad) before I was even ten. I was left with my mother and a disabled sister twelve years my senior. I became the peacemaker and the "good" girl. My mother was dependent on my for the rest of her life and became more and more paranoid. She would believe that people were talking about her and judging her. In the few years before her death, this became extremely heightened and she would call up people (like my in-laws) and tell them off for imagined hurts. It was very difficult for me to deal with. All through my childhood my mother would get mad at me for trivial things and stop speaking to me. I could tell the kind of mood she was in before I even got into the house. In an effort to become independent I made a lot of bad choices in my life and I suffer from depression and a lot of negative thinking. My reccomendation to you is to get some therapy. You have to get the negative feelings behind you so that you can really be yourself. You will need to be yourself and on your own side in the coming years. If you don't start now, it will keep coming up to bite you at different points in your life. You owe this to yourself. Whenever there's a suicide, the survivors struggle with feelings of guilt. In your teens, it's natural to have a "battle of wills" going with your mother - it's just part of the seperation process. Had your mother lived, this would have changed. I saw this with my own daughter. We had lots of emotional scenes and lots of negative things were said when she was a teenager. She (as all daughters do) blamed me for her problems. Now she is almost thirty and we are very close and best friends. There's a good chance that this would have happened with you also. She left you at a difficult time, because now you are stuck with memories of the "bad" things. I can honestly tell you that I can't remember a single one of those fights with my daughter - they're water under the bridge and they are for your mother too - it doesn't matter what side of the veil she's on. Despite my mother's problems I know that she loved me very very much. I know that this is true of your mother too. Don't let the fact that she had an illness take that knowledge away from you. Take it from a mother - we're just built that way. Unfortunately, with mental illness often behavior is the symptom. You can and will prevail in this and it will make you a deeper more compassionate human being. It did for me. Love and Mother kisses! moon
