 |
I'm an advice column junkie. I can't help it. I kick off my morning with a cup of coffee, my iPhone and a heavy dose of the “Dear crew”. When I'm lucky, I can persuade
David to play along with a game of “What would Abby do?”
If he's is in a particularly sporting mood, we can delve far
beneath the layers of the written word. What if the meddling mother-in-law, “Madge,” has a point - maybe “Good Mommy in Leavenworth” is, indeed, a bad mommy? |
Normally, I can convince myself that it is a game of good clean fun. The anonymity of Chip, Madge and Horny are fascinating and comforting - these semi-fictitious characters have problems too.
But a recent column was just plain disturbing. It involved a mother who is a newly retired homeowner with an outstanding mortgage. Unless she was the CEO of a major publicly traded corporation, this lady is on a whopper of a fixed income.
Now get this - she has two grown sons, aged 22 and 24, living in her home and she has asked them to pitch in and pay $30 a week.
“Stressed-Out Mom” says that they are now “ranting and raving and calling her a bad mother.” She goes on to ask if she is being unreasonable. What?
Kick those pot-smoking, Cartoon Network-watching, little punks out of your basement! How can you even ask if you are being unreasonable?
It's
time for you to grow a pair and live the life that you have
worked your butt off for. They are able-bodied men who
are completely taking advantage of your enabling ways.
Are you going to raise their kids, too? Because sooner or later,
one of them will actually get a date with a girl who doesn't
care that she's seeing a guy who lives with his mommy. Then you
are going to have quite the zoo on your hands.
I'm so
tired of hearing about Boomerang "Kids" and how hard it is for
them to make it on their own in the big, bad world. Granted, our
generation tended to be more involved with our children's education,
nurtured their every talent, made sure they were safe from balloon-related
latex allergies (and I'm the biggest recovering helicopter mom there is!)- but the helicoptering MUST stop at some point.
The longer we wait, the bigger and badder the world will seem to our offspring.
“Stressed-Out”
should have started her sons along a different path a long time
ago. Isn't part of the job to teach your kids to care for themselves?
I didn't raise my son and daughters to be good kids, I raised
them to be self sufficient adults.
That means once they are of age - they are on their own. They
began hearing about this early and often. As they headed off to
college, they didn't expect to hear, “Honey, come back any
time things get hard.”--“Watch out for the screen door,”
was a bit closer to the mark.
My Spawn know I love them. Enough to
want them to have lives they are proud of.
That's not going to happen in my basement.
Veronica, GypsyNester.com
YOUR TURN: You've heard my opinion, what do YOU think? What should "Stressed Out Mom" do? What would YOU do?
