DR JohnG, much as I know my feelngs about my mother are complicated, she was an insane, narcissistic conditional-love-only, manipulative bitch who nearly destroyed her youngest son's life by her passive-aggressve, but mainly remote, approach to rearing him, preferring shopping and soap operas to dealing with his school problems and enforcing discipline as he matured.
I believe her decisions to make those weekend trips on my last weekends home from college were deliberate attempts to avoid housework; when the house became too filthy, she'd become ill, go to bed, and let her sisters come in, get my brothers and me to school, feed us, and clean the house. Once it looked good, she was well, out of bed, and off to shop. Her sisters and sisters-in-law had no illusions about her problems. Families "overlooked" those things.
I don't make this up. She was a mess: unhappy, dreaming of a romantic happy ending that she had never worked for; the two pieces of literature that best describe her are Sally in FOLLIES and the leading lady in the tragic song "The Ballad of Lucy Jordan." I don't romanticize her madness and failures as a mother, and some days I find her eccentricities a source of humor. Some days I miss her and mourn whatever shaped her behavior. Those days I miss her, but there are more days when I want to dig her up just to kick her ass.