My story is complicated, and very painful to tell, so I'd really appreciate it if you weren't cruel.
Primarily I'm disappointed with myself. When people swept in, during my major, vegetative depression, saying they knew what was best for my children, I believed them. I couldn't take care of them, but they still needed taking care of. It is unfortunate that I have no inherent supports who could have done this, so relied on an agency. This agency was staffed by idiots, but I had fewer rights in family court than a criminal, since I could not prove I'd been permanently cured, and no psychiatrist could morally claim this was the case. It was indeed very difficult to get happy when they'd taken the point and purpose of me away, and construed the understandable struggles of a low income single parent in an utterly evil light. There is more to this story that doesn't bear typing here, but includes the fact that I myself was made a ward of the state at the age of thirteen, and the same child welfare agency used information from those files to "prove" my unsuitability as a parent. (It occurs to me that if I'd committed a criminal offense I could have my record expunged after four years, but will have to pay for being an abused child for the rest of my life).
The Children's Aid Society kept my son for nine years, adopted his sister to strangers, then dropped him in my lap a damaged teenager three years ago. I had no ramp up apart from strained two hour visits twice a month, just an instant jerk I barely knew leaving his pubes in the soap. I wanted to believe his return, however financially and domestically inconvenient, was a miracle, but as my mental health deteriorated in time with his tireless campaigns against my self-confidence, I wondered if maybe tainted miracles were all I was ever going to get.
I am on a permanent disability. I don't get enough to rent an apartment big enough for two people. I don't qualify for benefits to cover his expenses, because I don't have custody. I've gone hungry, sold everything that wasn't a necessity, so this ungrateful brat can surf the internet in his underwear, tear down my personality, and boss me around. He has a lot of opinions about what I should do with my life for someone who doesn't bathe, and they usually start with "why don't you just..." I keep telling him if it were that easy, I'd have a different life. I'm not a moron, just ill. Yes it has occurred to me that, someday, when brushing my teeth is not an event so overwhelming I cry, I could get a job, publish a book, become the prime minister, all that.
Our last apartment was a disaster. We could not open the windows without getting diesel exhaust in our living space, because the bus idled outside them. I had chronic headaches, even with the windows closed, and was chronically sick. We lived above the pizza shop, so it was often a hundred degrees in our apartment. There were other, numerous difficulties that pretty much come standard with low income housing. When my neighbour physically assaulted me, I decided to move rather than wait a year for the housing tribunal to evict her. I could not find a place in our price range that wasn't worse that had a separate bedroom and living area, so asked my son, who always says he'd rather not live with me, just has no financial choice, if he'd want to be roommates with my friend, so I could take a dignified bachelor, and we could both get a break from each other. He agreed this was a sound plan.
Despite having been beaten down by unflagging assaults on everything from my appearance to my romantic prospects to my joblessness to my weight to how I wash the dishes, comb my hair, stand, sit, breathe, I miss the little bastard. In addition, my friend does not set housekeeping as a priority, and his place is a damp basement where my son sleeps in the living room, and has no privacy. I feel guilty living in my clean, tidy, little shoe-box sized place while he dwells in a musty cave. He doesn't mind, and indeed it seems that as long as there are video games he'd be as content in political prison, but still. A mother feels an urge to shelter, and I have failed in no uncertain terms.
Every day I ask him if he's handed out resumes. He's handed out two since he stopped going to high school in June of 2016. I handed out several on the sly for him, because seriously. He can't still be in that chair thirty years from now. He has followed up on none of the appointments I've set up for him to get his life rolling, and pretty soon these social services aren't going to give him any more tries. I feel that if I don't hold his hand nothing will get done, including the groceries, which he has the audacious, arrogant nerve to order when I visit like I'm the damn courier. When I lug them back on foot he has the ungodly gall to complain that I brought spinach, not field greens, even though when I ask what he wants he gives me no clue or list, just a shrug and a "whatever." In secret, to myself, I refer to him as Prince Poop.
