Esther's mother does not understand the concept of mental illness whatsoever. She thinks Esther can just "choose" to get better and doesn't understand that there are actual chemical imbalances inside the brain and Esther cannot control how she's feeling. This is one example of a compilation of things that makes Esther fed up with her mother.
Something I could relate to Esther with was when she got mad about her mom getting her flowers. It's her birthday, her mom brings her flowers, Esther is very skeptical, and her mother reminds her that they're it's her birthday and Esther is kind of furious. Of course it is a nice gesture on her mother's part, with good intentions, but someone trying to be nice to you when you don't want them to be and you're already upset with them can be pretty annoying.
The other day, I came home to my mom cleaning my room after an extremely rough week. I was very annoyed. She hadn't given me any warning or anything, and I didn't want my room cleaned by her. I was pretty rude and passive aggressive about it, and later my sister told me how sad I'd made my mom so I talked to her about it. She thought that cleaning my room would help to alleviate some of my stress, which was really nice of her, but I just really didn't want her trying to do anything for me.
Teenagers have been known to be irrationally short-fused with mothers (and fathers), and I shudder at the thought of what a little snot I was for about five straight years in the mid to late 1980s. But this is one more area where we see something familiar in Esther taken to a hyperbolic and even distorted degree, under the influence of her illness. She doesn't want to "become her mother," whether that's fair to her mother or not--but this relatively common drift toward self-definition takes on a more hostile and even paranoid tone once Esther starts to descend into her clinical depression. So the ordinary teen-mother dynamic gets a lot more nasty and unforgiving. (Stephen refusing to take Communion seems pretty mild in comparison, and Holden's a regular mama's boy next to Esther.)
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