Arrrgh! is right. I recognize Goneril's behavior all too well since I've encountered this kind of thing a few times in my life. Your mother sounds like exactly the kind of person who is a magnet for these people, who, a psychologist friend of mine told me are described as having a Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). If you google this term you'll find websites about it, maybe some moral support, and tips on how to deal with it. What's most frustrating about dealing with someone like this is that they make you behave like them, and it can be hard not to sound like the crazy one when you're both trying to explain yourselves to neutral authorities, especially as Borderlines are master manipulators and liars. I'm currently dealing with more than one such personality in my own life, although I don't have an elderly mother in the equation, and I've chosen not to engage in war because these people fight dirty, and I have too much to lose. The result is that I've become isolated in my community, and am the victim of an insane truth distorting campaign which I'm just trying to outlast. I wish you luck.

succinct rather than superficial, perfect for me to read during my coffee break, and I like when experts offer simple definitions of complex phenomena like globalization, a word I often use and hear used without being entirely sure that I know what it means, not that I don't understand the limitations of the soundbyte version.

La vie est breve,

Un peu de reve,

Un peu d'amour,

Et puis, bonjour.

Being stuck in a relationship you don't want to be in can permanently scar you, and make it hard to have relationships in the future, so I say definitely get out now. Whatever your future is going to be like, I would predict with some confidence that it won't be anything like what you fear. That's not to say it will be better or worse in terms of the problems you'll face, just a lot different. One of the things I notice about problems life throws at me is that they're never the ones I prepared myself for by worrying, and that's why they can be such intense learning experiences, because they involve the unknown, rather than the known and anticipated.

In my mid twenties I started dreaming about death, waking up in the middle of the night *knowing* that I was going to die. It was very dark, and I became a militant atheist for awhile, mostly out of anger at this inescapable knowledge. People told me to go to a doctor but I went to school and read lots of philosophy instead. Eventually I lightened up. It has never come back with the same intensity, but it changed my outlook permanently. I agree with the theory that a lot of human activities are motivated by a desire to avoid thinking about death, including drug and alcohol use and achievement-seeking. Kurt Vonnegut said we're put on earth to fart around, wisdom that came from his experience of the bombing of Dresden. Reading that in Salon recently, it seemed to legitimise my whole life, which has been spent farting around, and it's been interesting, though not especially lucrative. These days I think I'm kind of a happy person, under all the superficial stuff that I occasionally get exercised about, and it's a long term result of those death dreams. You never know, maybe this experience you're having will turn out to be a strange kind of gift.

The other day I heard the end of a radio program about a book called 'My Dearest Enemy, My Dangerous Friend: Making and Breaking Sibling Bonds' by Dorothy Rowe, whose book on Depression is terrific. She had a troubled relationship with her sister all her life. They're now in their eighties, and it sounded like she ended up with a grimly realistic set of expectations about such relationships that is nevertheless not entirely gloomy. I plan to buy it myself. I feel at once very close to my siblings by virtue of the fact that we have a common origin, but very far from them because we've gone on divergent paths like branches radiating from a single stem. It makes me sad because nothing can take away the fact that we grew up together, yet time has taken away that period of our lives. Not that it was idyllic. Far from it. It's a very complicated and sometimes dark kind of intimacy that I share with them, and from my perspective some of them appear to be lost. When we get together every year or two, we slip back into the old roles, but we've become different people now, and the old costumes no longer fit, so there's something grotesque about it all, and I find myself wondering which of us will die first, and unable to imagine the universe without the existence of these people whom I hardly ever see, and don't even know that well anymore.