Emotionally drained and blackmailed

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

My son, who will turn 12 next week, told me tonight that he wants to go live with his father.

It has been a perfectly awful day. It started at 11:45 a.m. when his English teacher called me at work to tell me that my son once again failed to bring his homework to class. This is only something I recently learned. His grades have been much lower this school year. I’ve implemented new “study hours” from 3:30-5:30 p.m. every day when he does homework and the television stays off. I’ve encouraged him to bring his books home each day and have checked his homework. However, he has gone to great lengths to lie and deceive me about the assigned homework, his progress in the classes, and test scores. I had previously requested a parent-teacher conference but the counselor had never called back with a date. It was only yesterday when I saw the aforementioned teacher in our hometown did I approach her with my concerns.

So, she calls to tell me he doesn’t have the homework he swore the night before was never assigned. Then an hour later, another teacher, this one Social Studies, calls to tell me that she ran into the other teacher who informed her of my “need to know” policy. She was calling to inform me that she believed my son had forged his grandmother’s name on a deficiency report. She faxed me a copy of the report, and indeed, the child did sign his grandmother’s name.

It is important to point out that his teachers referred to him as “incredibly bright,” “very intelligent,” and “capable.” However, the words “lazy” and “unmotivated” were also mentioned.

All day I have obsessed over this child’s grades and the fact that he can be so dishonest and deceptive. And then tonight, when I confronted him after a long day at the office, he tells me he doesn’t want to live with me, he wants to live with his dad.

Part of me wants him to go (five hours away from here). I’m tired of the continual fighting about his grades and the lying. Part of me can’t stand the thought of what living with his absent, ineffective father will do to him.

I feel emotionally drained. Exhausted. But I also feel like I’m being blackmailed by my own son. He’s holding me hostage with his threats to live with his father. Could I live with myself if he went to live with him? Probably but I’d be miserable without him and would feel like a parental failure.

I don’t know what to do or where to turn. This is my avenue to express my fears, frustrations, and emotions; I was hoping other Dopers would have some advice.

Thanks in advance.

2

A 12 year old boy’s body and brain are beseiged by hormonal changes. This is part of growing up. A male role model (ie, his father) may be more important to him for his development into a man than staying with you (his mom). What’s missing is knowing whether or not he has a positive relationship with his dad or if he is just fantasizing / indulging in escapism. If it’s the former - it might be for the best for him to spend time with his dad - perhaps the summer on a trial basis. If it’s the latter - then I suggest family counselling for the two of you to get to the root of the problem and to help your son be honest with you.

This is a really tough situation - I wish you much strength and serenity.

3

Damn. Just plain damn.

To be honest, my first thought was just to ignore it. Kid could be trying to get you scared so he pulled out the nuclear option. I don’t know him though so I really shouldn’t even try to say for sure.

I hate to say it, but are there any counseling options available for you and your son? It’s probably the best option.

4

And in a perfect world, Dad would be a successful with-it parent, already involved in the day-to-day life of the child and a super capable male role model and could discuss it with you rationally so the two of you could decide which household would serve the child’s current needs best.

Oh, wait, we’d still be with that guy, wouldn’t we? Sigh.

This sucks, it sucks huge, no one deserves being emotionally blackmailed.
As a single parent, I sympathize. What particularly fills me with grrrr is not being able to levy the big guns in the argument and remind my darling child that if his dear Dad had any worth as a parent he’d have been more of one the last decade or so. Of course I won’t mindfuck my kid that way, but when they’re throwing every card they have at you it’s sometimes very hard to resist.

What I usually do is try and look at it from a 2 parent perspective sorta. I had original parents in the same household, no stepparents or ‘other’ to run away to, so I imagine how it would have played out if I’d tried the same tactics as a kid. I always come back to some core facts, children don’t make the big decisions, parents do, and emotional blackmail or guilting the parent or playing them off one another is Wrong. One of the main parental duties is teaching Right from Wrong, so even if the reality of the situation is that Dads might be the best place for him, it’s not going to go down like that, the adults can discuss it and make decisions later.
“I wanna live with Dad” is really saying “I can’t handle my current gig and wanna bail” so I look for why, what’s changed, what’s going on that’s making him feel incapable, what can we alter, etc. Being a kid really does suck sometimes, some have more issues transitioning to middle/high school than others, it might be a lot of little things or there may well be something very real there and it sucks trying to figure it out without the decoder ring.

Keep doing what you’re doing, talk to him, talk to his teachers and continue making school a priority. Sometimes you gotta fake it when you’re so tired of the drama you’d happily pack for him, that’s when you come here or call a girlfriend or do whatever it takes to recharge.

