We had SS13 over for the week after Christmas and then again this past weekend. Normally these visits go pretty well and for the most part everyone gets along. However, during both of the these last visits I noticed a change in SS's behavior. He spent most of his time in his room with his door shut, playing board games or puzzles by himself. When he did come out he rarely talked to me, specifically addressing only his dad. He's also started mentioning more of his mom's household finances (often in comparison to ours.) Today, before DH and SS left to take SS back, SS specifically refused to hug me goodbye. (It's possible that the hug is a result of my just having told his dad that SS needed to eat some of his fries, that we had taken home in a to-go box, in addition to the half a burger he still had left from our eating out for lunch since he hadn't eaten any of them and they hadn't come with the burger, they had to be ordered separately in addition to the burger.) I was pretty upset about the hug thing and it really made me wonder about his behavior the last month or so. I have come up with four ideas for why he might be acting like this.

1) He's just becoming a teenager. He just turned 13 this month, but the attitude can start early.

2) He thinks I'm the reason his parents broke up. During Thanksgiving break we had a big to-do about why his parents divorced (when he was five) and how what his mom had been telling him about me wasn't true. I wrote about that in a previous blog entry. I thought it was settled. Who knows though? We've gone through smaller versions of this before and since his mom sees him practically twice as much as we do, we have no way of knowing what else she might have said.

3) His mom is upset about my pregnancy and is sharing her feelings with him about it and therefore affecting his attitude towards me and his future little sibling. She had told him at one point that she, "just couldn't imagine" DH and I having children, whatever that means. SS once said that his mom will always love him the same even if his dad didn't because of a new sibling. This one pisses me off since she never even wanted SS in the first place (not that we would ever tell him that) and started freaking out that she was pregnant. After SS was born she started dropping him off with relatives so she could go hang out with random people. I and DH have told SS point blank that a new kid does not make him any less DH's son or my step-son and that we're not going to love him less because of a baby.

4) He is upset about his future sibling. I wonder about this one mostly in the context of finances. We haven't bought anything for the baby yet, but my parents have. I don't know if SS knows that my parents are the ones buying the stuff. DH and I also have more money than SS's mom, mostly because SS's stepdad is often not working, or working at a job that doesn't pay much. SS has been making lots of comparisons between his mom's household and ours. I can almost imagine the thoughts in his head running along the lines of, "Mom doesn't have money for cable TV and dinners out, but dad does. Mom only spends this much on groceries, but dad and astra have money for stuff for the baby. Why do dad and astra care if I order an 11$ burger and fries and don't eat it? Or a 13$ pasta that I didn't finish? They have money. They just must want to spend it on the new baby." What's so frustrating about this is that DH sends twice the amount he was ordered to pay in child support each month because otherwise SS's mom would lose the house. Her husband doesn't work so I can only guess that some of that money goes to supporting him as well. Also, we spend thousands of dollars every year traveling to and fro to visit or pick SS up. Not his fault since we had to move for jobs, but I hate that the expense and effort of that is never acknowledged, even though the one weekend a year that his mom makes the trip in the summer does get noticed by SS for its cost and effort.

Gah. I could just be making all this up. Maybe it is just him becoming a moody, teenager and I'm just oversensitive because of prego hormones. I can't imagine a teenager and a prego lady are not the two most stable of emotional beings. (Poor DH) I just wish the kid would say what it is he is feeling or thinking so we could clear things up, but he's hurt my own feelings so much with the ignoring and the outright snubbing that I don't have the heart right now to chase him into sharing.

I just don't know how to deal with this. My first instinct is to back away and let him be an angry little bugger all by himself as long as he is still doing the things I'm telling him to. If what is causing his behavior is 1) this is probably the best action. However, if it is 2), 3) or 4) then he needs to be, "straightened out" and talked to.

I think I'm going to tell DH how I'm feeling and let him talk to SS. Options 2, 3 and 4 just involve too much with me personally I think for SS to believe (or care for?) anything I say about it.

I just wanted a nice, happy family.