Some days I feel like Max hates me. I heard once that your not doing it right if your teenagers don’t dislike you at least some of the time. If that’s true, it doesn’t feel very good I can tell you that.
He spent the night at a friends, I got him some new bike parts and service done on it so he could ride it around this beautiful spring weekend. He comes home from his friends this morning in a terrible mood and has been holed up in his room the entire day, basically refusing to come down and when I do talk to him he’s obviously upset about something. I’ve left him alone most of the day, we all have those days I know I have them, that’s for sure.
Finally I asked him to come down for some dinner and he begrudgingly agreed. After much probing from my end he blurts out “I JUST DON”T WANT TO BE AROUND YOU!”
He must’ve been going for shock value. He got it.
I asked him if it was specifically ME that he didn’t want to be around or did something happen at his friends or what the heck was going on. He has been acting very strangely all day and I shared with him that I feel really concerned about his behavior.
“I just don’t want to be around you. Your annoying me today.”
I’ll admit, it hurt my feelings. A lot. More so because of the delivery, something is obviously wrong and his being nasty isn’t going to resolve it and I’ve barely seen him so we feel disconnected. And honestly, in this moment I’m more than a little angry at him. I spend all this money getting his bike fixed for him so he could get out and ride this weekend, agree to allow him over to his friend’s for the night even though I’ve barely seen him in the last week because I’ve been working so much and Friday night he was in bed by 10 or so and out the door by 10 AM on his bike and he’s still stomping around here like some Maxenstien.
And this texting thing has already gotten out of control. He’s ridiculous with it, he’s on it every waking moment and it’s hard to keep track of who’s he talking to or what they are talking about. Not all of his business is my business, but most of it is. It’s my job to know what he’s doing, where he’s going and who he’s spending time with. Something about all this texting makes me really nervous. I may have that turned off, he just got it turned off again and it’s already a problem it seems like. In fact, he seems to think it can be a way of communicating with me rather than actually speaking to me. I’m not in that, not with my own son.
But all kids text like mad these days, I realize that. Hell, my friends and I do it pretty regularly. Maybe mom is having that moment of feeling really out of control and not sure what to do about any of it.
Besides, my feelings are really hurt right now. So I should probably just relax, go give him a kiss and hug before bed and hope the crust washes of him tomorrow morning in the shower. Some days it just feels like I can’t reach this kid and he’s doing his best to put up a wall between us because he views me as the arbitrarily controlling adult and doesn’t think he should have to listen to anything I say, even though generally always does. Sometimes with a lot of attitude, but usually he listens pretty well.
Sigh.
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