Adult dss is driving me mad

[Carmenere]

I used to get on very well with him (he is 19) and have provided him with a stable home when his mum rejected him for no reason at all.
The thing is that he had been taking the piss behaviour wise for about a year and dp had his head in the sand about it. This all came to a head around Christmas time when he behaved appallingly and dp suddenly realised that he wasn't a freaking saint and that I wasn't a harpie.
So I laid down some ground-rules and his behaviour has improved but the problem lies with the fact that I just feel he is in my personal space all the time now. He is driving me crazy by just stupid little things.
Eating food is a big one actually, I would never begrudge him any food but he just ploughs through the kitchen eating stuff that I have factored into a meal later in the week iyswim. All I want him to do is to appreciate that he needs to ask. He suffers from the typical teenage thing of feeling like this is a house share situation and he can do what he likes. the irony being that if he was sharing a house he would have to be a lot more considerate.
The other thing that pisses me off is that he, when he feels like it, is really unnecessarily harsh and strict with dd(4) and ignores her the rest of the time.

The problems I have are non-specific, domestic ones, our house is tiny and I wish he would move out so that I can have a good relationship with him.
I NEED SPACE!!!!!

Dp says he wants to offer him a home until he finishes college, which I completely understand but now he is making noises about staying another year and I don't think that I will be able to last that long.

Rant, rant, rant............

i hope you can have a good talk and sort things out a bit more

I will try to find a neutral time and place, I might bring him out for a drink. Thanks

Hi Jammi, yes it is a catering course and he is dying to get a full time job so I reckon when he works over the summer as a chef he will not want to go back to college. I'm hoping that is.
the one piece of advice I would give to you is to make your dss do house work as he will get into the habit of not doing it and be a royal pain in the arse for you and any poor woman he hooks up with in later years

Crikey, this could have been written about my dss 21.

Eating everything: tick
Including stuff you had bought for a meal, and then getting awkward about it: Tick
Good at cooking, but useless at cleaning up:tick
Doing whatever he likes with no consideration: tick
Believes it is HIS house so he has as much right as me and DP to do whatever he wants, incl hogging bathroom at busy times, turning heating off when it is minus 10 outside:tick

You have my deepest deepest sympathies. However dp supports me in this, and he is as sick of it as I am, AND dss is moving out in July.

I don't really think this is step parent stuff, I think this is young adult boy stuff, ie reluctant to move out, thinking they can do what they want, and it is GODDAM awful to live with. Agree that you need to get him to move out for some space, otherwise you will just crack under it all
Unfortunately today it appears that 19 year old boys show no desire for independance or to fly the nest ..

Can you bear it until he leaves college?........... .I know............I know...........

I also think teenage boys are very good at "hanging" around the house and not going anywhere. It seems very common. Three like that in this house (big sigh.....drives us f* up the wall>

I completely lost it with him tonight
I went out t do the supermarket shop and when I came back in to put away the groceries and cook dinner at 6 o'clock, he was cooking bloody pasta for a snack DP didn't see why this was a problem
He is always in my bloody kitchen and space in general.
The thing is that he thought he was helping, by feeding dd and then when I said to just get out of the kitchen and go and eat his pasta so I could put the groceries away he said 'but I am helping out' to which I freaked because it really pisses me off when he thinks that it is a 'favour' to fill the dishwasher. It should be a duty and a habit

So I lost it and shouldn't have and he screamed at me and his dad is supporting him and I just don't need this CRAP in my life. I am very, very pissed off and sad.

Sounds tough.

As you both love cooking would it be an idea to talk to him one on one about how protective you feel about the kitchen/food/cooking. Explain that you understand he enjoys cooking too and see if you can work a way out together. I wonder if he's just a bit confused by it all, in his own mind he's trying to help and can't see what he's doing wrong.

