It's an admission that will appal most mothers but with shocking honesty, a best-selling novelist admits... how I grew to HATE my son

By Jacquelyn Mitchard


Troubled: Jackie with her son Rob, aged ten, in 1995. She remembers him being an angry and spiteful boy


Some parents think their children are heroes because they endure life-threatening illnesses with courage. Some people see their children as heroes because they overcome bullying, criticism or cruelty and still hold fast to the things they believe in.

But what if your child has done none of those things? What if you give birth to a son who is the opposite of a hero; a child who ruins everything he touches and squanders every opportunity, shows nothing but spite and throws everything you give him back at you with unbridled anger and resentment? Could you still admire and love your child then?

For more than a decade, that was my awful dilemma, as it slowly became clear that my son was a selfish loser; the sort of child whom other people would cross the street to avoid. And on one sweltering summer's day in 2008, I finally decided I'd had enough.


Rob was 23 when I turned my back on him, throwing him out of our house for good, thinking I may never see him again. It was a decision I know many people will find difficult to understand. Certainly, I never imagined that I was capable of such a thing.

That day, three years ago, I remember Rob slamming the door behind him and never looking back. I ran from window to window, struggling to catch a last glimpse of his brawny form and characteristic lugubrious gait. But I didn't call him back. Quite simply, I could take no more.

How had it come to this? How had I raised such a toxic child? The roots ran deep.

Rob was my first born and we were so close that when I had another son, Danny, three years later, then another, Martin, three years after that, Rob was terribly jealous, prone to sulking and dark moods. He was constantly unpleasant to his little brothers and constantly vile to me.

Then my husband, Dan, died at 44, cancer claiming him with the speed and ferocity of a bushfire, leaving me with three little boys and precious little else. Rob was only nine.

The younger boys clung to me, but Rob withdrew into an ever-darkening cloud of self-absorption.

I was a young widow, working all day as a speechwriter at a university. At the same time, I had an urgent need to try something impossible, consuming, as a way of distracting myself. So at night I was trying to write my first novel.

I admit I was not the mother I should have been or wanted to be. Too often, I was sharp or forgetful, stretched thin with work and worry.

Increasingly, Rob seemed to blame me for everything - from his father's death, to the loss of his best friend, Eric, who suddenly stopped coming to play any more.

What really happened was this: Eric's mother called me and said: 'I hate to say this Jackie, but I don't want Eric playing with Rob any more. Rob is just not being very nice. He's throwing rocks at cars and other kids.'

Perhaps I should have told him the truth and come down hard on his behaviour. But instead of confronting Rob, I tried to protect him. After all, hadn't he been through enough?

Instead, the problems worsened. Like a gathering storm, Rob became darker, more menacing. By the time he was 11, it was impossible to ignore the fact that he'd become the kind of boy who sneered and put people down.

He stole pencils from the school shop and coins from his brother's piggy banks. On the football field, he delighted in playing foul and making younger boys cry.

Because his father had died and I felt constantly guilty for not being able to compensate for his loss, I vacillated between trying to instil discipline and trying just to be there for him.

Sibling rivalry: Jacqueline with Rob, left, and his younger brother Martin and a friend in 1997. Rob was jealous when his brother was born


After giving him ultimatums, I often caved in and resorted to giving him love in return for nothing, not even acknowledgment. But Rob's hostility and apathy grew in direct proportion to his height and strength of will.

Oddly, his schoolwork didn't suffer, even though he did very little work. In fact, his teachers considered him a gifted child.

Four years after Dan died, I remarried. Chris was a father waiting to happen and, though he'd never been married, was undaunted by the prospect of fitting into a fully formed family. The younger boys turned to Chris's gentleness like flowers after a frost. But not Rob.

By then, my eldest son's ugly behaviour wasn't occasional, but daily. He'd stopped doing homework altogether - even at the expensive school for the gifted I sent him to when, against all odds, that first novel became a bestseller.

I explained Rob's utter lack of will to try anything he couldn't master instantly as boredom (after all, his IQ put him in the genius range) and I explained his unkindness as a side-effect of his grief. I was a virtual ticker tape of explanations for my eldest son's malice.

Deep down, I was sick with fear that something was truly wrong with my boy. But whenever he did something awful - like when he lit a fire next to a railway track, or bullied other boys at school - I rushed in to rescue him.

I always did. For this awful teenager was once my beautiful and sweet little boy. And at night, through the wall that separated his room from mine, I would hear him crying.

Refusing to give up on him, I took him to a parade of psychologists. He told them he hated me, that he had no friends because I pushed them all away.

The whirling epicentre of his fury was that as their father approached death, I'd still made the boys go to school, even on the last day of term, truly believing nothing would happen in the half-hour it took the kids to pick up their exam results.

Horrifically, I was wrong, and Dan passed away while they were there.

Despite how little sense it made, Rob would never believe that denying him the chance to say goodbye wasn't deliberate.

Torment: Jacqueline found her son's anger difficult to deal with when he was a teenager and eventually asked him to leave (posed by models)


The toughest and best psychologist said that this sin was only an excuse.

Rob and I were locked in a destructive dance of broken promises and fresh starts - and it was up to me to disengage. She did not believe Rob was suicidal or a budding psychopath.

'This is about your guilt, your need and his power,' she said. Another told me the greatest gift I could give Rob was to let him fail and repeat a year at school. It seemed too unkind. Plus if he failed, I failed, too.

So we muddled onward through adolescence. Whenever a crack appeared in the glacial front, when Rob's lip quivered, I would rush in.

'What hurts?' I would ask, hoping that once, just once, he would betray another emotion besides self-pity.

