We have an 18 year old leech living in our house. He is my wife’s son. She is afraid that he will fall into the drug trade if she kicks him out of the house. So she has continually made allowances and excuses.
Some of the issues:
He is one of the worse liars on the planet, but he insists on telling lies that he thinks will explain his actions. It is almost worth it to hear the stories he comes up with.
He smokes weed all the time. When he can’t find weed, he begs for alcohol. He says he needs the alcohol to help him get to sleep at night. Getting up before 4pm would help him sleep at night, too, AFAIC
She pretty much had to do all his schoolwork to get him to finish high school. He was taking correspondence courses, so she pretty much did everything but the final exam for a number of them. All the while she was working on changing her career and should have been spending her time on that.
She drives him to work when he does work because he stays up all night partying, smoking weed, or just playing computer games. So the poor dear is too tired to get up on his own and make it to the bus stop (assuming he knows where the bus stops and when. He has made the claim before that he doesn’t).
She got him two jobs as an apprentice mechanic for which he essentially got fired from both. He was so bad at the jobs that both garages pretty much refused to give him back his apprentice book even though it is required by law. I can only assume that they thought it was more important to get a fine than inflict him upon the automotive industry. The one job where he showed some promise, he told his boss he was taking his birthday off. When the boss said the schedule was set and he couldn’t change it, he still didn’t show up for work, so was fired because of it.
He refuses to follow our simple rules which pretty much are: No friends overnight. Clean up after yourself. Get and keep a job. No smoking in the house. No drugs. Don’t stay up all night rattling around the house.
In January, my wife and I went down to AADAC, a drug addiction center in Alberta, to meet with a counselor. He suggested a number of actions that my wife discarded as too harsh.
I have spent the last number of years feeling like a hostage in my own house. My wife feels the same way even though she coddles him. Regardless, in February we finally set a date of the end of June for him to be out of the house. When we tell him this, he acknowledges that we’ve talked to him, agrees to live by the rules until then, and then promptly violates them later that night. We told him no overnight visitors. So, he brings in an acquaintance, a guy we find out he barely knows, who got kicked out if his house for selling drugs at school. Just what we want: another drug addled kid living in our house! Probably casing the joint. He would sneak him in after we’d gone to sleep. They were too stupid to smuggle him out before we got up in the morning, so that is how we found out about it. That and the fact that neither of them can figure out how to clean up after themselves in the kitchen.
So, two weeks ago, while I was at work (I work overseas 5 weeks on then 5 weeks at home, which also causes major issues, not the least of which is how I can enforce rules when I am not there), my wife had the locks changed and told her kid that he will be out of the house by 9am and won’t be allowed back in until dinner time. If he doesn’t show up before 10pm, he needs to find another place to stay the night.
She finally got it right when she said, “Why should I worry more about his future than he does such that it affects the ability of me to live my own life?” Which is essentially what the counselor had told us in January. I guess she was finally pissed off enough after being woken up again up at 3am by the party in the basement (which oddly enough doesn’t occur when I’m at home).
and every time I picture that dream it suddenly gets crashed by the image of a 40 year old in his underwear, lounging on my sofa, asking what’s for dinner. Eck!