Hello Pamela

Can relate to your struggles in maintaining an ongoing positive relationship with your mother, who from your description, does seem to have many characteristics seen in sz or similar disorders of paranoid distortion of reality, although I am no expert.

The difficulties you describe that are particularly puzzling (and frustrating??) seemfrom your question to be the mixture of the above delusions in someone who 'can't be ill' because they are coping, keeping smart etc to outsiders often at the expense of feeling hard done by by their family.

It is a coping strategy in their untreated world of illness requiring huge energies of them.Women are often particularly good at it!

Very diffucult for a close family member whose motives may be misinterpreted and intended helpful gestures backfire.

My suggestion , from experience, would be the more you can accept an illness in your mother, and to yourself 'name the name even if not quite exact,' it may help you feel more relaxed and  see your mother's identity  and her illness as separate, so you may take her illnesses' outbursts less personally. You are both changed by the disease entering her life, unbidden and as yet untreated.

Good luck anyway

Chris,

facing accepting schizoprhenia diagnosis in son, as yet not confirmed, as 'he does not see himself as ill'