Look. You can't write anything in public about what you actually do as a mother. Poor Annie Lamott, kind human of the decade, confessed in Salon that she totally lost it one afternoon and slapped her teenage son across the face. She was horrified (although anyone who has raised a teenager knows that look, the cold, insolent, hateful "I dare you" look that comes after weeks of misery, and can easily understand Annie's moment...) .. but you should have seen the letters. Had she decribed the same incident and how she had NOT slapped him, she would have gotten the same degree of vicious excoriation. As it was, the readers worked up into a frenzy that ended up accusing her of near-psychotic abuse of her son, pathological and possibly criminal exloitation for having written about it, and so on. Had she not slapped him they would blame her for an entire generation of damaged children, spoiled, castrated, etc etc etc. You have by now perhaps understood something. The Mother is, was and always will be the target of a hatred and bitterness that reaches way beyond culture and times. You will be called a bad mother no matter what you do, and if your children taje their life difficulties to a psychotherapist of any persuasion, male or female, the chances are very good that you will be blamed . (I'm, a therapist, so I know. I am also a mother.) Your very human, touching and honest article made me wince, mostly because I knew what was coming. Look, everyone has had a mother, and the mother holds for the child a projected numinous power that is just way out there. This is most powerfully felt when it gets a collective going, as in a letters forum, or say, a tribe, like the Taliban. (The Taliban have taken care of mothers very neatly.) In any culture, whether she "overprotects" or "underprotects", she is invested with so much fear and hope that she becomes a symbol for the source of all possible good and all possible evil. then there are the Mommy wars, where the ghastly ambivalence about the whole situation pits mother against mother. It is ugly and stupid and universal. Read a neat book called "The Mermaid and the Minotaur" if it's still in print. And meanwhile, know that you are a perfectly fine, human, flawed, excellent, loving Mom, and that this gang of letter writers is simply expressing the compulsive and collective mob rage that always follows any honest confession of real mothering episodes (as opposed to the canned ones approved by The Myth, Inc.). You can't win with this bunch.

I'd agree that it's difficult to write anything about parenting decisions without attracting criticism, and that people are less civil on the internet than they would be face to face. We can relish the chance to vent some spleen, also, and a mob mentality can sometimes develop.

But Bonnie didn't write her article as a parenting guide. She's exploring an area where she obviously feels some misgivings about how things have gone. She's trying to place most of the blame on herself, but it seems to me the way she's framing the anecdotes is also designed to make the son look pretty feeble, also.

This may be journalistic hyperbole -- but that's not really relevant to the issue of attracting criticism. Posters can only know what she tells them. It could be a problem of cultural misunderstanding -- maybe this is normal practice in the upper middle classes. But there are some problems here, it seems to me, even if that's true. She isn't perfectly OK, and while she realizes that to some extent, it seems like there's still a level of denial here which will inevitably attract some tough words from commenters.

Nate's lack of enthusiasm for schoolwork, for choosing a career, for taking an active role in important decisions about his future, is very strongly contrasted with his mother's willingness to simply step in and do whatever was needed herself. He takes standardized tests and writes compositions "at gunpoint". Meanwhile what's most important to him is his Xbox, and "gets lost in his imagination". He ends up in a high-pressure university course where he's miserable. He spends a lot of time sleeping, and watching the Cooking Channel for comfort. He hopes he's developmentally disabled, so that he wouldn't feel so much responsibility for this situation, and thinks his parents will disown him. Of course, he fails badly. The conclusion the mother draws is "I hadn't finished raising him yet". I would say a little more self-reflection might have been appropriate at this point in the narrative.

I'd been hammering Nate with my personal list of essential maturity skills before he left home. One must be able to make decisions, develop relationships, understand transactions, show up consistently, communicate clearly, I droned while making him double recipes of butterscotch pudding. On his own, he does not e-mail and rarely calls me. I tried to insist he check daily for my electronic correspondence, helpfully providing a list of cyber cafes in his neighborhood.

She's researching cyber-cafe locations so that he can check daily for her missives. His response: ""There are physical limitations which may prevent me from fulfilling your rules. I will make them personal goals to be accomplished." Who speaks like that?

