What exactly has this kid done that deserves so much loathing? (real question, not criticism disguised as a questions) What, precisely, do you find so reprehensible about the way he treats your wife? You’ve mentioned that he doesn’t talk to her, that he won’t come to Easter dinner, that he tries to avoid being around her unless he needs something – all upsetting things from one’s child, and I’m sure things that hurt your wife very much – but has he done anything you’d be angry at a non-family member for? Spoken to her disrespectfully or anything like that? If he has, that’s certainly something that shouldn’t be tolerated, and constantly begging for rides IS rather out of line. But he MAY be acting this way toward your wife because he actually wants to avoid conflict. (I don’t know the kid or the situation, but it seems like it might fit. I do know teenage geeks.) If he’s really angry at his mom, or at you, he might be not talking to her because he doesn’t want to let that out, and he’d prefer to stew quietly, introvert that he is.
Does he get private time with his mom? Does he ever get to visit with her when you’re not around? If he doesn’t, it might be something that he’d like.
Also, gotta agree with yellowval. The kid KNOWS. He knows he’s a big geek. He knows you’re not. He knows his sister is a happy athletic extrovert, and if he has any contact with her, he knows you and she get along. Even if you’re a wonderful actor and perfectly able to conceal the fact that you “loathe” him, think he’s “lumpy” and “the most ungrateful, lazy, irresponsible piece of fungus I think I’ve ever encountered” and would “like to kill” him, he’s a geek. Unless he’s been raised in some kind of geek paradise, he’s experienced this sort of thing from happy athletic extroverts before, possibly accompanied by a face full of locker. It comes with the territory. He’s probably going to assume that you’re going to feel exactly the same way toward him, and the fact that he’s absolutely right isn’t going to make things better.
Try to find a reason to like the kid. If you can’t get to know him through his actions, I’m sure your wife is loaded with stories about the last 16 years of his life. Don’t find out just enough about his hobbies to ask inane questions. (When you’re 16, pretty much every question an adult asks you about your hobbies seems inane.) Find out about HIM. Your wife is going to care about him for as long as she lives, and you’ll be better able to interact with him if he’s more your stepson and less that kid you have to be nice to or it’ll upset your wife.
I know you’re very protective of your wife, but it sounds like this is really her problem. She has to be the one to not tolerate a certain way of speaking to her. …or any other behavior. I don’t have teenagers yet, but I’ve found with my two little guys (5 and 2) that you just gotta pick your battles. Sometimes the choices parents make don’t look reasonable to those outside the relationship.
(BTW, I was one of those teens not particularly interested in driving. My parents gave me no instruction whatsoever, and when I got to driver’s ed I was the only one who had never been behind the wheel of a car. I did so poorly, it was quite discouraging after a lifetime of not having to try at school. I finally got my DL at 18)
Additional food for thought (and to answer some of your questions):
*His mother is a psychotherapist who specializes in family therapy. I asked her last night how she’d handle the situation if she were her own client. She said that it is different in that she can’t be objective.
*I actually do like the kid in some ways - it is his treatment of his mother that I find so difficult, and my reaction to that magnifies the other negatives that I perceive in him. That’s MY issue to deal with (see, I recognize my part).
*Of course he knows he’s a geek. He revels in it. I have no problem with his geekiness - that’s his personality. As I said, he’d fit in perfectly here and, as far as I know, I don’t have any serious gripes with any of you That being said, being a geek doesn’t give you a pass to be lazy, disprespectful (he’s said some pretty hurtful things to his mother that I got second-hand), and rude to me. Part of being an adult (or an adult-in-training) is learning to be civil even when it kills you. I don’t dislike him because he’s a geek - I dislike him when he causes his mother pain. As the amount of pain he is causing her increases, the animosity I feel toward him increases.
*We’ve had a few conversations in the past where I’ve seen a glimmer of acceptance on his part. It almost seems as if he caches himself opening up and then he says “Oops, this isn’t supposed to be happening” and he closes himself back off.
*He would get as much private time with his mother as he wanted. She is always suggesting that he come over or that they go do something together. I know how important that is and have never stood in the way of either invitations. He wants no part of it.
Perhaps I’ve painted too harsh a picture of my feelings toward him as a person - if so I should correct that. Had we been in school together we would have gotten along in a friendly enough, see each other in the hall and say “hello” kind of way, but we wouldn’t have been fast friends. As I’ve said, it isn’t him as a person that gets under my skin, it is treatment of my wife.
