As a young adult, getting your own place is a super exciting experience, allowing you freedom and space to be yourself without the constant oversight of your family.

But for parents, their kids leaving home can be quite a tricky adjustment, with emotions high and a lonelier reality something that, for some, takes time to accept.

The guy in this story absolutely has the latter kind of mom.

So when he moves out to get away from her prying, he hopes that his life will be better as a result.

But he never expected she’d be his constant companion in his new place too.

Read on to see how this transpired.

AITA for giving the spare keys for my house to my father instead of my mother?

I am a 21-year-old man, and I got a nice little apartment in the center of a big town about a year ago when I started my company because profit allowed so.

Also I was going insane living with my mother.

I moved out mainly because I was so inefficient in anything I wanted to do when living with my mother that I felt I’d make the company fail if I didn’t have my own space.

When I got the apartment I gave her the spare key to my house in case I ever lock myself out in any way, or in case I’m traveling abroad and there’s stuff that needs to be done in the house (e.g. watering plants).

But her access to his apartment was quickly abused.

Lately my mother has been randomly showing up at my house unannounced and staying for hours with the excuse of having to clean the house.

I’m obsessed with keeping things in order, so what she cleans I don’t know – she mostly just moves perfectly organized things around into different places with different organization, which confuses me every time making me spend 10 minutes to find something that I knew perfectly where it was before she moved it.

But not only that, she asks me questions – extremely simple questions. Like, maybe she downloads an app for parking and has to insert the license plate of her car. The app asks her “Insert the license plate of your car here” and she comes to me asking “what do I do here?”.

These are extremely simple questions with extremely simple answers that take no more than ten seconds of thinking to reach. I don’t mind helping others so I give the answers and it wouldn’t be really much of a problem in normal conditions, but I feel like she’s overdoing it.

So he’s started taking action.

I’ve started keeping track of two things: how many times she interrupts me every hour, and how much of my time this is wasting.

What came out is how much difference moving out has made – and not in the way I’d expected.

Before moving out, there were between six and seventeen interruptions per hour, which amounted to 25 to 40 minutes wasted per hour.

After moving out (when she started appearing here), it’s between 100 and 240 interruptions per hour, or 43 – 54 minute wasted per hour.

Yikes! Let’s see how this is affecting his working life.

I really cannot work or live like this.

Recently it took me two hours and 55 minutes to eat lunch (two plates of food, not even too full), while watching a single twenty minute episode of an anime.

The rest of the time was constant questions and interruptions, and my lunch break was supposed to be thirty minutes long.

I own the little business I made but I’m a programmer as well, so I need focus to work both on the legal documents and on the code of what we’re developing – and the team awaits instructions from me, which I’m not able to provide when she’s around.

But that’s not the only problem with his mom being around.

It would be fine if she listened to my answers, but she asks, I answer, and she doesn’t respond until I give her the answer at least five times.

Then she says that I have to wait because she’s doing something else, and then she asks me the same thing again because she didn’t listen.

She’s offended that I want to give the keys to my father instead, because he’s always working and almost never present for me and she says she’s always there for me.

But after a certain point I feel like the presence is a bit too much.

AITA?

His mom is being extremely controlling, and clearly hasn’t accepted that he’s an adult that has his own life now.

She’s completely smothering, and if his business fails, she will be the only one to blame.

He absolutely needs to take the keys away – his mental wellbeing depends on it.

Let’s see what folks on Reddit made of this.

This person thought he was partly to blame for enabling his mother.

While others thought that giving the key to his dad would present problems too.

Meanwhile, this Redditor gave his mom the benefit of the doubt.

Sure, she might be lonely and just wanting to spend time with her son. Maybe a scheduled meeting would solve all their problems.

Or perhaps she’s overbearing and feels a need to maintain a constant presence in her son’s life, even after he’s moved out.

Regardless, this behavior is hurting both of them, and it needs to stop.

This mother and her son need boundaries.

If you liked that post, check this one about a guy who got revenge on his condo by making his own Christmas light rules.