I have thrown my son out, HELP please!

pavlovs_dog

well i'll offer the POV of the child on the matter, seeing as you've heard from the fellow parents.

i left home two weeks before my 18th birthday, a mutual agreement between my mother and i. if i hadnt gone when i did, one of us would have killed the other before the month was out. we really werent in a good place.

i had to fight tooth and nail, but i did eventually manage to claim income support, to pay my way through my final year of a levels. not that it was much support -around £45 a week, which really did not realistically reflect cost of living in any way, shape or form. as IS is a 'passport' benefit, once you are in receipt of that, you also become eligible for other benefits such as housing benefit. even taking rent and council tax out of the equation, £45 a week is not living, its barely existing but thats a whole different debate!

we are now 4 down the line. whilst i have never returned to live at home (i enjoy my independence too much, something that has always ben difficult for my mother to accept), my mother and i do now have a good relationship. it eventually took the death of my grandfather to bang our heads together and make us realise that life is too short.

the 4 years have not been easy by any stretch. whilst i do regret that things went to the extreme they did, i do not regret moving out for a second. it makes you grow up very fast, and you learn some very important life skills when you are in a sink-or-swim situation.

throughout the whole situation, the best piece of advice i was given was not to burn bridges. its taken 4 years for me to be able to appreciate just how shrewd that advice was. such is the benefit of hindsight i suppose. but if i can only give you one piece of advice, dont burn your bridges would be it.

whilst there are stark differences in the circumstances between my situation and yours, the emotions are probably the same. if you want to talk someone who has been through it, then you are more than welcome to PM me. cant promise i'll be of much help, but i can at least share my experience, and continue on my journey of turning my bad experience into a positive, learning experience.

thinking of you xx

pennypuppy

I am so sorry, I really feel for you. Some of the above posts here sound helpful.
Good luck.

booklover

Hi Caterina

I can empathise with you as I have had a very difficult time with my eldest son. He is now 22 and left home 18 months ago. Things are a little better now but for several years I was in a terrible place with him. :sad: :sad:

I could maybe pm you as its a little private.

Take care and believe it will get better.

booklover

I wish more than anything that I had been firmer as In was too soft on him aand just put up with all the verbal abuse.....

seven-day-weekend

I too will pray for your family, son included.

belfastgirl23

I think you've done the right thing although it might not feel like it at the moment.

Lots of luck1

ailuro2

Good Luck, and well done for being brave enough to protect the younger kids in your family- it's not the first time younger kids have been introduced to drugs by an older sibling.

When you think of it as a necessary measure to protect the rest of the family perhaps it will not seem such an awful decision to have made? None of us want our kids to make mistakes, we all want them to learn from our mistakes and just take our word for it that what they're doing is a bad choice. As they get older it's harder to convince them of this. You've done everything you could, and although it's hard, try to think of it as being good for him- you may have done the only thing that will force him to stop him using skunk, in time to stop some of the mental health problems that can be triggered by abusing it.

Best wishes, and try to have a good Christmas.:A

Caterina

Dear all,

thank you very much from the depth of my heart for your kind replies, I felt it was not enough to just tick the Thanks button, but I really wanted to say it in words.

I feel at peace with the decision I made, and I know that this is hopefully going to be a growing experience for him, and also for me.

To put this situation in the picture I am going to share a bit of my life from teenage years:

I was a really WILD child, not just cannabis but crime and all sorts of really nasty things, and started running away from home at age 15, caugth by parents, run again, caught by the police, ran again and eventually ran abroad (no passport, just hiding with complacent lorry drivers through borders all the way from Italy into Scandinavia - I leave it to the imagination what I had to be put through to do this!).

I hated living with my parents and was determined to leave, no matter what, and I put up with extreme pain, humiliation and hardship in order to achieve my freedom. The problem in my case was that my parents, good catholic traditional middle class professionals in the 70's Italy would not let go of me, hence my extreme rebellion.

I wish there had been something like the Princes Trust, Connexion or other organisation like these and that I had the freedom to leave without putting myself through such an ordeal to be rid of my oppressive family.

I definitely did not want to obey their rule but at the same time I really wanted to live my life, self-supporting in whatever way I could manage, it was them who would not let this happen!

With my son the situation is different. He wanted to stay home, eat, smoke, drink, party, thrash the house every time we went away for more than a couple of days, speak bad to me, his father and his sister, bring in all sorts of really degraded people, who also did not respect me and treated my house like a mix of bed and breakfast and rubbish bin... need I go on?

I asked him several times over the last couple of years to consider leaving home in a 'controlled' way, with some support from us, possibly involving social services to rehouse him (if we had done this when he was under 18 he would now have a council flat, a support worker, and also come age 19 he would be a 'care leaver' so he would be supported better in finding his way in life).

