To me the mom is too focused on righting the wrong “wrong” in her own life through her child. In this case she thinks it was her missing out on education so she’s making sure her daughter doesn’t. Worse, she’s conflating education success in her mind to her connection to her daughter. Things are “good” between them when that is good and she doesn’t have the emotional tools to interpret things differently. The good results prove the love her eyes can’t see.
What she doesn’t realize is that the biggest loss in her life actually was missing out on real love and affection from everyone who should have given it to her freely from her parents to her good for nothing husband she didn’t pick. If she only had her education she wouldn’t have been stuck in that shrinking loveless world. Partially true, but she’s learned the wrong lesson from her life.
So when her kid, at the doorway to reaching the educational success she missed out on, finds romantic love it feels more like a threat to what she sees as their connection. And since she’s so fucked up about love she can’t feel it from her daughter outside of a very specific context that is trapping her daughter and creating this false line in the sand. She needs to love freely without all of the conditional baggage to really love her daughter right and be able to feel loved properly too. Maybe this knock to her head and brush with mortality will at least force her to let someone without bad motives care for her. Something she’s never had.