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Boomerang
"Kids"
From GypsyNester.com
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I'm
an advice column junkie. I can't help it. I kick off my morning
with a frothy soy latte, my “Crack”berry 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 husband,
“Chip,” is really in need of Viagra, and is not,
in fact, having an affair as “Horny in Hoboken”
thinks? 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.
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Today's 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 butthole 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
house! How can you even ask if you are being unreasonable? It's
time for you to grow some balls and live the life that you have
worked your butt off for. They are friggin' 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 loser 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 sick and
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--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 real 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. They know
I love them. Enough to want them to have lives they are proud
of. That's not going to happen in my basement.
See also:
Sell the Nest
David & Veronica,
GypsyNester.com
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