Tender love and care... Do special things with him. Any time he does want to talk be there for him. Give him extra 'mommy' love. When he goes back to school have him talk to the counselor. They will be able to try and help him learn to cope with his new found feelings. We started taking my SS to the school counselor 5 months ago, and now with summer we are using a Therapist and it is really helping him get his feelings out, without telling his mother, father and I how he feels. Don't get me wrong he talks about it but not as much as he does with the counselor. In talking to someone that is not 'involved' he does not feel like he is hurting anyones feelings. Good luck, I know how hard it is to love a child so much and not know what to do to make them feel better.

I think there are a lot of kids in your SS's situation and they aren't all children of divorce either! There are many kids and adults who want answers and explanations as to why their parents weren't there for them or better at being parents. I think it is a good idea to get him counseling now and have him deal with it so he can go on with his life and become a better person. Too many people are having problems well into their adult lives because of stuff that happened to them as kids and they never were allowed to talk about it or were too scared to. Lots of parents don't even realize what effects their choices and decision made on their kids. Just be there for your SS and love him and even if he isn't that close with you now, he will be someday. As he gets older he'll see that you care and love him and he had a mother like the one he wanted his real mother to be.

This may or may not be applicable. Dunno.

My wife has a BM that has a, shall we say, hit-and-miss relationship with reality. Not dangerous per se, but she tends to be very selective about her memories, and is only occaisionally reliable in crises -- unless you count being unreliable as a strange form of reliability.

My wife is 30 years old. She's known her mom for...well, 30 years. However, she gets suckered into trusting her mom on a semi-regular basis during critical situations, and nearly every time, she's burned all over again.

Why? I think that my wife has confused the job description -- "Mommy" -- with the real person, let's call her "Ms. X". "Mommy" is supposed to be able to do the occaisional favor for her grandchildren -- say, be able to pick them up from a bus station on time. "Ms. X" on the other hand, runs out of gas on the freeway after misplacing luggage in the station. (I'm making this up, but you get the drift.)

People shouldn't be forced into having to "handle" their parents. However, this is the situation your SS is in. Life has given him a BM that needs to be treated like a bank -- "it sure would be nice if my check was processed in the next 3 days, but I need to plan like they're not only going to take a week and a half, but also like they're going to lose it at least once in the process." He needs to be able to separate his expectations of the job description from the expectations he should have for his specific real mom. And he needs to learn the hard lesson that if people act the way we expect them to act, then any problems we have with that are our own lookout (to the extent that he as a 10 year old has control over his own actions, and his contact with his mom).

All of the above are ways to help him understand his situation, and to protect himself from inflicting further probs on himself through selective memory or "maybe this time" kinds of thinking -- I really don't have any useful advice about "how to make him happy". Maybe he *needs* to be unhappy with it, in order to avoid repeating these behaviors with his own family sometime down the line.

Maybe he should draw up a real description of the duties of the job "Mommy", and see if he'd hire his BM for that job. If not, see if someone is already doing the job. (Like, say, you.) If there's any lack, maybe you could offer to subcontract. Or see if there's any other available subcontractors....

I'm being facetious, but only a little. Your SS *knows* he can't trust his mom. He should be angry over it, but realize that life sometimes stinks. He needs to figure out how far she has allowed herself to be loved, love her just that much if he cares to, and no more -- or if more, to realize and accept the consequences he's buying in to. And he needs to realize that 'momhood' does not reside only with her. It can also reside with you, or with other folks in his life.