More self-help talk: ""If you do something every day for a 30 days, it becomes routine." They are obviously spending a lot of time talking about his shortcomings. She's been "hammering" him with a list of ways he needs to change. What I'm suprised about here is that he's still so accomodating and polite. Part of that might be not biting the Visa card that feeds him, but maybe there is a level of Stockholm syndrome here that needs to be addressed. I don't think it's good for kids to be so immersed in linguistic analysis of their own personality problems, especially with their parents. It's liable to lead to becoming neurotic, self-doubting, a Woody Allen kind of personality. He shouldn't be participating so enthusiastically in it -- but if your mother is spending a lot of time explaining where she thinks you have problems, it's kind of hard to disagree, if you're a good kid.

Why did Bonnie put in the bit about him complaining about her posting the rent check? She's putting him down in public there, justifying something maybe she felt guilty about, which made her doubt her own competence. At the same time., she's pointing out where he still has clerical and financial problems, which enables her to go on building her own self-esteem by handling those "problems" for him.

Like I said in my own thread, I'm a bit like Nate. I know what it's like to need to escape into your imagination. Video games can be a substitute for real-world competence. This kid really does need to find something for himself where he can get some respect: both self-respect and respect from others. It seems like Bonnie realizes this now, but maybe not to the extent she thinks she does. He doesn't need protection, or to have decisions made for him, or to email her every day, as much as he needs a sense of mastery and competence. After all, that's the central theme in his mother's self-image, and her opinion is obviously important to him.

I can't possibly respond point for point to that long, ostensibly astute analysis (well, i could, but I have a Saturday I want to live and have written enough), except to say that you can run that sort of pathologizing trip on almost every human relationship. The variance in parenting styles and relationships is vast. Really, really vast.

In fact, as a psychotherapist, I can tell you that nearly every human behavior can be similarly pathologized in some context or another. (Read the uproarious article about the laughing baby video on YouTube.) Therapists who are bad therapists do it for a living. It is destructive and silly. (And profitable.) There's not nearly enough data in that article for anyone to do anything except to project -- as you quite frankly do when you say "I am like that boy." Look to strengths. That's where the hope and the help dwell.

Yes, we have very little information here, and so we project on the basis of our own relationships. Whether it's accurate or not we'll never know. Elsewhere you yourself say about your family, "If I were rich I'd set them all up with trust funds, and I'm quite sure that it wouldn't damage them. One of my kids is more dependent and floundering than the other two -- why in the world would I toss the weakest chick into the cold most readily?" So maybe you are looking at this story (and it's literally a story) through your own feelings about your kids and their needs. And you are as likely right as I am -- maybe this kid really does need a lot of help.

I'm giving him advice that I want to take -- I'm in a bit of a rut, and need to start working harder on moving forward. Competence is a big part of my own sense of self worth. So I'm talking to myself, as much as to him (appropriate, since I very much doubt he'll read this). But I still get the feeling Bonnie needs to back off not just for Nate's sake, but for her own.

I have a feeling that your open and intelligent style of introspection will see you through very well. And look -- you slipped the noose of mob mentality! I find that encouraging. Good luck; it's an absolutely crazy world. Try to have a good time. Try to have a good heart. Try to have a good day. : )

As the middle child to such a mother, I REALLY have to dispute that ".. you are a perfectly fine, human, flawed, excellent, loving Mom, and that this gang of letter writers is simply expressing the compulsive and collective mob rage that always follows any honest confession of real mothering episodes". First of all, let me suggest that this does have something to do with this child being her SON and her BABY. My ridiculously competent older sister is a high school teacher on her way to becoming an administrator, and I as the middle child couldn't wait to be independent from my parents as long as I can remember. However, my younger brother is very much like the irresponsible, immature one written about. Now, those qualities are not so uncommon in teenagers, I think we can agree. The difference here is that I know my brother is still like this at the age of 23 because he was CODDLED his whole life. If you are never allowed to do anything for yourself, how will you gain any self-confidence or initiative? Somehow my mother never thought twice about filling out my college application or applying for jobs for me, yet she has done just that for my brother, among many other things. To me it was "We may be paying for your college, but it's four years and YOU'RE DONE. No fifth year senior for you." But for my brother? He can fail out of school repeatedly while not holding a job, and mom buys him a car and pays for more schooling. I cannot explain this phenomenon, nor can my mother. She claims she has not treated him any differently in spite of 23 years of action to the contrary, and can only offer the explanation for such treatment that "he's different." No he's not! YOU made him that way! Don't get me wrong, I love my brother and actually wouldn't change anything about him; it's not me he mooches off of. I just have no clue how a mother could be so blind.