The Saturday morning hissy fit

We experienced what my dad calls the Saturday Morning Hissy Fit this afternoon just before dinner. It's when my mom finds things to yell at people about and starts yelling, and then usually storms out.

The SMHF's precursor started while my dad was cutting up dill for the soup bowls and my mother asked him to wipe off the table. He went on to finish the dill and she just started screaming at him; he countered with, "I'm in the middle of something, can it wait three seconds?" and she said, "no! I need table space, NOW!"

Then I finally reacted to the lecturing. Some of you may know that for the first time in my life I have been watching my weight. I gained a lot of it in Hawaii/Australia/New Zealand, and I'm going to be in a wedding in a week. My mother experiences no cognitive dissonance between telling me I'm fat on one hand and force-feeding me/lecturing me about how I should just eat what I want on the other. I told her I wanted to reserve some of one salad for myself before she put mayonnaise in it; she started lecturing me about how I shouldn't be fanatical and how there's nothing wrong with a little mayo, etc. and I asked her to stop lecturing me every time I made a decision about food. She said no one's lecturing, you're an adult. I didn't even say, "ya think?"

Anyway, then she asked whether something else had been ready and my dad said no, he hadn't set it to boil yet. Mind you this particular part of the dinner would take about three minutes to cook, and there were plenty of other things we could start eating in the meantime. Nonetheless, my mother proceeded to yell at him for not having turned it on; he responded that she hadn't told him to; she responded that he had no initiative and needed to be spoon-fed; and we both pretty much simultaneously pointed out to her that whenever anyone did show initiative and did something, she yelled at him or her for doing it the wrong way. I have childhood memories of trying to help out by cleaning the house; as with the complaint letters, instead of saying thank you and giving constructive feedback, she would just take the opportunity to yell about what a shoddy job I'd done and how I'd only done it to get done with it, not to actually make the area clean. Anyway, it escalated, she continued to hurl insults at both me and dad, and then stormed out and threatened not to talk to us for a long time. Which is kind of upsetting, I mean she is my mom and I love her... but I'm past the point of being bound my her attempts at emotional blackmail.