Hi everyone,
To keep long story short, I’ll get straight to my question. I have a son at uni and it seems that he never actually has any time for his parents at all. Whenever I call him, he never answers the phone. Clearly, he must be able to see that he has missed calls but he never calls back. This is regardless of the time of the day or which day I call. And to be honest I wouldn’t say I am one of those parents who call every day. I have tried explaining to him that we just want to make sure that everything is fine and if he can’t answer the phone at a particular time, all he has to do is respond something by text. No success.
When I finally managed to get through to him this week, for about 3 minutes, he gave me just “yes” and “no” kind of answers. When I asked if everything was ok, he said everything was fine and he was just giving me short answers because I was interrogating him apparently. My questions, however, were generally about what he’s been up to, if the weather was good, if he managed to catch up with his friend etc. I was just trying to keep the conversation going amid his yes/no answers.
I don’t actually know what to do with this but his behaviour seems generally quite disrespectful. When we come up to visit him, we usually take him to lunch and after that, he wants to go straight away and doesn’t want to spend a second longer than lunch itself in our company.
He doesn’t remember either mine or his dad’s birthday and basically generally seems to not want to have anything to do with us other than for us to supply money for his university living expenses.
I am not at all saying I am the greatest mother in the world or has been the greatest ever but is that disrespectful or am I expecting too much here and need to tone it down? I generally don’t call more than, let’s say, once every 2 weeks or so. In his first year, I called weekly but then I thought maybe it’s too often, so I cut down on that and try not to hover too much. But even that seems like too much. What would you do?