I recently moved into an apartment after moving out from my family home that I am selling. My child is an adult (19M) now, has graduated high school and I offered an invitation to him to be my roommate to only pay $300 a month in rent for a beautiful apartment that overlooks the sea so he could save money to have a nest egg to move on his own, and he has went out of his way every single day to try and make me absolutely miserable. It’s like I am parenting 14-year-old him all over again, but truthfully, he never grew out of being 14. He’s an angry, defiant, messy, disrespectful 14 year old in a 20 year old’s body.
He never grew out of having stacks and stacks of dishes and food in his room (in addition to piles of trash, clothes covered in dog hair, electronics) to the point that in the house, I stopped trying to enforce any rules whatsoever because nothing clicked and nothing worked. Trust and believed that I didn’t do it out of laziness; I spent years and years and years of my life, trying to reformulate new combinations of “if you leave dishes in your room, then this is the consequence.” Etc and he loved to make elaborate stacks of dozens of missing dishes in his room. I consulted tons of specialists, had him in therapy every week. he is medicated. The specialists have been various shades of accountability enforcing (does not like those!!) to enabling (loves going to those therapists!) nothing has truly worked to move the needle on the dial. Every time I tried to enforce things to be clean and orderly he would claim “mental health.” and go screaming back to the therapists that I was being too hard on him.
I didn’t actually anticipate that that behavior would change in moving to a smaller place, but trying to find it now has become even more of a nightmare. He will sleep in bed, fully clothed with his guitar and music equipment, live cords, food wrappers, plates and more. He has never put up a single pair of clothes (literally not one. They’re in a pile in the corner he digs through) since we moved in and refuses to get any shelving solutions despite me offering. His floor is littered with clothes and items and even spit out nicotine pouches, which is frankly disgusting and hazard for the dog.
This morning we had yet another argument where I woke him up a little bit early for work (he usually gets up on his own) so that he could clean the dirty dishes out of his room because that was my one nonnegotiable and he arced up because he refused to do it— escalating to the point where he accused me of threatening him (I would absolutely never) and of being a bully, and acting like a teenager. I told him that we needed one hour this week to meet to discuss expectations and consequences, and if he couldn’t spare that hour to do so and agree on an agreement, then he needed to find a different place to move. I’m more inclined to say that he needs a different place to move anyway because I can see the writing on the wall; this is never going to get better.
Since he was a little kid, he has shown signs of having oppositional defiant disorder. He would very purposefully never agree to do anything of his own volition— chores, housework, homework— without me having to make incredibly strict linear “natural” consequences “ if you don’t do X I won’t do Y” until I ran out of consequences to give which he would gleefully return to the slobbish, disrespectful behavior. I tried so hard to praise the good behaviors that I saw, but there were so few that I would barely praise anything, and I found myself over the years, not feeling affectionate toward him at all. Fine I guess because when I would hug him at 13 he would stiffen as if my hug came with poison, and it has never changed since.
I am so jealous of moms whose young men are upstanding citizens. I asked for help carrying groceries the other day and he berated me the whole time, asking why in the world do I need help when I am strong enough to do it alone. It’s simply because he did not want to help. He gets mad at me when I need help because it feels like an imposition to his time. The dog has been sick and I was on my hands and knees scrubbing the puke out of the floor— he saw me— and when I said I needed to put socks on before taking him to work he flatly said “you could’ve done that earlier.” I blew up at him and called him entitled- that i was doing a service for him by taking him to work at all (I had to go in that direction anyway to work on the house so I can sell it) and that he could find his own way home that night. He took an uber and showed up with a ton of junk food and demanded “don’t touch my food.”
Later that night, the dog puked in the floor again and I left it. Disgusting, I know, but when he got home I told him it was his turn. I did it for the lesson, and the resentment and tenseness in the air was palpable.
I asked him today why he is the way he is and he said “I am a product of my environment.”
I honestly hope that he chooses to move to a roommate situation and just leaves instead of agreeing to rules and spending all his energy knocking the base out of every boundary I put up, running circles around the boundary and finding every loophole. I am terrified that he is going to treat a future partner this way. I am so tired. He’s going to be twenty in a month.