I’ve lived alone since the divorce.
My relationship with my son has been fraught. I love him to death, but he doesn’t see that. He thinks I have no emotions, I am cold, I don’t love him. He doesn’t talk to me unless he needs something from me. I have said many times I love him so much. I often ask him if he is all right. My son has never told me he loves me. He has never asked how I am doing. He is rude to me and has said very hurtful things. When I help my son with his homework, he gets very irritable.
I can handle these things.
My ex-husband recently died of cancer. That was devastating to my son and to my relationship with him. He is being very difficult. I suggested putting his shoes by the door, and got, “Don’t [expletive] tell me what to do.” I knocked at his door at his dad’s house to announce supper, and he came out and said, “First, this is my house. You need to call first. Second, there is [product] out next week. Can I get it? Third, [friends] and I want to go [away] for spring break. Can I go?”
I also inherited money from my ex, and my son says I am not sharing it with him, which is untrue.
I am not complaining. I am doing what a mother should do. I just don’t understand why the disrespect for me and disregard for facts.
His grades fell badly in the past quarter. I hope he will pick up his schoolwork and start thinking for his future.
Overall, my son is a decent kid. He is polite and respectful, just not to me. I don’t know what to do.
Desperate: It is tough to be 17 because it’s the line, give or take a bit, between adult and child. It’s where parental control feels insulting — anger — and full self-control feels overwhelming — stress.
The place of choice for a 17-ish-year-old to dump all that anger and stress is on the nearest, safest person. The definition of the nearest, safest person is the one he trusts not to abandon him for behaving horribly. The nearest, safest person is you.
Meanwhile, your son is not just a regular 17. He’s a 17 plus two family traumas: a divorce to usher him into adolescence and a parental death to see him out of it. These things happen, but they require extra care, attention, skills. His grief for his dad no doubt has swamped his already strained adolescent ability to manage it.
Plus: This current batch of 17-year-olds has had to come of age through a pandemic on top of news cycle after news cycle bearing the message that a bunch of things older generations have taken for granted are now in flux. Political stability, safety in public spaces, library books, earth. To name a few. Even the ones who don’t pay attention to it themselves can read it on us.
So I suggest you step back far enough from the details to see the big picture of your son. He is a young man in an enormous amount of pain. Staggering. If you talk to him right now about his future, his grades, he’s not going to trust you with his heart. He’s going to see you as cold, and he’s going to fear you don’t love or understand him, even when you think it’s obvious you do.
Or he’s going to say mean things to provoke you to start an argument to give him an emotional release that he can understand. Fight with mom? Okay — that’s a way to burn off some feelings that’s more accessible, less terrifying, than grief.
So here’s my advice: foremost, counseling. For you (to start). It may take a while to find someone taking new patients, but look first for a provider with experience treating adolescents so you can have guidance on guiding your son.
And then: patience. The why and the what and the what-next are all centered on his pain. Grief, mostly, but general adolescence as well. (“He doesn’t talk unless he needs something” is the closest thing there is to a universal teen-parental lament.) So be the person you think a teen boy in pain would want.
If you can’t imagine that, then be the person you’d want if you were hurting as he is. Would you want to be corrected on your shoes or warned about grades? Or heard, forgiven, hugged.
Right now you’re focused on your pain and how you’d like him to behave toward you. Flip that. You’re the parent. Being who he needs you to be is “what a mother should do.”
Think healing, not correcting. The rest will follow from there.