He would not budge, he said he wanted to be home, this is his home etc, he just behaved better for a couple of days and then the troubles would start again. He would come home stoned and would be impossible to live with, unspeakably rude, dirty, smelly, leaving greasy frying pans in the kitchen, taking food in his room and then leaving it to rot as he would forget to eat when he was too stoned, leaving all the lights on all the time, rings around the bath, horrible friends eating cheese toasts in my kitchen as soon as I turned my back (they stopped coming around when I was there after I threw them all out and threatened to call the cops on suspicion of drugs!).

What can I say, he would have had great freedom in his own home, to come and go, but also he would have had to take into account our needs and our lifestyle, so no drugs and no druggies under our roof, but free to pursue his beloved music and to be out and party all weekend away from us.

No, he wanted it all and he wanted it on our expense.

I got fed up of being abused and exploited.

I hope this makes it a bit clearer, I appreciate it completely that he needs his freedom, I WANTED to give him his freedom but he wanted to have it at a terrible emotional, spiritual, physical and mental expense of all the rest of his family and this was just not acceptable. He wanted to be here and have the love and the money and the cheese and chicken, and hey he has expensive tastes, not for him the OS way, he would call my rice and bean stews Hippy Slop, I would buy him chicken, but hey not the legs please, it had to be the breast and it had to be organic too and it had to be boned. He also wanted smoked salmon and cream cheese and avocado for his sandwiches for when he had the munchies. He wanted milk, but would not use milk that had been already open, he would only use the first drops from the bottle and then the milk would sit there rotting in the fridge as nobody else drinks it here. He wanted cheese for his toasties but hey, not the soap blocsk for £2.99/Kg from Iceland, it had to be Mature Farmhouse....

And everything I did was not good enoug, everything I served he turned his nose, he would start his sentence as: don't mean to offend you, mum, but..... and some sort of criticism of food, clothing, anything, would follow.

Enough is enough.... time for him to grow up and for us to rebuild our family life which has been so badly shattered (not to talk about my personal self esteem!)

Thank you again all of you who read this and responded, I have taken on board all your kind words and advice and I am very grateful for all of you who are praying for him.

Love to all and happy Christmas

Caterina

Angelica_2

My friend went through as a similar situation with her daughter. There was constant fighting, arguments and staying out late. In the end they agreed they just couldn't live together any more and when she was 16 she moved out in to a hostel. From there she went to a flat where she got loads of support and then in to her own house.

Her daughter received Income Support and Housing Benefit until she was 19 and was still studying. She had to prove she was estranged from her parents that just meant mum filling a form in to say she couldn't go back. It might be be different now I think you can get Child Benefit until they are 20 so they might be able to get Income Support until then. She had to go to Connexions first then to the Job Centre to get the Income Support form and see the under 18 adviser.

Hope this helps.

candygirl

You have definitely done the right thing hun:D .My daughter left home at 18.5, after a row when i asked her to contribute £25 a week towards housekeeping.She was earning a good wage at the time, and spending all her wages on clothes and going out, and said I was taking the pee asking her for this amount which I considered to be absolutely minimum:rolleyes: .
We get along a lot better now, she lives with her boyfriend and realises that £25 a week really was a good deal.;)
Your son has a lot of growing up to do, and he will grow up a lot quicker out in the real world.Congratulations on giving him the wings to fly:T :T :T

margaretclare

I hope this makes it a bit clearer, I appreciate it completely that he needs his freedom, I WANTED to give him his freedom but he wanted to have it at a terrible emotional, spiritual, physical and mental expense of all the rest of his family and this was just not acceptable. He wanted to be here and have the love and the money and the cheese and chicken, and hey he has expensive tastes, not for him the OS way, he would call my rice and bean stews Hippy Slop, I would buy him chicken, but hey not the legs please, it had to be the breast and it had to be organic too and it had to be boned. He also wanted smoked salmon and cream cheese and avocado for his sandwiches for when he had the munchies. He wanted milk, but would not use milk that had been already open, he would only use the first drops from the bottle and then the milk would sit there rotting in the fridge as nobody else drinks it here. He wanted cheese for his toasties but hey, not the soap blockS for £2.99/Kg from Iceland, it had to be Mature Farmhouse....

Good heavens. Champagne tastes on a beer income, as they say where I come from. It will do him a world of good to be out there in the real world!

You say he was a 'skunk' addict - this is different stuff from what used to be around when I was at university. It's more addictive and research is showing that it causes permanent psychosis.

You did the only thing possible.

Very best wishes

Margaret