I have a couple of good friends and my sister as support. My sister became a part time stepmother years before me and lived with the highly manipulative, entitled stepdaughter for some years. She (and her DH) fell for the sob story, how essentially the stepdaughter was a Cinderella and a free maid in BM’s house, only to discover that she was the entitled teenager who couldn’t wash herself, let alone clean the house and still stinks the guest bedroom out when she visits, now in her 20s.
Admittedly, I also used to encourage my sister to be more patient with the girl. Little did I know about de@th by thousand paper cuts.

For years, I worked within foster care system, supporting the carers to house and love some  of those kids from hell. While some turned out to be decent human beings, I’d say that from the carers perspective it wasn’t worth the stress - eventually, even after we thought that all was going well, the kid would leave at 18 and the carers were left feeling like they were a free hotel to the little ingrates they genuinely loved. I’m ashamed to say that I was one of those constantly trying to prop up those rickety structures doomed from their inception. On the other hand - who knows, maybe someone needed to believe in those kids? Maybe I’m the reason they only smoke dope and not meth, LOL.

As for support for me - I remember an ex-friend having a go at me for not being understanding enough when my steppos (teen and tween) laid into each other in front of a busy restaurant where we all went for a special occasion. My SO had to promptly shove them in the car and cut his participation short. This was typical for us, sadly. My ex friend insisted that I need to “talk more” to the more violent one and that “maybe he’s depressed”. Stuff like that came really condescending, as if I hadn’t  throught or tried this before, multiple times.
Mind you, this was the friend who is a chronic cheater and typically insists that each of her new husbands love kids from her other baby daddies “as his own”, meaning he financially supports the whole brood. So perhaps not the best person to dish out moral advice.

Generally, I think it’s only other stepparents can truly understand all the nuances. Even I had no idea before I became one, even though I worked so close to it for years.

Last edited by BanksiaRose (8/31/2025 10:04 pm)

Kes, in reality you are lucky with "the madams" shunning you!  I consider myself lucky that Chef's three now adult ferals have been shunning us since 2009.

Now if only I could do something about Chef's terrible narcissistic personality which is getting worse as he gets older.

I became a stepparent in 1996.  He came to live with us in 1998.  Prior to him living here, he came every other weekend and largely wanted to stay with MIL because SIL’s kids lived with her. He and SIL’s younger kid were close to the same age and were thick as thieves.  You wouldn’t know it now though. We all lived on the same property so it wasn’t a big deal and he was able to walk home whenever.  When he came to live here it was StepHell to me.  He was constantly getting into trouble at school, he was always doing things at MIL’s that she didn’t like, he was disrespectful to every woman in the family except for me. MIL or SIL would call us and complain and my husband would say “send him home”.  They also had permission to discipline him but they never would.  Had they simply disciplined him or sent him home then he would have straightened up.  BM of course wanted to control things. SS would tell her EVERYTHING to the point I felt like I was living in a fishbowl. 

I didn’t have any support but I didn’t really reach out for it.  I figured it would be useless anyway. I complained at times to my husband but he didn’t seem to care.  “If you hate it that much.. “ was all he’d say.  I took it as if I didn’t like it I could leave.  I did think about leaving sometimes.  I figured everybody else would say the same thing. “You knew he had a kid”, “you knew what you were getting into” “did you think he’d never come live with you?”  To answer the last question, truthfully no I didn’t.   BM loved getting child support and loved being in control. Until she didn’t.   I think my dad might have sensed something and I did come to him with some of my problems.  I don’t know if he sensed how bad things were and how unhappy I was at times.  He was a stepparent too but his stepkids were grown and they loved him.  He didn’t have to deal with their bio dad because they were grown, so it was different. 

Other than my dad possibly having a feeling about it, I had no support.  My aunt might’ve been a good support person too had I reached out.  I mostly kept things to myself because of how my husband reacted really.  It would backfire on him years later.  My resentment towards it all came out of nowhere a few years ago.  He did a lot of apologies. 

Society expects us to love them like our own. Then we do and they tell us that skids are not obligated to even like us much less love us.  That we’re the adult, and those skids had no say in us being in their lives.  That is their justification for the double standard.  Oh but it’s not a double standard in their eyes.  If you try to say otherwise then they laugh at you and some say you are a bad person.  But the skids can treat us how they want because they don’t have a say in you being there. 

Society sucks.