fighting the bear: need some advice

today i feel: stuffy
today i'm hearing: mum and da upstairs
today i'm thinking: this isn't all my fault, is it?

So today my da cornered me with a conversation that began with, 'So you and your mother'.

I did not stop him as I had only moments later caused some possible irreparable damage to his car under the guise of learning to drive stick. I did however allow myself a single, 'Aw Shit'.

This gist of what he said was that life with my mother and I has become more or less unbearable. Whenever the two of us are in the room, the demons of ancestral darkness begin knocking at the floorboards. The sky turns gray and ominous. The lights flicker. The wind howls. In short, every dinner we have had together this past week has been incredibly awkward.

Now from what he said to me, he does not feel like this is my fault. The man has lived with my mother for thirty years. He should be canonized. He also is well-versed in just why living with my mother can be the single most frustrating experience in a person's life. For me, it's only the second most frustrating experience of my life, but that's still quite high on the list. So this isn't my fault. However, in true Da fashion, he did inform me that I needed to remedy the situation.

...He gave me no ideas on how to remedy the situation.

...But he did say I needed to be the one to remedy the situation.

Which puts me in an awkward place.

I love my mother. I really, really do. She's a good person and I know that she cares about me a lot. But I see in my mother everything that I dislike about myself (because that's where I got it from!). She's lazy, messy, self-absorbed, depressed, moody, hypocritical, uncommitted, misguided, and a poor dresser. (I know it shouldn't matter, but for some reason it does.) And she tries really, really hard. She wants desperately to be a good mother, and I really think that's where her downfall lies. She's good at certain things--certain things that make her a good mother--but my da has always, always been the primary caretaker and house-maker and everyone's quite comfortable with that; don't mess it up. If something's wrong with me, I'm going to tell Da. If I need help cooking, I'm going to ask Da. If the garage is mysteriously on fire, I'm going to run and call Da from a distance of at least fifty miles. That's how this family works and it's been working just fine like that for twenty-odd years.

But that's not really the point here.

The point is that my mother has recently developed this need to be patronizing towards everyone in the family. She criticises everything anyone does. Da can't put up shelving right; Justin can't sing this scale; Kiri can't pick up her room correctly; it's infuriating! We are, all of us, highly intelligent people. We know what we're doing and if we don't know or if we screw up, we have the mental prowess to take responsibility for our failings. Sometimes, we even have the grace to ask for help! ...Sometimes. But regardless, we'll admit that we're wrong and we'll fix it or we'll try to fix it and we'll all go to sleep with a relatively clean conscience or at least a few drinks in our system. And that's perfectly wonderful and perfectly adult.

But Mum just doesn't let us be to do things ourselves and make mistakes and BE ALIVE. She just can't have it. And I think it's because she doesn't want us to fail. I really think that's why she does it: it's some sort of cracked-out protective requirement that comes from having kids of your own and parents that are dying rapidly. But that doesn't excuse her behaviour, and it sure as hell doesn't make living with her any easier. And that is why I didn't want to come and stay here for the summer. Because if Da's giving me this talk on the second day of July? That means we're going to have a very, very long rest of summer.

But anyway.

I don't know what to do. And I'm looking for some advice. I've tried talking to Mum about stuff like this, but (and this is going to sound defeatist) talking to my mother is slightly less effective than talking to my mother's dog. My mother is an interrupter: she doesn't let anyone else say anything if she doesn't like the way it's going. There's no conversation with my mother: only lecturing. And I go to school for that, so I really don't handle it well here. I've tried just ignoring it, but I'm not so good at sitting idly by while someone calls me an idiot to my face. I'm not even good at sitting by myself in the room and talking about this is an unbiased way, as can be witnessed by the former sentence.

So, long story short: something needs to change and I don't know how to do it. What do y'all think?