Who knows, maybe the ineffective absentee father will even step up and surprise you one of these days. Well, it could happen. In a Lifetime movie maybe, but it could. :wink:

5

Sorry this is happening to you. Hearing this from your son must be a tremendous emotional blow.

But, unless I’m missing something, he’s pushing your buttons with a meaningless threat. You have custody (that seems to be implied), and he’s 12.

You can’t back down, both because the blackmail will never stop once he knows it works, and because his education is important.

6

Thanks for your support. It means a lot and it’s helped me feel a little better about where I stand.

To answer a few points:

Wonderwench questioned (sorry; don’t know how to quote) the father’s relationship with our son. It’s pretty non-existent. My ex-husband once was a decent father to our boy. Unfortunately, that ended about the time my son started school and his father remarried and began a new family. My ex-husband calls him now and then but visits him or takes him for his visitation only twice a year. In fact, he hasn’t called his son in more than a year-- basically since I found out he had our son’s medical coverage dropped (which, of course, is in contempt of the divorce agreement.). Since that, he’s not made any contact whatsoever with our son. No Christmas cards, birthday cards, no Easter baskets or anything. Not even a call to see how he’s doing.

My issue with the whole visitation thing is: why on earth would the child want to come back to me after spending a week or more with his father. He gets away with everything under the sun when Daddy has him, mainly because Daddy doesn’t have him very long. I’m the mean, ogre of a mother who insists on rules, chores, respect, and decent grades. My child is a changed person after being with his father for any length of time; he becomes mouthy and disrespectful, bad-mannered and hateful towards his grandmother and me. But then, about two weeks after he’s been home again, he returns to his former, more respectful self.

I’m calling some counseling places tomorrow to see what I can find out. I also have parent-teacher conferences set up for tomorrow evening.

Queen Tonya: you sound exactly like one of my friends. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear you were her. I feel the same way as you: although I’d dearly love to remind my son that his father hasn’t even had the decency to wish him a happy birthday in the last four years, I won’t. And even though he can cut me to the bone by saying he wants to live with his father, he can’t make those decisions. I think, and by that I mean he hasn’t indicated one way or another whether I’m spot on in my diagnosis or not, that he’s lashing out at me because he’s been caught in his deceptions. Had those teachers not phoned me at work, I would have never found out about him forging his grandmother’s name on the deficiencies or not doing his homework. I mean, I ask every single stinkin’ day of the week if he has homework. When he said “no,” I accepted that as the truth.

I’m just absolutely sick to death of this. I’ve cried all day and all night: first about his lying and now about the thought of him living away from me, away from where I can keep him safe. I’m not in the financial position to pick up and move if he were to live with his father, not that I’d really want to do that anyway. I’m rambling but I’m hurting, heartbroken and confused. I don’t know how I should feel or what course of action I should take. And all signs around me (aka. my mother and stepfather) point that the problem lies with me and my failures as a parent.

7

I meant to address this in that last post but of course, forgot until I hit Submit. Yes, I have custody. Sole custody. Not joint. Therefore, if my meager understanding of the legal system is correct, wouldn’t I be the one party who would have to petition the court for a revision of the custody agreement? Wouldn’t that be up to me?

I think you’re 100 percent correct in stating that the blackmail will never stop once he knows it works. I don’t know how to ignore the hurt that particular threat causes or how to respond to it. Tonight, when he said that, I answered in what I consider a very childish manner. I apologized to him for saying things I don’t mean and speaking to him in anger.

I think our relationship will be very different from this point on, but I can’t live my life walking on eggshells afraid that every time I punish him, he’ll threaten to move to his father. I can’t live life that way and raise him the way I believe he needs to be raised. I don’t know what to do. . . I’m just hanging on.

8

My only link to this is that I was once a 12 year old boy!

From what I can get, he’s making a meaningless threat that he knows will hurt you, in order to get himself off the hook. That’s what 12 year old boys do! I don’t think you should take it too seriously. After all, it sounds like his Dad wouldn’t want him to be with him, and after a very short time he wouldn’t want to be with his Dad, at a guess.

I think the thing to do is to try and find out if he’s having trouble at school - is he really just not pulling his weight or is he under pressure to succeed, or even being bullied or something. You sound like a really sympathetic and caring mother - I think if you can make him realise you aren’t nagging him, or trying to get on his back all the time, but you care about him and his future, he might just surprise you with his response. I really hope so anyway.

Hope all works out.

J (who was nastier to his mother at that age than I can bear to think about now!)

9

I’m a girl, but when I was 12, I did everything I could to make my mom’s life miserable. I got lazy at school and became a hellion at home. Unfortunately, the reason I was acting out was because I had an abusive dad.