Could he perhaps plan a meal for the whole family, you buy he ingrediants, he cooks it and you all sit down together. Would give you a night off and him chance to do his stuff?

breath deeply Carmenere. a bit of a shout might not be a bad thing. I'm in no position to say anything about the rights and wrongs of tonight and/or the overall situation, but what you;ve done tonight, in no uncertain terms, is make it very clear that you're not happy with the current situation and that it's not particularly sustainable. when the dust has settled (maybe tonight, maybe next week...whatever) perhaps the 3 of you can sit calmly and talk. so tonigh might not be a bad thing.

fwiw re tonight I would give him the benefit of the doubt - that he thought he was being helpful - so you need to explain why, to your mind, he wasn;t and why you reacted how you did. I also can't help thinking you need to work out more groundrules about the kitchen. can I ask, very gently, because I do sympathise, if it's entirely fair to think of it as yours? whenever I've lived with other people (be it my whole family when I was a kid, my mum and brother when I was 15-20, friends, or dh and dds, I'd never see a room in the house as mine. difficult because I know I'm not a chef. but, for the moment, can you find a way of sharing it? can you get in regular routine when it's his certain nights of the week? a kitchen's such an important part of the house I think I'd feel a bit uncomfortable living in a house where I felt it belonged to somebody else. can you find a compromise?

sorry tonight was rubbish. but, like I said, bringing things to a head may be good in teh long run.

Thanks both of you I know you are right, I just feel very frustrated by the whole situation. I know we would get on fine if he wasn't here so much, or even if our house was bigger.
I want to smooth things over but I don't want to just roll over again to keep the peace.

Well this morning I just gave him a big hug and told him how proud I am of him and I apologised for losing my temper and he apologised to me so it is all ok for now. It turns out that his tutors are giving him a hard time in college.
He is not good at controlling his temper/attitude and is quite arrogant as he is very good at cooking and I suspect he is rubbing people up the wrong way at college. Predictably the tutors are coming down hard on him because of this. I have spoken to him about it but he doesn't possess enough self awareness at this stage of his life to see the bigger picture. Bless him, testosterone is an awful curse to have to live with.......

Big sympathies Carmenere, it's very hard isn't it? I hink the only people who can really understand are those who have had or have full time sc.

Would setting up a rota for cooking help?....and getting him involved in planning the ingredients? He might not eat them all then

Do you think you would feel like this if it was your own son? The "space invading" stuff I mean. It is so hard to know what to think isn't it? I suspect that we are uninetionally different with sk. Not malicious or anything but just more concsious of stuff.I have read that stepfamilies need more physical space than normal (?) families for physchological reasons, and I think this is very true. You just seem to need more breathing space somehow...

Glad you are feling a bit better..have frequenly reached screaming point myself...

OK I am not a step-parent but I don't actually think you are having a step parent problem.

When I was 19 I had a flat mate, both of us were very good cooks and both of us LOVED our kitchen.

We got in each other's ways/faces so often!

Set up a roster for the kitchen. Split the cooking/shopping duties, i.e. I would cook Monday to Thursday so I looked after all the food shopping/preparation etc for those days. Flatmate looked after the weekends (obviously there was some flexibility etc).

It doesn't have to be a 50/50 split like that but perhaps if he has to do the HARD work of cooking, i.e. the shopping and washing up etc then he might have some sort of grasp on how hard it can get. Also if he has to buy food for the family a couple of times of week it works out a bit like board IYSWIM?

Instead of thinking of him as a kid, try approaching him as an adult...an adult who finds himself in a VERY lucky situation and who needs to carry his weight a bit.

I'm not sure if you'll want to hear this Carmenere, but I used to feel the same way about my own ds when he was about that age. He drove me to madness with eating all the food in the fridge and just being around with massive feet and goth mates in and out, waking me up in the middle of the night etc. I was a single parent at this stage but tbh I'm not sure it would've been much different if h had still been there. I had several shouts and laid down rules which were subsequently broken....Oh dear it was hard. I just wanted him to leave AT ONCE and he was my darling baby boy!
He didn't mean to be so selfish and annoying. He was just a teenager and wrapped up in his own world.
Now I can laugh at it, but at the time it was hell.
No real advice. It could be that I felt more able to be angry with mine as he wasn't a ss, but I think it's the age more than anything.