If you feel that way about any human being, then you need to fix your own feelings. Let alone feeling like that about the child of your wife. I think you resent your stepson’s position in your wife’s heart as much or more than your stepson resents you. Of course he won’t have dinner with you at Easter if you harbour those sorts of feelings about him. He is a teenager, and teenagers are aways likely to be jerks to their parents, it is the parents who need to be adults. Time for your wife to discuss stepson with stepson’s father, and for you to learn that stepson is part of your wife, and that you must love him if you love your wife.
If after you have been truely loving and adult, stepson is still ‘evil’ to you and your wife, only then maybe should you consider that your stepson is a bad person.
I’m not too far out of my teens…Wait?! Who am I trying to kid? I’m out of my teens by a decade.
Well, anyhoo, my two cents.
I was recently thinking back on my teenage years. They were very tumultuous, internally. My family is the most stable that there can be, but I was the exception. I remember causing my parents all sorts of unneeded stress. I remember making a fool of myself, and hurting others’ feelings on a regular basis. I spent some time in my 20s recovering, dealing with, and apologizing for these mistakes.
I now wish that, at the age of fourteen, someone had grabbed me by the shoulders and said, “That’s it! I’ve had it!” and shipped me off to a military school or locked me up somewhere and made me reconcile my own problems. I truly feel that I would have gotten more out of working on a chain gang, or working in a scullery on a barge, than spending all that time waiting for the school period to end and worrying what my hair looked like.
Sure, I would have hated it then, but I would have been more appreciative of it now.
I eventually came around at about age 23, looked back at the carnage that I caused, with alarm, and said, “Oh my god. What have I done?”
But it’s always the eccentric and troubled ones that have the interesting lives.
I see that most people think that the OP has a generally correct outlook on the matter. I beg to differ.
Two people get together and start having children without even knowing if they can maintain a marriage or not. Then they go through a divorce, and I am under the impression that these are always worse on the children then on any other side involved. And then surprise surprise one of the kids tries to do things to hurt his mother. Well who thought that would happen?
Now why doesn’t he play nice and try to work it out like the rest of you? Well he does not have to, its not his duty, his parents wronged him by their inability to provide a steady family no matter what. Can’t do it - don’t have children; very simple really.
It might be a brat thing to be doing but he has the liberty and the license to do it because when the only people in the world who are truly supposed to care for him put him second and their differences first that hurts more then anything a teenager can do to a reasonable adult.
The only reason you would have to complain is if his father gets any less of it then his mother does, but I gather you do not know if that is the case or not.
I was an amazingly awful teenager, even without the divorce. I have no idea or explination for what came over me, and what is currently over my little sisters, that lifted when I moved out.
Grit your teeth, demonstrate appropriate adult behavior, and do your level best. It will end. I bless my parents for every time they suceeded in showing me how adults deal with stress, proving me to still be a child, and I remember vividly the triumphant rage that came with every time they failed. I could lose my temper, that made me a child. That kept me a child. But if they lost theirs, and I kept mine, I was in the right. Snotty and incorrigable, better as a wet puddle under a semi, but still the adult of the situation.
Being a teenager sucks, quite frankly. Its hard, and there’s so much going on internally you can’t keep up with it. Your mind lies to you about reality. what can you do against that? He sounds like he’s a reasonably good person, once he gets past the hell that is teenagehood, he’ll probably be a fine human being and if you don’t get an apology, you’ll at least see vast improvement.
Deal with him as you would an adult you had nothing in common with. He’ll pick up on the respect and when there are not other influences (there will be) he’ll respect that. when he fails to live up to respectable behavior, let the disapointment show. Implicit in that is that you know he is well capable of better (and in general that he does better.) Other than that, its not your show, its between him and his mother.
Well, it seems like they managed to maintain it for a decade and a half or so. Should they have waited for the 20-year mark before reproducing or what?
And what if staying together would have had them at one another’s throats all the time, or acting like complete strangers? Isn’t it better to be showing him that one is not obligated to stay in bad relationships out of habit? Isn’t it better to open themselves up to loving relationships that could also be models for him AND provide more stability than there would be in a loveless marriage? Thinking of the children is important when you’ve got them, but avoiding divorce at all costs is NOT always the best idea.
The kid has the right to be upset and should probably be granted a bit more leeway in some things than a kid who hasn’t gone through this. But he shouldn’t get a free pass to be an absolute bastard to his parents and have it not really be “his fault”. He’s 16, he’s old enough to deal in a more mature way than that.