When I leave my friend's after my check-ins, I will say goodbye, and my son will ignore me. When I ask him to acknowledge that I'm leaving, because it is still pretty devastating to me that we're not living together, and it really hurts me in the womb to sleep under a different roof, he'll be rude, saying (literally) "yeah, I get it,
off already." He wastes no opportunity, no matter how small, to remind me I'm meaningless to him apart from the errands I run, the material things I provide, and the social connection which houses him for my sake not his own.
There is a residential program I am trying to get him into. The housing is dignified, the days are jammed full of life skills training, job training, cooking classes, and he will not have the option of being a full time permanent internet troll while there. This program receives awards, has it's own print shop, there's family counseling: it's everything he needs, and everything I need to not have my waking moments filled up with anxiety as to his future. The waiting list is long, and he's lucky to be on it, a fact he doesn't appreciate, because he doesn't appreciate anything. I sent him an email instructing him to NOT botch the interview by correcting the syntax on the questionnaire, etc, which as an arrogant little you-know-what is absolutely his style. He can't be with people without correcting them, and alienated three alternative schools with this brand of antagonism before finally dropping out. I feel like if he ever (I mean ever) left the house long enough to interact with people, he'd realize no one behaves like him, that is like a teenage dictator who knows more about guns than where the grocery store is, and doesn't admit that's concerning.
The point of this very long, and very scattered story is I don't like my son, can't help my son, he won't help himself, when people try to help him he dismisses them, offends them, alienates them, and I have BIG, HUGE, CONSTANT, very physical (like a helicopter landing in my chest) fear that the world is going to spit him out and on him now I am financially unable to give him a roof. It was a roof under which he was free, due to my guilt over what the system did to him, and a corresponding inability to deny him anything, to develop only the mean, small parts of his personality, but at least I knew he was clean, fed, and dry.
I also miss wondering when I'll see the seven year old who used to wipe the tears off my face again. It's like I need to grieve, because I don't think I'm ever getting him back. He will NOT talk about how it was to watch his sister walk out of his life. I feel she is why he eschews all emotion, including empathy, and I really hope the family counselor doesn't fall for his manipulation tactics, because last time and at the last place he was able to convince them it was all in my head. Very, very cruel, and very, very unfair.
If my son were my partner, I would leave him for this kind of psychological and emotional abuse.
Primarily I'm disappointed with myself. When people swept in, during my major, vegetative depression, saying they knew what was best for my children, I believed them. I couldn't take care of them, but they still needed taking care of. It is unfortunate that I have no inherent supports who could have done this, so relied on an agency. This agency was staffed by idiots, but I had fewer rights in family court than a criminal, since I could not prove I'd been permanently cured, and no psychiatrist could morally claim this was the case. It was indeed very difficult to get happy when they'd taken the point and purpose of me away, and construed the understandable struggles of a low income single parent in an utterly evil light. There is more to this story that doesn't bear typing here, but includes the fact that I myself was made a ward of the state at the age of thirteen, and the same child welfare agency used information from those files to "prove" my unsuitability as a parent. (It occurs to me that if I'd committed a criminal offense I could have my record expunged after four years, but will have to pay for being an abused child for the rest of my life).
The Children's Aid Society kept my son for nine years, adopted his sister to strangers, then dropped him in my lap a damaged teenager three years ago. I had no ramp up apart from strained two hour visits twice a month, just an instant jerk I barely knew leaving his pubes in the soap. I wanted to believe his return, however financially and domestically inconvenient, was a miracle, but as my mental health deteriorated in time with his tireless campaigns against my self-confidence, I wondered if maybe tainted miracles were all I was ever going to get.
I am on a permanent disability. I don't get enough to rent an apartment big enough for two people. I don't qualify for benefits to cover his expenses, because I don't have custody. I've gone hungry, sold everything that wasn't a necessity, so this ungrateful brat can surf the internet in his underwear, tear down my personality, and boss me around. He has a lot of opinions about what I should do with my life for someone who doesn't bathe, and they usually start with "why don't you just..." I keep telling him if it were that easy, I'd have a different life. I'm not a moron, just ill. Yes it has occurred to me that, someday, when brushing my teeth is not an event so overwhelming I cry, I could get a job, publish a book, become the prime minister, all that.
