The complaint comes not from the mother of the son who has returned to the nest. It comes from the sister. The brother, a recent college grad, has a low-paying, late-night-shift job and can't afford to rent his own place. So he's moved back home with mom. His girlfriend is the problem. She doesn't officially live with the brother but she's there all the time--and she sits in his room all day, stoned, the sister says. She wants to know what her mother can do about this inappropriate and unhealthy situation--a situation that bothers the mother. The sister/daughter writes Carolyn Hax, a Washington Post advice columnist,that her mother "is at a loss as to how to confront my brother and this girl without stomping on his nascent adulthood and causing a huge fight."
Ah, yes. The "trampling" on the "nascent adult." Just what so many of us face when college students, young adults or emerging adults move home while they come to terms with where their life is going--and all the anxieties that accompany that: for them and us. It's a problem. We don't want to step on their toes, but when they start stepping on ours or we are confronted with unhealthy choices they are making, we may have to do some trampling--nuanced and with some with some emotional subtlety--but nonetheless something that addresses the point.
Here's Hax suggestion: Mom needs to treat son like an adult, not as an emerging one. She could say something straightforward and non-emotional, like, "I've said nothing about your girlfriend's staying here, hoping you would recognize for yourself that it is totally inappropriate for her to sit in your room, full-time, stoned...Please steer her out of your room, and ideally to some help, or else I will have to get involved."
Hax's point--and it's one I find worth remembering--is this: Don't get sucked into an argument. That would send the message that the mother sees her son as fragile, and that would undermine her respectful intent.
To say nothing of trample down hard on his nascent adulthood.