I know I might be wrong due to me not having all the information but from what I managed to gather he is acting like a real jerk and regularly driving his mother to tears. Yet he is only doing it after his parents failed to provide him with a loving caring family. They may both still love and care for him but they are not a family. And if I read the OP correctly they have not been a family since he was like 11-13 or so. Well take a look at every jail/mental institution/courthouse or any other place where they hold people that have harmed others. I have no cite but I am willing to bet at least 80% of the people that are there for really hurting others(so druggies and prostitutes don’t count) had bad childhoods due to abuse/divorce/poverty/plain bad parenting or what have you. It maybe his concious decision to hurt his parents but its the only decision he can make considering he is a geeky intravert teenager with a screwed up family life. And if your only choice is the wrong one is it really wrong? Yes but it is at least justified.
His parents were wrong to hurt him but had the right to and did it, it was their fault. He is wrong to hurt his parents but has the right to and does it, it is his fault but you can not retaliate against him for what he does as his actions are wrong yet justified where as yours wouldn’t be.
PS plnnr I am sorry to have to disagree with you and claim that your loved one deserves to be hurt (she does not but if her son does hurt her it really is not something that can be simply blamed on him being a brat) but since about a year ago I’ve managed to convince myself that bad parenting is the root cause of everything that is wrong with the world and am very passionate about the issue.
Adolescence is horrible, and adolescents are foul. My daughter is 16, and she seems to be over the worst of it (girls mature faster than boys, so you’re stuck with it for a while), and while she is generally affectionate, open and happy, and we both know we love each other passionately, she can still say the most horrible, hurtful things to me.
Part of adolescence is testing the limits of everything, and parents in particular: Will they still love me if I do/say/act like this? Added to that is the whole issue of his mother loving you: more competition for the attention it probably appears he doesn’t want.
The most important thing you can do for your wife is to be as non-judgemental as possible (yes, I know it’s easy to say). Being a parent makes you vulnerable in ways that nothing else can, and she needs to be able to talk about him, complain about him, and work out how best she should deal with him, without feeling that you are negative about him. I know your reaction is to protect her, but she will end up not wanting to discuss him with you. However horrible and hurtful he is to her, she loves him. She needs to be able to concentrate on the good things about him. I stopped talking to the people close to me about my daughter’s negative behavior because their anger, and concern for me, just alienated me from them, and made me more inclined to make excuses for her because it aroused my protective instinct. And that gets lonely.
Good luck - I really feel for you. Sometimes it’s only the unconditional love that gets you through it.
My parents separated when I was 19, divorce finally came through and my mom moved in with someone else a few years later, I’m 23 now. My mom is now engaged and apparently I’m going to be a stepkid. Anyway, I don’t think your stepkid is being manipulative. Seems to me that he’s opting out of some events in order to prevent further hurt - saying things he knows he will regret and so on.
Sorry, plnnr, but a divorce between your parents is bad enough - a divorce and remarriage and having a substitute father figure dropped on you when you’re at an age when you don’t really want or need another parent is a big blinking neon sign that reads “You do not control your own life and probably never will.” Which might explain the lack of interest in a driver’s license. (And please understand that I’m not implying you are trying to take the place of dad, since it sounds like you’re not - it’s just that you now occupy the position he once did.) And I’m sure he’s aware that you’re not in the household because you’re crazy about him, so he probably feels barely tolerated. I actually suspect that, because even if you’ve never said anything about your feelings toward him, he’s probably already picked up on them.
I don’t really have any answers. I think that you should let your wife work out her relationship with her son, and that you should take care of your relationship with your stepkids. I don’t think it’s your battle; though I understand it’s hard to suppress the instinct to try to make everything all better.
I think I can provide the other side of the arguement for this one.
I am a 16 year old lazy sullen teenager. I’m the first to admit it, sometimes I go too far. My mother is still currently married to my father, but it’s a joke, they live miles away from each other and never speak. My mother has recently begun seeing another guy.
I feel nothing but resentment toward him. I’m sure he’s a very nice person yadda yadda, but I love and respect my father an incredible amount and to me encouraging his relationship with my mother is, in my mind, tantamount to treason toward my father, who frequently tells me how much he wishes to get back with my mother. TBH, I’d like to see this aswell. To me, being friendly with the new guy is basically telling my mother that I accept him. It’s pretty illogical I know, but what can I say.
I hope I have given you some insight so you can best deal with the situation.
