Advice from fellow Koreans much appreciated. How do I [28F] productively draw a boundary with my mother [70F]?

(For cultural context, my family is Korean, and my parents first immigrated to the U.S. about 40 years ago.)

Today was my parents' 45th anniversary. My dad told me to send my mom a happy anniversary message, so I did. This is what she replied:

"XX야. 엄마 아빠의 결혼기념일을 기억하고 있었네. 45년 동안이나 헤어지지않고 살은 세월이 요즈음의 너희세대는 너무 잔인한 세월같지않니? 잘 살아냈다는 생각보다 살아온 세월들에대한 후회가 하루종일 나를 괴롭혔다. 엄마한테 톡 보내줘서 고마워. 몸조심 잘 해."

English: "(OP), Thank you for remembering your father and I's anniversary date. Staying together without separating for 45 years must seem like such a cruel fate for people of your generation, no? Rather than thinking I've lived well up until now, all the regrets I have about all those years that have passed by kept bothering me today. Thank you for sending a message to your mother. Take care."

This is one of many, many instances where she'll vent to me about how much she regrets marrying my dad, how much she abhors him, how she feels she wasted her life with and on him, and how she regrets having had children.

The stress and guilt from hearing these things have caused me to have psychiatric crises and emergencies in the past. I was on the borderline of going very low contact with her for this reason, but decided to give her another chance. Her message is putting me into another spiral yet again.

Should I draw a boundary with her to please stop talking to me about these things (her regretting her life, marriage, and children), and if so, how? Every time I've tried to calmly draw boundaries with her in the past, they've resulted in guilt trips and crying/screaming fits. It seems the only kind of "communication" that gets through to her is histrionics, and I'm not willing to do that.

I also really wish she'd just divorce my dad if she's so miserable with him and do whatever she wants with her remaining years, but she insists she can't divorce him because she doesn't want her children to lose any of their share of the family inheritance. I have informed her multiple times that it's fine and that her happiness is most important to me, but she continues to stay. I really wish she'd get therapy or find some other way of not being regretful, miserable, and despondent all the time, but I don't know how to help her. It also hurts a lot whenever she talks about how much she regrets having had children, because I feel like nothing I do can ever make her happy, and I don't know how I can communicate this to her without making her feel worse.

TL;DR: My 70-year old Korean mom keeps venting to me about how much she regrets her life, her marriage, and having had children, and keeps talking about how she wasted her life. No matter how much I try to be impervious to it, it causes me a lot of emotional and psychological distress each time. How do I draw boundaries with her without her basically flipping out?

Submitted November 01, 2021 at 08:29PM by BusinessYak947 https://ift.tt/3CCvOlC