Disengaging, Nacho support thread

[SnowWhitesSM]

Hiya - anyone fancy a disengaging support thread?

Rules of disengaging - not your circus not your monkeys! The more I concentrate on good things in my life the more I don't care about the shit I cant control. There is still a bit of a target on my back as I'm not the greatest at disengaging, but I'm trying!

Helpful links I've found along the way -

blendedfamilyfrappe.com/about there is a survival guide download on this site that has saved my sanity.

Radical step mum on IG is also very helpful.

There's the Facebook Nacho-ing group, it's American based and there is also an academy for additional support. Advice is pretty good although there are obvious culture differences between UK and US step parenting.

jamiescrimgeour.com/uncategorized/when-should-a-stepmom-disengage-from-parenting/ another blogger that I've found a bit helpful.

If anyone wants to join in and has any other links to share that would be great!

What I'm trying to achieve by disengaging is to take the target off my back. So I don't say to DH argh the living rooms a mess and dss hasn't put anything away, I ask dh to tidy up the living room. He then sees its dss mess and tells him to tidy up or, if he chooses he tidies up himself and I'm not put out by it. This was dh can't get defensive and put his annoyance on me and I'm not the bad guy.

Some things you can't disengage from - my recent thread about positive lft is testament to that, but life has got easier since I've stepped back and found something else to concentrate on rather than be annoyed around dhs parenting.

That sounds really tough too @candlelightsatdawn. I’m glad you were able to outright tell him to stop it and how it was making you feel (I don’t think it’s sticking the knife in to tell him that his insistence on making everything about his eldest child will impact on how you see him).

I hope he can be the partner and father you need him to be.

I can very much relate to what you’ve said (albeit in less difficult circumstances - I would have been a lot less nice than you appear to have been of difficult scans became about my husband’s other children). My husband kept making everything about his other children throughout my pregnancy. It was so hard and I felt so unsupported. And that was a healthy and fairly straightforward pregnancy. But still, it felt like my needs (and the baby I was carrying) were always being cast aside. Even more so since the focus on his children was not even relevant to what was going on.

This has continued since the baby was born. I have spoken to him again and again about how I am sick of being unable to talk to him about our baby without him making it all about his other children (and how much more wonderful they are). Individual incidents seem quite petty but cumulatively it’s unacceptable. I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t want to talk to him about our child because I’m not interested in it becoming all about his other children.

Even more so when some of it is almost gaslighting me and he makes it clear that I’m not allowed to offer any opinion on his children’s (often poor) behaviour. For example, yesterday I was telling him that the staff at the baby's nursery keep telling me how fond they all are of him. Rather than focusing on the baby, he decided to turn this into him telling me about how everyone thinks his daughter is wonderful. Except that my experience of his daughter does not fit that description - I get to enjoy the company of a rude, extremely demanding 8 year old who is quietly and sneakily mean to other children and who treats me with open contempt (no matter how nice I try to be).

Instead of just talking about our baby and the event that I was relating to him, he decided to make a broadcast about how great his daughter is. I’m going so he shut down the conversation and I was left with a choice between quietly seething and arguing with him about his total refusal to not make everything about his other children.

That’s a single example, but it seems that almost any time there’s a conversation about the baby he turns it into a broadcast about how wonderful his other children are. They’re not there. They aren’t actually relevant to the conversation. But still I don’t seem to be allowed to enjoy my baby without having the superiority of the SC shoved down my throat. I mean, I can’t even comment that my baby has lovely long eyelashes (he does) without being told every time that my SC has the most amazing eyelashes ever. 🙄

It all adds up and definitely affects how I see my husband.

@BeyondOurReef oh lord that would drive me crackers - I was hoping when DS is here that he would calm down a tad with a real baby in front of him ! Also I thought this was some type of weird quirk of my partners tbh. I'm glad I'm not alone but also I do wonder what the hell prompts it.
I'm so sorry you had such a shitty pregnancy and that's it's continuing, you have my person recommendation to hit him over head with frying pan which time he does it.

Also I probably made myself sound much nicer than I was with DH. I really did lose my rag publicly. I basically said just because you feel like you failed your first child, your literally failing your second.