Our last apartment was a disaster. We could not open the windows without getting diesel exhaust in our living space, because the bus idled outside them. I had chronic headaches, even with the windows closed, and was chronically sick. We lived above the pizza shop, so it was often a hundred degrees in our apartment. There were other, numerous difficulties that pretty much come standard with low income housing. When my neighbour physically assaulted me, I decided to move rather than wait a year for the housing tribunal to evict her. I could not find a place in our price range that wasn't worse that had a separate bedroom and living area, so asked my son, who always says he'd rather not live with me, just has no financial choice, if he'd want to be roommates with my friend, so I could take a dignified bachelor, and we could both get a break from each other. He agreed this was a sound plan.
Despite having been beaten down by unflagging assaults on everything from my appearance to my romantic prospects to my joblessness to my weight to how I wash the dishes, comb my hair, stand, sit, breathe, I miss the little bastard. In addition, my friend does not set housekeeping as a priority, and his place is a damp basement where my son sleeps in the living room, and has no privacy. I feel guilty living in my clean, tidy, little shoe-box sized place while he dwells in a musty cave. He doesn't mind, and indeed it seems that as long as there are video games he'd be as content in political prison, but still. A mother feels an urge to shelter, and I have failed in no uncertain terms.
Every day I ask him if he's handed out resumes. He's handed out two since he stopped going to high school in June of 2016. I handed out several on the sly for him, because seriously. He can't still be in that chair thirty years from now. He has followed up on none of the appointments I've set up for him to get his life rolling, and pretty soon these social services aren't going to give him any more tries. I feel that if I don't hold his hand nothing will get done, including the groceries, which he has the audacious, arrogant nerve to order when I visit like I'm the damn courier. When I lug them back on foot he has the ungodly gall to complain that I brought spinach, not field greens, even though when I ask what he wants he gives me no clue or list, just a shrug and a "whatever." In secret, to myself, I refer to him as Prince Poop.
When I leave my friend's after my check-ins, I will say goodbye, and my son will ignore me. When I ask him to acknowledge that I'm leaving, because it is still pretty devastating to me that we're not living together, and it really hurts me in the womb to sleep under a different roof, he'll be rude, saying (literally) "yeah, I get it,
off already." He wastes no opportunity, no matter how small, to remind me I'm meaningless to him apart from the errands I run, the material things I provide, and the social connection which houses him for my sake not his own.There is a residential program I am trying to get him into. The housing is dignified, the days are jammed full of life skills training, job training, cooking classes, and he will not have the option of being a full time permanent internet troll while there. This program receives awards, has it's own print shop, there's family counseling: it's everything he needs, and everything I need to not have my waking moments filled up with anxiety as to his future. The waiting list is long, and he's lucky to be on it, a fact he doesn't appreciate, because he doesn't appreciate anything. I sent him an email instructing him to NOT botch the interview by correcting the syntax on the questionnaire, etc, which as an arrogant little you-know-what is absolutely his style. He can't be with people without correcting them, and alienated three alternative schools with this brand of antagonism before finally dropping out. I feel like if he ever (I mean ever) left the house long enough to interact with people, he'd realize no one behaves like him, that is like a teenage dictator who knows more about guns than where the grocery store is, and doesn't admit that's concerning.
The point of this very long, and very scattered story is I don't like my son, can't help my son, he won't help himself, when people try to help him he dismisses them, offends them, alienates them, and I have BIG, HUGE, CONSTANT, very physical (like a helicopter landing in my chest) fear that the world is going to spit him out and
on him now I am financially unable to give him a roof. It was a roof under which he was free, due to my guilt over what the system did to him, and a corresponding inability to deny him anything, to develop only the mean, small parts of his personality, but at least I knew he was clean, fed, and dry.I also miss wondering when I'll see the seven year old who used to wipe the tears off my face again. It's like I need to grieve, because I don't think I'm ever getting him back. He will NOT talk about how it was to watch his sister walk out of his life. I feel she is why he eschews all emotion, including empathy, and I really hope the family counselor doesn't fall for his manipulation tactics, because last time and at the last place he was able to convince them it was all in my head. Very, very cruel, and very, very unfair.
If my son were my partner, I would leave him for this kind of psychological and emotional abuse.
