Feeling like I have to babysit a friend...

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I had recently agreed to have a friend sleep over this Saturday evening and we would spent all the rest of that Saturday together. I had also originally planned on going to a fund raiser/ party for Autism and take her with me which would have been downtown. Yet, she pulled out the red stop sign by telling me that her parents didn't want her riding the train downtown Atlanta and they wanted us to stay around my condo and go off and do things around the area. I also suggested seeing a specific movie and she whined that she didn't like those kind and had a total attitude about that.

Finally, I feel like she has pitched an attitude with me for the last few years and acted like she is better than I am.

So I went and canceled her visiting because I had made other plans and I really felt that I had to babysit her because she lower functioning than I am and I didn't want to cancel my other plans for her. So I left her a message and told her that I planned on canceling because I wanted to do my other plans this weekend and not cater to someone who was acting ungrateful. She then left a message on my voice mail with an attitude that she had a major meltdown. So I called her back and told her that I didn't want her there because she was acting ungrateful and required high maintenance.

Should I have handled this differently?

I think you handled it right. Why should you cancel your other plans just because her own mother didn't want her riding downtown?

So maybe another weekend would do.

That is what I explained to her over the phone when I canceled her coming over by telling her that this was not a good weekend since I had made other plans on both Friday and Saturday when leaving her a message. She had also called me later Monday evening and a message and threw a tantrum over the phone by saying,"Hey, I just had a meltdown so please call me back.." So I called her back and let let her know that I felt like she was having an attitude about everything that I had to offer including her parents not wanting her to ride the train with me downtown. She didn't seem to act very sorry for the way that she had acted and never even apologized.

You did what you had to do. There's nothing wrong, with that.

I had a friend, who was a lot like yours. I had to constantly babysit her. She clung on to my side, like you wouldn't believe. It turned out, that she wasn't allowed into certain stores, that I wanted to go into. We've drifted apart, over the years. Now she's best friends, with the older of my two closest friends.

She is very clingy like you are talking about and I do feel like I am drifting apart from her and it is sad but I really feel that we both live in two very different worlds and maybe I am being a little selfish. She lives with her parents and she is currently 29 years old and has lower Autism and has holes in her ear drums but functions like a child/ early teenager. She is not working right now and is not going to school because her parents do want her to while her mother is looking to find her another sheltered work shop program with all kinds of activities. Finally, she lives a ways away from myself in a more rural part on the outskirts of Atlanta where there is no transportation and her closest neighbor is quite a ways away from her house. She has a boyfriend but they are both sheltered and hardly get to go on dates at all and only spend time together at church once a week and that's about it. When she does go out, it's mostly to go camping with her parents, help her grandmother inside the city of Atlanta, short visits with me, and group events people people with developmental disabilities. Meanwhile, I am 28 and a half and I just moved back out on my own 7 months ago and I am holding down a part-time job, going to college, going to counseling to deal with my anger, learning and finding out about different things that I am interested in, while maturing.


Like you were also saying about the clingy behavior, she gets so lonely and bored that she will give you a call on the phone 10 times in one night and this is every night if you don't pick it up. I have told her not to do that many times and call my phone two times in one night at every half hour and if I do not pick up that means that I am busy. I had also mentioned to her that she needs to pick on phone and do the two times on that phone at the half hour. She also gets mad and gets this idea that my friends and I don't like her and then she will start crying when it's not true.