Is it like word vomit with your DH ? It's like almost reflex with mine and it annoys me so much that I'm willing to have a fight over each time and i have told him he needs to work it out with his shrink because every single time I say a thing, I say oh that snowsuit would be good for baby and he will be like oh DD loved snowsuits and going out in snow or we need to get some bottles for DC and the response is DSC had bottles (without actually answering my question) and I feel like I'm going mad. At one of the scans, the MW made a point and said I know we have spoken about your DSD at length (DH was just going on and on) but we are actually here to discuss this baby shall we move on (I wish the grown swallowed me up) . Any tips if you have managed to stop it please throw my way ? Right now I just go mad every single time.

Also 8 (is the age of hell) seems to crop up time and time again. I don't have any advice but you have my sympathies honestly my friends DSD is 8 and honestly she's horrific and malicious and smart. Thing is to be that way they do have to have a level of smart to lie so my friend has started saying to her DH look I know she's testing her boundaries and of course because she's so smart she's manipulating you via Zyx. Her DH seems to listen due to the smart compliment first 😩

I'm sending you cake 🍰 and 🍷 vibes. Have some for me as this has been a long pregnancy.

I honestly think blended families just rarely work. We're sold this blended family dream but in reality it's a pile of shit for everyone involved.

We go into it with the best intentions and hope but it's a pile of wank. Without that inate biological attachment (I am not talking about adoption here, although there are plenty of unethical studies showing that adopted children who don't know they're adopted feel like they're different and don't belong and act out) (there's also a reason why late adoptions rarely work out and those dc usually end up back in Foster care) it just doesn't work.

I can pinpoint my abandonment wounds in my marriage and they're mostly all to do with h putting his son above us. There are blended family theories that say operating the family on 3 seperate main family systems works well - you and him, you and your dc and him and his dc, but I've never been able to be ok about that and I know I'm not the only one.

I feel really sad this morning that it didn't work with my h. Really sad. But even if we take a year apart and work on ourselves the reality is that it's never going to work with the blending. I won't get to have the family I want with him. My head will always be filled with the shit that comes with it and that makes me miserable. I will always see his son as a threat because he takes my h away from being a team with me. I wanted it to be like a nuclear family where me and him parented together as a team for all the dc but it's not able to happen like that in step families as a norm. It's really sad.

@candlelightsatdawn it must be really awful if the midwife is having to pull him up on it. 😱

It is like word salad. I really lose it with him. I just have had enough of the shit, frankly. I wish I could be calmer about it, but honestly I think it’s given me PTSD and this is a major trigger.

I find the 8 year old SD really difficult. Partly, it’s not her fault (it’s her parents’ fault - her mother for encouraging awful values and her father for pandering to it), but she is old enough to know that she’s being horrible.

I find it so frustrating. She’s a very clever girl and hugely manipulative. She’s also sneaky. Her father wants it both ways. He wants everyone to marvel at her academic and general genius. But he wants us all to act like she’s a toddler and cannot be expected to behave nicely.

One of my huge frustrations is the awful golden child/black sheep dynamic that surrounds the SC. Yes SS is difficult but I think that his behaviour is so obviously the product of always being the ‘naughty one’ and compared to his perfect sister. This has been the message he’s been given all his life. No wonder he thinks ‘screw it; I’ll just be horrible’.

The worst thing is that SD just isn’t the wonderful angel they all pretend she is. She’s sneakily and quietly horrible to people in all sorts of ways. She is awful to her brother. For example, she basically ignores him when it suits her. He’ll be speaking to her and she will purposefully ignore him. He then gets really frustrated and shouts and kicks off and everyone tells him how naughty he is. But, actually, his sister is not being nice and she knows she can basically upset him and he end up in trouble. She even smirks when he gets into trouble.

Multiply that by telling him how she’s so much better than him all day long, constantly telling on him and making up lies, ruining any game or activity that isn’t centred around her, behaving poorly herself but just ever so slightly less poorly than him… no wonderful kid is frustrated and loses it.

He’s 3 years younger than her, but their parents and grandparents seem to dismiss this.

Honestly, I once sat (seething) and watched SD behave like a baby at a meal so that her grandma (my truly awful MIL) would spoon feed her - at 7. Meanwhile her not quite 4 year old brother was feeding himself. And his grandmother kept telling him what a naughty boy he was being for making a mess and taking a long time. All while she fed his much older sister and praised her. She was being much, much worse than him even without the age difference!

