So many better answers here than I could contribute, but what you said about your son resenting you has been on my mind.

I have five children, 16-31. I was lucky in that my symptoms, present and progressing since childhood, were manageable when my older ones were little. I tried to be supermom, homeschooling, scratch baking and cooking, made clothes, quilts, knitted sweaters, huge Christmases, just really the whole domestic goddess thing, and did it well.

My eldest and only daughter, 31, as well as her next younger brother, 28, would tell you that their childhood was perfect. My eldest son, 30, dwells on the mistakes and even the most ridiculous things. He is convinced he should have been an only child, (he is the second one, mind you!) that he should have gone to Harvard, that I should have made professional contacts so that he could go into diplomatic work, that we should not have spent money adopting two more children and depriving him. His memories are purely delusional and his reactions to our inevitable mistakes are over the top. I tell you this only to say that how children view their childhood has little in the end to do with the realities of it.

Our two youngest children have had to deal with an increasingly disabled mom. They do not display resentment about this but while both were adopted as infants one is distinctly more self absorbed and separate from our family culture than the other. He sometimes wishes he had been adopted by people who were better off and able to spoil him, although we are financially quite stable. He has largely taken an anti-intellectual stance. There is no question that we have disappointed him and yet his father invested far more time in him and his activities than in any of the other children. It is a question of expectation vs. reality and his expectations like his eldest brother's are too high.
Our youngest is thoroughly attached to us and to his siblings and believes he has had a wonderful childhood. He is a very happy and contented person, and yet he has had to bear the brunt of having a disabled mom, living in a disorganized and often messy household, pushing a wheelchair through universal studios, having more responsibilities than the others.

I go into all this detail to make a simple point. Children are not blank slates and it is impossible to tell how they will react to minor and major disruptions in childhood. Your son may well take all this in stride and become stronger and more independent while feeling like he had a perfectly good childhood. He may be the kind who feels like every problem he encounters in adulthood is due to some failure in his upbringing. You have little control over where he will be on this spectrum, much less than you think. Every parent is flawed and every child has to overcome less than perfect circumstances. Please do not let the stress of worrying over this affect you.

The most important thing is for your son to feel loved, valued and secure. To feel important in your life and never to feel like a burden or unwanted. The rest is incidental.

Susanne C,

Thank you for sharing such a touching family history to illustrate the overall truth of your final paragraph. You tell a narrative similar to mine with my 3 young step-children growing up with my pain, disabilities and illnesses.

Dave.

I decided when I had children the one major thing I would make sure they knew was that I loved them. I wondered many times growing up if my mother hated me. (We are very close now)
Susanne you are right. We can only do the best we can. We need to love our children and be there for them. I have 3 children and if someone asked them I'll bet they all have different opinions on their childhoods. Some people just can't face that they are responsible for their own happiness. They want some else to blame their failures on.
I hope you don't mind me saying this but it's a shame your adopted son doesn't realize how lucky he is to have you as a mother.

I think he does sometimes. I just think he had that kind of personality that is never satisfied, which will torment him all his life. When we let him buy a stick-shift car, even though it meant that fewer people in the family could use it, or even move it, and it narrowed the selection considerably, he was tired of it in a few months. I worry for his girlfriend because of his fickleness. My husband has put incredible effort into this child, learning from his mistakes with our older boys that he needed to develop a better relationship with this one, and really deserves more credit than I do. He is far enough along in his education with a great internship lined up, again mostly through his father's efforts, that his future looks good, and that is all we could do.

Some mothers do not love their children. Mine hated me from birth and I always knew it. You never get over that experience, no matter how well life turns out, there is always the feeling that if your own mother couldn't love you you must be very, very flawed.