Divorce is never fun, and when there are kids involved, it can be increasingly challenging. Parents want to be sure their children are happy with their living arrangements, so they try to lessen the blow. Sometimes, kids prefer to be with one parent over the other, and if it eases their transition after the divorce, parents will make concessions so their kids are happy.
A mother posted about her strained relationship with her teenage son in Reddit’s AITA forum, and it’s a tough one. When she and his father divorced, the boy clearly didn’t want to be with his mother. As time passed, things changed with his dad, and now he wants to be back with his mom. But she has a new baby and no room for her son. Is she a jerk for telling him there is no place for him to stay?
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At first, the couple shared custody of their son.
The original poster explained that their agreement was 50/50 custody of their son at first, but things started to change after she went back to school. She expected her son to help around the house, but he wasn’t interested in chores and working.
“His dad’s house was more fun. I tried to make my home welcoming. I bought a used PS4 and I got fiber optic internet. It wasn’t enough for him. When he was 14 he and his father got the court to award my ex primary custody,” she explained. “I did fight it but my son made it clear he would run away if I didn’t give in. Counselling didn’t help. I tried everything. It was devastating having my son decide I wasn’t someone he wanted to spend time with. He started skipping visitation. When he did come he would leave the house and not come home until it was time to sleep.”
OP got remarried, and life changed.
She got married and pregnant while her son was living with his dad. He met someone new who doesn’t want a stepson and is pregnant. Now OP’s son wants to move back in with her, but she doesn’t have a place for him to stay. She downsized to a small townhouse and doesn’t have a designated space for her son. OP offered the living room couch, but that wasn’t enough for him, so her son moved in with his grandparents and is unhappy about it.
“My son is p—ed that I prioritized my new baby and my work over him. I had no expectation to ever need to house him again. My ex called me and told me to make our office into a room for our son. I told him that our son’s circumstances were his fault not mine,” she shared.
Redditors had a lot of feelings about this one.
Plenty of people thought OP was right.
“Honestly. [Not the A–hole]. People are upset, saying you should have held a place for him, but you’d previously been doing just that only to have the son not want anything to do with you,” one person wrote. “It’s a lose-lose for you here, unfortunately.”
“NTA. Kid made it clear he didn’t want to live with OP ever and didn’t even want visitation. He has somewhere to live that’s safe. 16 is old enough to learn actions have consequences,” someone else wrote. “Also curious as the why no one is p—ed dad doesn’t have room for him. He needs to get a bigger place with the new chick.”
Some commenters, however, thought she was totally off base.
She is the parent, and some Redditors thought she forgot that.
“YTA. Do you really mean to say that you don’t communicate with your child enough for him to know that you MOVED HOUSES?” one person wrote. “That kind of information is usually the bare minimum, and I mean barest, between a parent and their minor child. Just because his father has full custody doesn’t mean that you had to abandon him as a parent. Jesus.”
This person agreed: “YTA. What parent, custodial or otherwise moves and does not share that information with their minor child?
Redditors think the whole situation is a mess.
Many Redditors believe OP and her ex really let their son down.
This person made a great point, writing that everyone in this situation sucks “except for your teenage son who was behaving exactly the way I would expect a teenager to behave. Kids are jerks and its painful and it hurts but they don’t have the longview. Their brains are wired for big feelings and big actions but not for the bigger picture (not the least reason being, they haven’t lived long enough to understand what taking the long view is.”