The dynamic infuriates me. But my husband just perpetuates it. And I end up livid and hugely protective about my children. I will not have him treated poorly by his sneakily unpleasant half sister.

As an aside, I’m sick of the 8 is a ‘young child’ bullshit I keeps seeing thrown at SMs (and get myself). It’s just not that young anymore. When my middle son started Y3 (he’s a summer birthday too, so he wasn’t 8 til Y4) the teacher gave the kids and the parents a talk about how they were not little kids any more and would be expected to take on more responsibility in KS2. And she was right. They weren’t babies any more. They needed different expectations.

On the 8 year olds are not young point too, my middle son was 8 when my husband met him. And he seemed to expect near adult behaviour from him. Yet he insists his daughter is ‘a young child’ all the time. Because it suits him.

Having it both ways: the NR parent playbook. 🙄🙄

@SnowWhitesSM the thing is your husband could have changed but chose not to and you didn't actually have a choice (although he would obviously disagree and you did what was best for you and look flourishing ) there's a podcast bundling around here that said in nuclear families the parents act as a joint umbrella in which the kids collectively fall under and until DH says look she's SM and she's of joint power to me here and staying the kids will keep testing is she or isn't she staying, and what power does she have, wanting a answer from dad. This is compounded by ex wives who are like she had no right to do x y z and tell the children as such. Blended families are hard work, they can work but really the operative question is does DH want to make it work or is he still dithering. What's the ex like. Even with all the perfect factors in place it's still hard work and tbh odds set against it.

@BeyondOurReef oh lord, that sounds very much like what happened with my lovely half sisters, other sister (I don't consider her the nasty sister my half sister as she regularly wishes me dead just for being born and is abusive in the extreme to both of us). Hideous life to lead and my lovely sister really suffered at the hands of being the "bad one" she wasn't bad she was just normal.

Does DH at any point acknowledge the issues with your DSD ? I feel for your DSS, awful being labelled the bad one at all time actually the golden child causing havoc, if it helps my lovely half sister was the black sheep and turned out out of them the nicest human being !

8 is when my DSD hurt the dog and she knew it was wrong and we had to get it rehomed, she knew she it was wrong, was jealous of the dog as daddy loved it and she admitted to as much when she was gone to the therapist who was alarmed about how biases she was about it. The dog was really hurt btw.

Thing is if you talked about a child that was 8 that wasn't a SC people would be like, yup they should know better but if SC doesn't matter the age 8 or 21 people will often infantilise them and they end up with a weird moral code because never pulled up on bad behaviour so it's not their fault but often weirdly not spoken about ?!?

I have zero advice but hope your DH opens his eyes a bit. Only now will DH actually acknowledge the thing with the dog was cruel and morally wrong but most of the time he struggles with it.

My DH has gotten better with it but only when I have openly shamed him and now his family have started to pull him up on it too. Weird things happen in blended families and my friend said similar thing has happened to her friends in blended families, it's a guilt spiral usually triggered by pregnancy or marriage. There would probably be resources for it online if it was allowed to be discussed without the FWC vipers coming on and bashing people.

The poor dog. 😢

You’d think your husband would be more alarmed as purposeful cruelty to an animal (Especially motivated by jealousy) is a very bad sign.

My husband can occasionally recognise that his daughter is an issue. But then he undergoes a massive cognitive dissonance thing where he decides that I’m in the wrong for objecting to it not her for having done something unkind.

And he’s always sucked straight back into the hideous dysfunctional dynamic of his first family. Totally reinforced by his family who all participate in it. It’s really overt too. They all pretend that I’m making it up but I really am not.

Things like MIL insisting that SD must have her own room at her house (because she’s a girl) but that meant that SS literally had no room at all and was being made to sleep in a travel cot in with his dad at 4! All while there was a room permanently designated as ‘SD’s room’. That’s not subtle favouritism or whatever. And both the children’s parents allowed this!

I have said so many times to my husband that, if any member of my family treated my children like that, they would not be seeing us. I would not take my children to visit a grandmother who plays favourites like that.

But, what I have learned over the years is that it wasn’t just MIL. That’s the whole family dynamic and he and just ex did similar things. They’re all caught up in this golden child/black sheep bullshit.

And the irony is that being treated as the golden child is making SD a pretty unpleasant person. It’s not good for her at all. SS’s behaviour is difficult too. But, frankly, I’d think ‘fuck it’ and want the world to burn if I were treated as he has been. His whole life.

