My relationship with my mother was permanently ruptured in my mid-twenties. 

I came back to New York after five years in California, having grown in ways that most of the people I had known before noticed immediately and complimented.  Not my “dear old mom,” though.  She disapproved of virtually every way I had changed since I last lived in her household. 

I eventually came to realize that I hadn’t so much made major self-improvements as just allowed myself to be who I naturally was all along—something she had stifled when I was a child and  desperate for some form of parental warmth, but willing to settle for mere approval, or (manipulative) praise.

I tried to get her to see how aggressive and outright hostile she was being, but had no success.  After a few months, I left New York and never lived there again.  With one notable but brief exception, my contact with her was the minimum required to not be mean to somebody who, in the final analysis, was incapable of seeing or understanding what she was doing, much less improving it.
 
It was also the minimum needed to prevent other people from perceiving me as somehow “strange” or “troubled.”

My mother was different around my kids than she had been with me, though—and they really liked seeing her. This resulted in some work-arounds that probably aren’t common in most people’s family dynamics.

For example, one summer I took the kids on a vacation to Lake Shasta, in Northern California.  As part of the leisurely multi-day trip back home to the LA area, we stopped in Livermore—also in Northern California—so they could see their grandmother.  (She had moved there from New York.)

Earlier that morning, while sitting in a perfectly still parked car, my daughter had a delayed reaction to a ride at an amusement park, and not only threw up, but managed to do so in precisely the places where it was most difficult to clean—between the front seat and the center console, down into the seat belt retractors, and so forth.

This turned out not to have been as much of a misfortune as it might have seemed.  It meant that while the kids got to enjoy the company of their grandmother (and her dog), I was fortunate enough to have a reason to be off in her garage, absorbed in hunting down and removing vomit from tiny out-of-the-way spaces in my car.