in which there is venting
He's a good kid. I know this. I know I'm really quite lucky and blessed. He doesn't get in trouble at school. He's never been brought home in the back seat of a squad car. He's getting mostly good grades. He doesn't spend half his life on the phone with some girl or another, no strange girls ever show up at my house looking for him, and I never get angry calls from other parents about how they caught my kid running half-naked out of their daughter's room. He doesn't steal booze from the cupboard when I'm at work. He's never taken the car. His friends are all pretty good kids, and he's actively removed himself from groups of kids that aren't "pretty good kids". (Case in point: he decided to do club soccer instead of trying out for JV soccer at school, because he thought most of the kids already on the school team were "jerks and assholes"; an assessment that I thought was pretty spot-on.) Hell, he even self-polices his eating habits - no soda, easy on the sweets - if it weren't for tortilla chips, he'd be consistently more responsible about his diet choices than I am!
(Legit beefs: He is currently sitting on a couple of C's that would be in the B+ to A- range if he'd just turn in the goddamned homework already, and I'm pretty sure he and his buddies are technically trespassing when they go up into the hills to run around with their Airsoft guns.)
I'm very fortunate. The hard work his dad, stepmother, and I have put into making our own relationships function is paying off. I can see that the difficult choices I've made over the last few years were good ones.
All that said: holy cow, am I sick of the fucking attitude.
The eye-rolling. The dismissiveness. The open disdain of almost everyone and everything around him. The silent treatment. The grumpyness. The "God, Mom, can you just get out of my room?" The YouTube. The passive-aggressive stoicism. THE FUCKING YOUTUBE. The fact that, when the attitude is in full swing it's like getting a face-full of ALL the reasons I told his father to pack his bags and get the hell out, and I hate that my knee-jerk reaction is to want to yell "Stop being Dad!" at him, and that sometimes I can't stop myself before it comes out.
As Charlie Brown says, AUGH. And maybe I'm having a harder time putting up with it because my mom's not here to pat me on the shoulder, remind me of my awful teenage behavior, and assure me that it's a phase and will pass.
It is a phase.
It will pass.
But in the meantime, AUGH.