There’s nothing I can do about the awful dysfunction around the stepchildren. But I refuse to have my baby subject to the same golden child crap. And I am not having him steamrolled by SD’s enormous sense of her own superiority like SS is.

My older sons both think that the way SD talks to SS is dreadful. I’d never have allowed the older one to tell the younger one that he just wasn’t as good at anything or as clever or whatever, which is what SS hears all the time.

DS2 was utterly perplexed to hear SD saying ‘Oh SS. You just don’t know how to swim. I’m really brilliant at it’. SD cannot swim. Neither of the SC can. SD has had some lessons but if she doesn’t have arm bands on she screams and wails and scratches everyone and just won’t try. If anything, her much younger brother is braver and more competent than she is. But still her parents let her tell him how he’s just not as good as her. It’s not even insecurity - she genuinely seems to believe that she is better than everyone else and is unable or unwilling to recognise that she isn’t. 🤯

She tried to tell my DS that she’s better at swimming than him that same day. He swam off and laughed. He is 4 years older than her and knows fine well that she can’t swim (whereas he’s a seriously good swimmer), so he found it hilarious that the girl with armbands on was trying to claim she was amazing at swimming.

His favourite SD anecdote is the time that she was lecturing SS in the car about how he knows nothing unlike her. He doesn’t even know where Sir Francis Drake lived (which she’d been learning about in school that very week). Except it turned out she couldn’t bloody remember it either. DS is usually quiet and chooses to ignore this crap but he spoke up and said: ‘don’t worry, SS. She doesn’t know either. Maybe it would be better to make sure you know things before you start boasting about it to others people’. My husband told DS off and insisted that ‘you can know something and just not be able to remember it’. Rather than agreeing that she was just being horrible and had comfy unstuck. Rather than learning to be nicer, she had it reinforced that she is actually better than SS.

This is the sort of thing that happens day in day out. Everyone around her keeps preventing SD from learning humility or empathy. And poor SS just has to listen to his father agreeing that his sister is better than him - even where her boasts are nonsense (rather than simply bring because she’s nearly twice his age).

Any decent parent would simply stop their child being horrible and boasting. How hard is it to say something like; ‘he’s much younger than you. He’s at nursery and not being taught these things. Please stop being unkind to your little brother’?

Well I got told to stay in lane by the ex when I said look DSC has some issues at the time of dog situation and she needs therapy (I suspected non neotypical, which is now a confirmed diagnosis) the psychologist basically said you need to get this under wraps because this young girl needs a very strong framework ethical framework and support at or will end up socially and academically struggling. Which luckily we have in place. My god was that a fight, DP still can't understand now why DSD respects and behaves for me for than him but I suspect it's because simply she doesn't respect him. She thinks she's higher in the pecking order than him and that's his own making.

That said some of the conversations we have are down right odd (think being asked if I throw a rock at a bird, how much pain will it be in, will it die, how long will it take ect) - death is a real fav conversation in our house 😩 but usually you have to be very blunt with her re appropriate actions and not and she's usually ok. It's like she's been born without any empathy naturally so you have to tell her in black and white why we don't do things even the legal implications of things. If everyone had continued to dance around her and not instil a strong moral code we would be in trouble. But as long as your very black and white she gets it. Luckily.

I feel for you re SD, must be awful for SS - he couldn't even have his own room 😭 and everyone plays along and totally get you wanting to protect DC from that type of bullshittery. I'm almost glad you have older DC to call her on this stuff as otherwise it would go completely unchecked. Your a better women than I am, I would laughed when DC said what he did. My "other" sister is a completely unpleasant person who is if I say it kindly very very unhappy adult despite all she has and I have to feel bit sorry for her, even though my lovely sister says she doesn't deserve empathy from anyone. It's not a kindness to do this to kids. It's so damaging. My lovely sister was a horror for a long while but she did come around. Horrible it witness growing up though won't lie.

Oh @BeyondOurReef I don't even know what to say to you. What a shit situation for you and your dc and ss. Actually I feel a bit sorry for sd too. She's going to have a horrific life, her trajectory is Foster care and prison. I can't imagine how much of yourself you need to swallow.

@candlelightsatdawn I will check the podcast out thanks.

