am i wrong for putting my hands on my mother?
I’ve (18M) always had issues with my mother (41F) but everything recently came crashing down.
for some background knowledge she’s always been childish, and has admitted this herself. she got addicted to substances in her early 20’s and got clean a few years ago but it still heavily affects her emotional maturity. I was expected to keep the house running since I was about 8, so I find I’m often told I act more similar to how a parent would while she acts more like a child.
I’m currently in the process of attempting to find work and moving, which has added more stress to my work load as I’m expected to be a live-in maid for my mother and her friends most of my time.
My responsibilities in the house include: Doing everyone’s dishes, taking care of all animals (there are 9 cats), keeping the kitchen, living room and occasionally bathroom clean, taking the trash out and sweeping and moping.
Although I normally wouldn’t have an issue with this, it’s been increasingly stressful as if I don’t leave my room for a day it will result in the house looking horrible due to her and her boyfriends absence of taking care of it despite usually both being home.
My biggest thing with her has always been I’m fine taking on the work load, and would be okay continuing this arrangement after I find work as long as she doesn’t do anything to the cats. Although the large majority of them aren’t mine I have a soft spot for them, and I don’t think I would be around without them.
Recently we got into an argument, this isn’t uncommon for us though they always usually go the same way. She gets upset, often confronting the situation aggressively which causes me to shut down as a trauma response, I try to remove myself before it escalates and she either threatens to beat me or the animals in the house.
She usually stops there when I don’t feed into whatever she’s doing, but our most recent argument she threatened to throw the cats all out. When I went to walk away like how I normally do she opened the door and grabbed one of the kittens.
I’m not sure if she was going to follow through with it but with how she was standing from my perspective it looked like she was preparing to chuck the cat outside. I admittedly didn’t think much but it caused me to get physical with her and we both fault for a minute before she stormed off back to her room.
I’m honestly uncomfortable going into extreme detail, but for better context at first I grabbed her wrist to stop her and made her drop the cat, and she went to grab me which caused me to push back on her and it just escalated from there.
I’m ashamed that I wasn’t able to keep myself together like how I normally do, and put my hands on anyone, let alone my mom.
The situation has truthfully been tearing me apart apart, I hate that I put my hands on someone out of genuine anger, but I’m also torn because although I believe I overreacted, I do believe he possibly harming one of the animals to get back at me is insane behavior.
I’m fine clarifying anything in comments, honestly I guess I’m just looking for an outside perspective to let me know what I could have done differently and what I can do going forward.