This had been going on for over a decade. I am no longer entangled in this way.
On the one hand, she says she loves me
On the other hand, her mother had it. Even if she doesn't literally suffer from bipolar, she will have behaviours that she learned from her mother that were influenced by bipolar.
What this means is that she will sympathize with me if I say something is wrong, but sometimes I would get,
"But I do that!" or "Many people in our family do that!"
After some reading I found out that both of us are correct. Before that, it would frustrate me to no end because she was right, but I knew that wasn't the whole answer. For context, this would happen when I would try to tell her things I thought were warning signs of mania. Now that I think of it, I am pretty sure she's even said something like, "believe what you want" when I told her I read it in a textbook about my illness.
One of the most difficult things for me was being able to feel like my mental illness was a real thing and not just a collection of behaviours I developed that made my life miserable. Not being able to get my mom to understand this has been detrimental to my mental health so I have decided to give up. She doesn't think I'm not mentally ill, it's just that if any of it overlaps with how she is, it isn't part of what bipolar is to her.
Does anyone else want to share their stories? Not sure why, but I just got the hankering for some commiseration.