I (36F) struggled with my mental health for my entire adult life, & my family sometimes worry about me if I stop answering the phone. I try to be responsive to alleviate their worries. I've also done a lot of hard work on myself & healed quite a bit, so I'm doing significantly better now. I consider myself mentally stable now, but I also experienced a significant amount of trauma as a child, so I imagine I'll always be untangling & healing that trauma even if I'm stable. A big part of my trauma comes from my childhood, which is related to my relationship with my mother. I was raised in a Christian fundamentalist-like cult, my mother displays symptoms of being a narcissist & I was her scapegoat, I was parentified as a child so I had to take on adult responsibilities without having adult authority/respect, my mother was also very negligent so there are many important, common sense types of life skills that I have had to teach myself as an adult, & have also had to teach my younger siblings because she wasn't doing it (such as potty training my sister when she was 3 & I was 12, because I was tired of changing diapers, or teaching her how to put in a tampon over the phone, because I had moved out by then), so I didn't have a childhood. The closest she's come to an apology is to tearfully or sarcastically exclaim that she's a bad mother, but she's never not made it about herself. I'm still in contact with her because I have a nonverbal autistic brother who lives with her, so I have to keep the peace if I want to have a relationship with him. If it weren't for my brother, I would go no contact. But since we're in contact, I choose to make the best of a hard situation, & treat her with compassion. She texted me on my grandma's birthday to remind me to say happy birthday to her, but something about that was triggering to me, so I didn't call my grandmother even though I had planned to do so before I got the text. (I know, I'm the AH for that, I shouldn't ignore my grandma because I'm mad at my mom.) But that set off a whole chain of texts from my mother. I thought she would be acting mad or hurt, but instead she said she was worried about me. She had my dad call me, and I know she was standing next to him when I answered. I said I was doing fine, and told him about some fun plans I had that weekend. He seemed satisfied that I'm stable and well. But my mom proceeded to text me for the next few days, saying she was thinking about me and worried about me. It's been a few days later, and I still haven't answered her texts. At this point, I'm not mad, I'm just struggling to do anything that feels like taking care of her while I'm working through the trauma response I had over the text about my grandma's birthday, and I'm wondering if it's a manipulation tactic to get me to talk to her. But I don't want to punish my mom either, if I should be working through this trigger faster. AITA for not texting my mom back when she says she's worried about me?