The ? refers to the fact that I have not heard it from his mouth yet.
This is my oldest son who is the father of the granddaughter that has been in my life so very much. My son and her mother finally called it quits about a year ago after a few years of switching the amount of interest each had in making that relationship work. Now he is seeing a different person for the last five months or so. She has a 10 year old daughter.
He seems to really like this lady. It appears to me that one of the main draws this lady and her daughter have for him is the fact that they have not had easy lives. They live with her grandparents who are not entirely supportive / welcoming to them. He tells me that they sometimes don’t get enough to eat, and have lived "less than" lives. For example, when they went together and got her daughter and my granddaughter pumpkins and they made jack-o’-lanterns out of them, and we ate and baked pumpkin seeds, he told me that this is the first time her daughter had ever cut a jack-o’-lantern.
My son is a very sensitive person and he would give the shirt off of his back to his friends. But this is no reason to marry. #1
#2… My sister-in-law tells me that when my son and his friend were over at her house the other day, helping her with some heavy work, that my son was arguing with her on the phone. That she could hear the girl accusing my son of not really being at my SIL’s house and helping her. I guess the girl was suggesting that he was with someone else? She ended the conversation and my said out loud that he was going to disconnect her phone, because he was the one paying for it. Later, I found out through her granddaughter that follows my son on Facebook, that he had changed his "status" to "single". That was maybe 10 days ago.
And, perhaps selfishly…#3 is that I’m guessing he will be asking / suggesting that if/when they get married, they will come here to live.
And #4, she is on some kind of probation that my son does not want to share with me. I don’t know what kind of trouble she was in and I understand mistakes, but we don’t need any more issues" in this home.
Also, I’m gonna say that I feel that my son has been seeing his daughter less since these two have come into his life. And that is SO not OK, at least with me. Not that it’s really my business.
I’m not trying to be negative about this relationship, seriously. And I am trying to "practice" the appropriate response when he finally does tell me about his "engagement". Do I act surprised? I’m basically an honest person, so I’m not going to pretend I didn’t know. But do I immediately present "issues" with the situation because I ask him why he didn’t tell me?
I am remembering a comment my son made to me a week or two ago… Maybe a month… That he knew that mother of his daughter was engaged now. And I wonder if he is trying to rush this relationship based somewhat on that fact. I have never really thought that he was completely over her.
So I guess I’m just wanting some input about how to handle this with him. Do I carefully point out some of my concerns? Or do I just say congratulations and let it go at that? I know what it is like for parents not to support marriage and I don’t want to do that to him.
But this is more than a little concerning.