I’ve gotta go with faldureon on this one, only a “lite” version. I don’t believe the kid has “license” to act like a jerk. Although I do agree it’s no wonder that he’s acting like one right now. Break up a kid’s home and the kid’s supposed to just be a “good sport” about it? Pfft.
The kid’s pissed because his home life was shattered. Even if the OP came into the picture 4 years ago (and had nothing to do with the divorce), the marriage is still new. There’s a big difference between mom having a boyfriend and mom having a husband.
I’m not saying the kid’s actions are justifiable. If he’s treating his mom bad there needs to be an ass kicking. I’m just saying that the kid’s reaction to his parent’s divorce is normal, especially now there’s a new guy with mom.
Could it be that Dad is trashing Mom to the kid? Some people are bad to do that
Regarding the easter party he wouldn’t go to - it’s probably because he knows his rants upset his mother and wouldn’t want to go off on one or show himself up at the party. Prolly why he’s quite introverted, too. It’s highly doubtful he did it just to be a vindictive shit for the pure fun of it, he’s still a human being remember.
I married Mr P when my stepdaughter was 8. She was vile to me. When she hit adolescence, she was ghastly to me for years. I disliked her intensely which was a direct result of her behaviour. I didn’t enter the relationship expecting to dislike her, I did nothing to her apart from exist, but, man, she was awful.
In the end I pulled back and had as little as possible to do with her. Up to the age of 18, I made sure there were phonecalls and birthday and christmas presents but at 18 as far as I was concerned, she was an adult and I could treat her like I’d treat any other adult who felt they could treat me and my kids in that manner.
It’s all very well to blame bad parenting and say oh dear the poor suffering child, how sad but the bottom line is that all I ever wanted was common basic courtesy along the lines of the courtesy she extended to a random stranger. I didn’t want to parent her, I didn’t want to be her best friend, I simply didn’t want her to idolise her father while shitting on me and my kids.
The astounding outcome is that last year she came to visit us in Australia for 10 days. I was very nervous about the visit but it was fantastic. As adults we are friends, an outcome I never expected.
I think if I had my time again, I would have been far less involved with her much earlier. While I never tried to be her parent, I did try to have a civilised relationship which gave her the chance to show me over and over again she wasn’t willing. I never had to deal with her being awful to her father and I don’t know what I would have done if that had been the case. I dealt with the parent on a pedestal syndrome which sucked especially when he wasn’t perfect and, yep, you guessed it, it was all my fault.
Another vote for the birth parents to address this together.
In an ideal (such as it is) situation, the kid is acting out on his own and the dad is not (fully) aware of it. If that is the case, having the dad support the mom (even if it is nothing more than a verbal “Watch your mouth” as the kid leaves his residence) is certainly better than silence.
In the worst of all possible worlds, the dad is actively encouraging the behavior, in which case the mom should confront him and insist that such negative encouragement stop. (Yeah, I know.)
If the dad is supportive of the mom, then all the parents should agree to a set of rules for the kid and then enforce them. (I realize that plnnr should generally be removed from penalty enforcement on this topic.)
We did the family counselling thing. Yeesh. We did 2 sessions and then the clinical psych rang and suggested we not bother to come back as Mr P’s ex was obviously unwilling to change and had no reason to change.
Looking back now, I have no idea why I was so clueless as to where the behaviour was coming from. The ex saw no problem with her daughter ignoring me and being rude to me. She told me I had no role in her daughter’s life whatsoever and she saw no reason why we should work together on how A was treating me. She told Mr P that if he were to leave the country tomorrow, it would suit her fine as she and A were a family and A didn’t need a father and if she did need a father, then she needed a father who was single. The ex was not single herself at that point in time. I have no idea how that partner was treated by A.
The ex however was perfectly happy to receive money, felt we should pay for half of the private school fees when we had no input into choosing the school and used us for childcare when it suited her. With the benefit of hindsight, I’m not sure I think the ex had a full array of sheep in her top paddock. If I felt the way that she did, then I would have moved cities. I certainly would not have remained in my ex’s life creating chaos via my child.
That being said, being a geek doesn’t give you a pass to be lazy, disprespectful (he’s said some pretty hurtful things to his mother that I got second-hand), and rude to me. Part of being an adult (or an adult-in-training) is learning to be civil even when it kills you. I don’t dislike him because he’s a geek - I dislike him when he causes his mother pain. As the amount of pain he is causing her increases, the animosity I feel toward him increases.