Expert: Nafeesah - 2/23/2009

Question
I am 62 years old and my son is 27, my wife died 3 years ago from brain cancer.
I have no one else to confide in, so here goes. I don't know what to do about my son inability to accept constructive criticism.
           I truly feel that he feels inadequate in dealings with all life’s challenges. In order to make himself feel better, he starts verbal abusing the only people who will listen, the people that care and love
him.
He has just ended a on again off again 2 1/2 year relationship with a girl he met on My Space who actually moved into my home from 900 miles away in the winter of 2006 to begin a relationship with him.
My son has been in 5 relationships with girls, the first 4 being in the normal dating situation with them all living at home. During those first four relationship from time to time while he was at home, I would hear loud vulgar conversations coming from his room while on his cell phone and I would confront him during those conversations as to why he need to speak to anyone that way.
           I also would check his phone from time to time to try see who he was actually was speaking to,
           which when he discovered this it put us at odds. This also gave him the chance to avoid the real problem of his verbal abuse, and only bring up talk about my invading his privacy. The 4th girl in this span actually told me the reason she ended the relationship was his verbal abuse.  
My son seams to place more emphasis on pleasing friends than on those who actually have feelings for him.
This last girl had much more of an effect on all of us coming here only 6 months after my wife’s death. She gave us all a lift kind of like having a child born into the family. She was 23 and seamed perfect for my son she was attractive, athletic, and confident.
She has told me that she came here because my son had said that they would have a place of their own, I am sure he must have mentioned it. The house was not ready to move in, but I agreed to complete it when weather permitted. They moved in July 2007, thinking that would give them the privacy they deserved. My son at the time had a daytime job and umpired baseball games at night, which left very little time to spend together.
My son then allowed it to be a hangout for some of his male friends who would bring alcohol. My son’s friends didn’t accept her, because she was taking away the life of the party. You could imagine how uncomfortable that was for her, but my son didn’t seam to understand her complaints.
I supported her financially (with out any string attached) when she first came here so she wouldn’t lose her car, and at times treated her like a daughter on her birthday and Christmas only to come under fire by my daughter who felt I treated her better than Jeff her husband. Which caused some resentment toward her, which was intensified by comments she made about my daughter razing of her children. My daughter for whatever reason has taken things that I have said in frustration in trying to deal with the way my son has acted
Whenever they would argue according to her, he would insult her by calling her fat, thunder thighs, freak, weird, and I am not attracted to you. When it got to a point she could not handle it any longer (that would usually would be prompted by him urging her to leave) she would contact her mother who arranged for her brother to be flown here to pack her car and return to her parent’s
home in Florida.
He would call her and apologize and within a few weeks, he would convince her to return only to have the same thing repeat a few months later.
           



           
           








She decided it was time to make sure she could provide for herself and return to school to become a dental assistant near a school in Boston.
She started in school in September of 2008, and by the middle of October he had decide to quit his job and move to Boston. She had told him before he moved out there that she never planed to return to his house, (I guess he felt if things went well, she would overlook the past and return for a short time) because of the problems that she felt my daughter and I had caused in there relationship. I
have been told by her mother in an e-mail that I was the cause of my son verbal abuse, that it was a product of his living in my house.
By moving to Boston he had the responsibility of finding a job, paying the majority of the expenses of an apartment.  He took a seasonal job with UPS, and when a better paying job came along with good starting rate of pay and chance to learn a trade and see a future only to be laid off 2 weeks into the New Year. He finally was feeling good about himself and being able to support the both of them. He would call me on the way home from work everyday to explain what he did, and I would tell him how proud I was of him and now he could stay. He became discouraged about finding another job with all his savings gone and having to ask me for money and the possibility of having to ask for more. I had told him that I was reluctant to give him any more money; my intentions were to get him to find any type job for the time being, while he kept looking. I explained to him that I had to work a job that at the time was very low in pay, but it paid the bills while I sought a better job.   
There relationship became stressed and she decided after my son went to lunch with her brothers (which she loathes because of things done to her growing up) that it was the ultimate humiliation of her. She asked him to leave the next day, with the assistance of her brothers who were asked by her parents to remove him from the house.
           She has always felt Jay was not being true to her. She would look into his e-mails, and cell phone, which absolutely caused a lot of resentment. This is probably due to him being obsessed with his dedication to respond to text messages, with no regard to the people in his presence. He can spend hundreds of hours on the phone, but can become angered if I fail to make it through an intersection after the light turns yellow.
           There are things I wish my son had dealt with differently some of which I ashamed of, but the one thing I know about him he is not a player even after she would say its over he could not put himself
           in a position to move on.
           My son is the most important thing in my life right now, and I truly want him to be successful and happy. It is truly frightening to me not see that happen before my time here ends. I truly wanted for him to move to Boston, to break him free of the web his friends have him trapped in. The sorry part is when this college life style ends he will have lost a great portion of his life, which should have been spent developing a relationship with a special person and a career
What is your opinion of the situation?
           Thank you,
           David Allendorf


Answer
It's hard when you lose a spouse and it affects not only yourself, but others around you. It's sad that your son is 27 years old and still acts like he's 19. He's still greiving the loss of his mother and he maybe acting out as a result of that, but that still doesnt excuse him from mistreating others. For one at 27 it's time for him to grow up because he is in fact wasting a lot of productive years acting immature and hanging around the wrong crowd. Most people at that age are completing graduate school and like you said are establishing relationships with people and/or getting married and starting families. What I would hate to see is him at 37 looking back and wishing he had left a lot of that immaturity behind. There is no reason why your son should be asking you for money because he's not responsible to manage his finances. Your job as a father is done you've raised your son, but it's time to enjoy your life and to look at meeting new people eventually. It sounds like it's a combination of immaturity and grief that has your son behaving the way he does and it does sound like he needs some kind of counseling. The more you help him the less he's inclined to want to do for himself. Your best bet is to cut him off and let him know that some of what he's dealing with he needs to get it together and that goes for how he treats others because what you said is something many women won't tolerate and will not stick around.