Invariably, he would answer: 'You. Get out of my life.'

But he wouldn't let me get out of his life. Whenever the world disappointed him, when the first girl he loved dropped him after a month, or he failed to make a team when he refused to try, Rob attacked me with a vengeance that began to terrify me.

Try to imagine loving someone who is actively, cruelly unloving, who towers over you, shrieking vile names and describes your life as a fraud.

Do you know what exquisite agony it is to be able to remember nuzzling that person's little baby feet and hear him gurgle with pure joy? Can you even fathom how painful it is to yearn for just one touch from the miserable, scowling, resentful, hateful hulk that your chuckling blond baby has become?

Two classes before his exams, Rob dropped out of secondary school and got his own flat. He got a job as a technical specialist for a big online music company.

I tried to push it, but he said university was out of the question.

'Concentrate on your other kids,' he sneered, 'the ones who actually need you. I never have and I never will.'

I should have been hardened, after years of put-downs. But those words still took my breath away. Yes, our lives had been hard, even austere, for a long time afterwards.

But as tough as things had been, Rob had always known he was loved. And my other children, brought up in the same environment, were perfect gentlemen.

Of course, they had been younger when their father died, so their loss was not so shattering. But that didn't explain everything. They showed kindness and temperance, ambition and mercy, even though Danny had to overcome learning disabilities and Marty battled chronic asthma. Kids dealt far worse cards somehow thrived.

Instead, Rob seemed determined to build a future in which he strived to be obnoxious, disdainful and deceitful.

Things finally came to a head one blisteringly hot summer's day in 2008 when we were having a family barbecue. Marty, then 18, wanted to leave.

'Your brother just got here,' my husband told him gently. 'All the more reason,' Marty muttered.

Then Rob shoved Marty, who sprang back at him like a terrier. 'You little ****,' said Rob, springing into action and grabbing Marty. 'I'll smash your face in.'

At last, the wall of denial I'd mortared together so carefully over ten years crumbled. A party with Rob was like a picnic with the town bully. We brought the food; he brought belligerence.

'Stop,' I said, coming between them. 'Stop it, Rob. Please leave. Go anywhere, just go away.'

'If I leave,' Rob said, 'it means I'll never have anything to do with this family ever again.'

The younger kids drew a collective breath. They were used to Rob's outbursts, but not this. Not to hearing their older brother say he didn't care about any of us. 'I just really have no feelings for any of you,' he shrugged. 'It's a relief to stop faking it.'

Rare smiles: Mother and son look happy together in 1997 - and remain that way today after reconciling


The awful thing is that I felt that relief, too. But, as the dust settled, after all the years of insults, whining and swearing, after all the oxygen Rob had consumed in our lives, I could finally see the truth: Rob didn't really hate us, he hated himself for his awful behaviour. Unless I stopped forgiving that behaviour, he could never change.

I didn't hate Rob. I still loved him. But that love had become an old refrain.

The freedom to give all my attention to the rest of my family was something to cherish. But there were times I thought I would lose my reason. Over the next four months, I thought my heart would break. I didn't know if Rob was in work or out of it, alive or dead. I must have picked up the phone 200 times to call his mobile. I put it down 200 times.

Chris would never have stopped me calling Rob, but one night he said: 'You know, Rob nearly cost us our marriage.' I knew he was right. The longer Rob was away the farther the levels of conflict and stress dropped - sweet rain after a drought.

Then, that September, Marty was leaving for university and I was cooking spaghetti when, through the open kitchen window, I heard the sound of a car chugging up the hill. It was Rob.

My breath began to come in gasps. What could he want? Surely, he hadn't come to say goodbye to Marty - the sibling he'd abused the most.

Marty answered the door, and Rob apologised to him and held him close. At first Marty flinched, but then accepted his brother's embrace. I watched disbelievingly as Rob came into the house. I could not say, oh, how my eyes have hungered just for the sight of you and he could not say, I was so wrong. Instead, I said 'Would you taste this?', nervously proffering a spoonful of my lasagne. 'I think it needs sugar.'

Tasting it, Rob said: 'It's perfect.'

He stayed for six months.

Sleeping in the spare room, he finished his secondary school qualifications and - terrified - enrolled in university. Two years later, he completed a degree in computer engineering.

So, what changed?

The turning point was the day that his aimless loser of a flatmate upped sticks, leaving Rob with unpaid bills and forcing him to sleep on floors.

Finally, he had to assess what was left. With a dead-end job and nowhere to live, thanks to his flatmate's behaviour he learnt how it felt to be held to account for someone else's failings, just as I had for years with his.

At last, Rob admitted his own role in his downfall. Essentially, he had an addiction, a dependency on anger. Flying into a whining rage was so much easier than taking responsibility. Recognising that was the first big hurdle; the next one was swallowing his pride and retracing his steps back to our house.

Three years later, Rob still has a short fuse. It's as though he has so much love in him now that he doesn't quite know how to cope with it and has to let it off, like steam. He admits that caring feels odd, and frightening.

Now, though, anger lasts a day instead of a month. He's alienated so many people; he does not want to risk more.

He calls his brothers weekly and takes care to remember their birthdays and achievements, and comes round to see us often.

Almost every day, he calls or texts. He signs his notes to me 'Love Rob' and - in a refrain mothers everywhere will recognise - he tells me that someday, when he's made his fortune, he'll make me rich.

But I already am: people who meet Rob consider him one of the most delightful young men they've ever met. And he is.

For more than two decades, I never had the chance to brag about my boy - I could only make dry jokes to cover my alarm and shame. Now, it's as if a clenched muscle in my breast has finally relaxed. Perhaps it is my heart.



source:dailymail