I’m not suggesting that you’re abusive, but I’m wondering if there’s something major going on in his life that he’s upset about. Is he maybe still having issues over your divorce? Maybe just really missing his dad? I don’t know what’s going on in your son’s life, but his actions sound suspiciously like the symptoms of childhood depression.

I’d strongly recommend getting him to a child psychologist, either alone or with you and/or his dad. Finding out what’s bothering him will help you figure out how to fix this.

Best wishes.

10

I don’t know what to say about him saying that he wants to live with his father other than that while your ex-husband’s absence may give him rarity value, it’s been seven years now, and your son is well aware which of you knows what he likes for breakfast. There is a good chance that he said it because it is a plea for sympathy and a good way to stick a pin in Mom at the same time. Give him the sympathy, ignore the pin, and make it clear that though you are not his only parent, responsibility for feeding, housing and educating him is yours alone. Tell him that your responsibilities include his happiness, which means that if something at school, at home, or somewhere between the two is bugging him that it is your job to help. The trick is to offer help and establish control at the same time. If you manage it, tell me how.

As for the homework. It’s important to know what kind of a problem you have. Is it just homework, or does he slack off and/or behave badly in class also? If it’s just homework, that’s a very good thing. I have a son who couldn’t be bothered to turn in homework he had actually done, for heaven knows what reason. But the problem of not bringing the work home and doing it was more manageable. I simply prepared fiendishly long and difficult homework assignments of my own to give them, and pretty soon the kids saw that it was better to do all the work their teacher gave them than to miss one and risk spending a weekend researching the history of the decimal point.

Good luck.

11

I offer no advice, all the good stuff has been given here.

Hormones suck.
I wish you some peace during this insane time period.

12

This probably has very little, if anything, to do with you or your parenting skills. My guess is that it has everything to do with your son being essentially abandoned by his father and the stage of life that your son is experiencing.

This is a really difficult time for any kid. Their bodies are changing, their hormones are out of whack, they’re not little kids any more, but they’re not even teenagers. They don’t know how to identify their constantly in-flux selves. It’s like a constant itch that they have no idea how to scratch. They just keep scratching at everything, hoping it will do the trick. A safe, unconditionally loving parent is an excellent target.

Add to that, a boy who needs a male role model to figure out this whole growing up thing, and who needs to know he is good enough, as is, to be loved; throw in an absent father, and there you have it - a hurt, pissed off, confused kid. He’s probably figuring if he pisses you off enough, maybe his Dad will notice him and step up to the plate. And the more Dad doesn’t do that, the more hurt and angry your son gets and the more he lashes out. My guess is he doesn’t want to leave you, he just wants to know that his Dad loves him and cares about him. Some kids become overachievers, some act out. Basically, they do what they think will get them what they need. It gives them some sense of control in a time when so much is out of their control. I wouldn’t even say it’s on a thoroughly conscious level.

Unfortunately, it seems to be common for some fathers to give up their old life, including their kids, when they feel as though thay aren’t able to make an impact any longer due to distance. They have a new life where they can start again and their daily existence doesn’t include their kids that are further away. Is there anything you can do or say to your EX that will help him understand the (negative) impact he is having by not being there for his son? Maybe if he sees that he does have an impact it will help?

One possibility, if your EX is open to it, is to tell your son that if he gets his grades back up, etc. that he can stay at his Dad’s for some length of time during the summer. Then your son will continue to feel like he has some control over his life, but he will need to act positively to exert that control. But Dad would have to be amenable to that, obviously. If he isn’t, you could try a different reward that would be meaningful.

Best of luck to you and your son.

13

I’ve thought about this-- the part about if he’s still having issues about the divorce, but honestly I can’t imagine that’s the problem. See, we divorced when our son was just two and had been separated since he was six months old, so it’s not like he ever remembers mommy and daddy being together.

I think he very much misses his father, but he never brings it up to me. He never makes the first move to call him or write him or e-mail him. (At this point, I don’t think his father would even answer the phone or e-mail because of the whole insurance fiasco I mentioned earlier. He wouldn’t answer my calls or e-mails when I was trying to get that straightened up.

The depression thought scares me. I’ve been dealing with what I believe to be depression for three years now and I know how I feel. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone else for any length of time. And if he’s been feeling that way and this whole time I’ve been nagging him about his grades, no wonder he hates me and doesn’t want to live with me. :frowning:

14

It’s homework. The teachers I spoke with yesterday said his test scores are great (funny how I ask every day if he has any tests coming up and he tells me he doesn’t), but his homework grades and his scores for his in-class work are the ones that drag down his final average. Apparently, even activities they do in class, he doesn’t turn in. I’ll find out more about this this evening. I can’t imagine the rest of the class doing an activity but my son does not and no one sends him to detention, calls me or sends a note home.

15

I also thought about this, but again, the problem is that the father won’t take phone calls or e-mails from us because he thinks, I’m assuming, I’m going to badger him about the insurance. It’s been well-over a year since we last talked ABOUT the insurance and he’s not called his son one time or had any contact with him. And that’s not unusual for him.

I remember a couple of years ago when my son earned straight A’s on his report card-- he used to do that with some regularity in the earlier grades. Anyway, I asked him if he wanted to call his father and tell him about his grades. His comment back to me, and he wasn’t being snotty or sarcastic, he said it rather matter-of-factly, “Why? Dad wouldn’t care anyway.”

My son tried to call him after winning first place in the state social studies fair last year to tell him of his triumph. His father wouldn’t answer the phone, never returned his messages, and never acknowledged his achievements.

At this point, I’m terrified my ex-husband would take him for the entire summer, just to hurt me emotionally. Again, why would my son want to come home to me at all when he gets to do anything he wants at dad’s and doesn’t have any of the “stupid” rules I have here? I also think my ex-husband would try and keep him, with little regard for his education or rearing, simply to stop paying child support. I can live without the child support, but I’d be miserable without my son.

16

In the cursory glance I saw I didn’t see what I have to say, but then I’m lazy, too.

I would tell him he can go live with Dad, but it won’t be until summer starts. He has to finish the school year where he is, and by Og he’s gonna do his homework in the meantime.

Ship him off to the ex at the first possible chance afterwards, and tell him he cannot come back until the week before school starts again; force him to stay there for the summer. In essence, you’re calling his bluff, and he has to live with the consequences of his actions.

He’s either going to hate it because of the usual stepfamily dynamics and not having any friends there, or he’ll get along with dad and family and adjust.

He’s at the age where some kids start to rebel against the homework and the teachers. I won’t say it’s normal, but it is typical. I did it, as did my son.

17

Well, but what’s different now is that your son is in the middle of a life transition to adolescence, and he may just now be feeling the abandonment of his father (which also sounds like it has been more pronounced in the past year or so). And of course he’s pissed off at you—you’re the one who’s around to be pissed off at. And you’re the one he can blame for his Dad not being around because, again, you’re the one who’s there to be pissed at.
When I worked with kids and adolescents, I heard this all the time. The big difference I see in your case, though, is that you sound like you’re really trying to be aboveboard and think carefully about what will actually help your son, not just what will help you feel better. Props to you and Queen Tonya for not indulging in the petty games that a lot of the moms I used to work with would play—sneering at the kid and snapping, “Well, your father obviously doesn’t want you, because he’s not here now, is he?” because their feelings were hurt.

Again, he doesn’t hate you. If anything, he hates how he’s feeling, and he hates his situation. Maybe he hates being nagged, but he needs it. It is such a cliche that kids resist limits but secretly want them and, you know what, it’s true.

I hope you do find some good counseling options. And I think the school needs to take a much more proactive stand in helping you stay on top of what work your son has.

18

After reading some of the last posts in the thread, I’ll concede stupidity on my part.

19

I’m very sorry to hear you’re having these issues with your son. As others have said, this is probably more about the age, rather than your parenting skills. I have 2 kids right around that age, and have seen very similar behaviors: not doing homework, “forgetting” assignments, not turning in HW that was completed, general surliness/slacking in household chores and lying/being deceitful. I have seen it in both my daughter and my son; my daughter is really growing out of it as a young teenager.
Here’s how we cope with it: constant contact with their teachers. Start with a conference to air your concerns and hear what the teachers have to say. Most teachers really love concerned parents. Our kids have agenda books where HW assignments are to be written. Review these every night. Have the teachers sign it to make sure the assignments are properly copied. You can sign it to indicate that you’ve reviewed his HW. You can use this to jot notes to the teachers and vice versa. You will really need to be a taskmaster regarding reviewing HW. Every night, so your son realizes this is the expectation.
Second, you’re going to have to become a bit of a drill sergeant with your son. Every time he misses an assignment, “forgets” to turn something in, etc… will result in loss of privileges. No TV, PS2, ice cream, going outside to play, etc… . Heck, we ended up stripping our daughter’s room of everything but a bed, desk and dresser for a week or two. You will not find this easy, but your son needs to know that there are boundaries to acceptable behavior, and crossing those bounds will have consequences.

20

something I forgot to include. If you are concerned about a male role model for your son, you may want to consider Boy Scouts. It gives him both positive male role models, plus a good group of peers and older kids who have been through or are going through some of the same ups and downs. I know some folks look down on the Boy Scouts ( and sometimes for good reason), but they are still by and large a very good organization.