So today h has rang me and told me that he was diagnosed with general anxiety disorder and he could chose between anger management or cbt for anxiety. He went with the cbt option. Apparently he's got a voice in his head that tells him that if he doesn't check on his son and listen to him breath 10x then he thinks he will die. Theres a few other things too. Omg I feel so relieved. All the times when he was being so over the top and making me feel like an outsider was because of him. Not because of me. I've been thinking for so long that there's something wrong with me and even though on here and in real life everyone says its him - all his twisty roundy things are HIS problem and not mine. I don't know why he didn't tell me this before, probably because he told me how much he hated the depression and anxiety bandwagon brigade and actually has it himself. If you only knew the knots I've tied trying to fix myself when actually its been him all along. I probably should feel a lot more compassion for him as he's been hiding it for so long but I'm pretty over it tbh. If he had told me this a month ago I would have done my best to support him but now I'm tired of it and worried about a lifetime of catering to his anxiety. He did apologise to me about the way he's treated me with me thinking I'm going crazy when its been him all along. An apology isn't really enough at this stage though.

Well I hope he sorts himself out. I personally believe most anxiety stems from trauma and cbt is a sticking plaster and doesn't really work. Until he's able to get to the root of his trauma and deal with it he will always have it.

I’m glad that your husband has finally admitted he’s a big problem (to some extent - although it sounds like it’s couched in a whole poor him thing that isn’t useful) @SnowWhitesSM.

It is probably for the best that he’s admitted this stuff after you left. Because it does sound like the sort of thing that sucks you in and causes you more heartache and misery.

I feel a bit sorry for my SD too. The whole dysfunctional dynamic does her no good. Or, in theory, I feel sorry for her. In practice, i find that I just want to hold my hands up and walk about so I don’t have to see or hear any of it. I can’t imagine looking forward to seeing either of the SC - and that’s on their parents.

Tbh, I would say that her trajectory is probably less of a problem for her than foster care and prison (@candlelightsatdawn’s SD’s behaviour is really worrying in that regard though). My SD is basically going to grow up to be her mother: she’ll put on a big act about how wonderful she is (that people who only see the superficial act will totally fall fit) and she’ll lie and trick people into getting what she wants, while being horrible to the people she’s decided it doesn’t matter if they don’t see the fake nice act any more.

It’s what SD is seeing modelled by her mother very clearly and it’s a behaviour pattern that she is rewarded for emulating. So she does the child version of it. I would not be surprised if in her 20s she isn’t setting out explicitly to trap herself a man with enough money by getting pregnant just like her mother was (we are talking two abortions with previous attempts, before my H said that she didn’t need to have a third and they’d just have the baby a where they previous two marks had taken her up on the abortion. I mean, women can - and should - make choices about their own bodies, but my SC’s mother’s behaviour was so calculated and really awful. She’s basically the kind of woman you think the anti-abortion lobby makes up, but sadly she was going to just keep ‘accidentally’ getting pregnant and having abortions til someone agreed to ‘stand by her’).

What hope does my SD have when those are the kind of values her mother has?

Ummm, golly.

Only one useful thing I can contribute here. @candlelightsatdawn - does your dsd feel pain in the normal way? One of my lot has a very high pain threshold. Stayed with me when younger, and I took them for a long walk on a cloudy summer day. I suddenly realised their face was developing blisters from sunburn. (Nocturnal, pale as). They hadn't noticed a thing.

Anyway, it might explain the questions about pain, and what causes pain. The dog issue sounds horrendous, but it's possible to her it was no more than ripping the arm off a teddy bear - massive cognitive gap.
Looks like you are bridging that gap with the supervised horseriding. Challenging though.

@SnowWhitesSM the thoughts crossed my mind. It's actually been echoed by some of DSC aunties but the very concerning thing she does is act like she's shy and people feel sorry for her then she does something bad. She's absolutely not shy or dumb which is what she projects.

Luckily in the nicest sense because she's smart, I can be very direct with her and she's not emotive in the slightest so it helps to be practical, weird as DH is a giant cuddly bear of emotions. She's just missing all of them and we have spoke at length that she feels different as she doesn't have any emotional response to really at all good bad or anything. It's a bit like there a giant void. I have done a fair amount of reading and as far as what was told to us, we really have to try to put things in a very practical non emotional way at all times as my DSC just doesn't get it and won't get it. She was the same as a baby I have been told, never happy, never sad, rarely cried if ever, that's confirmed by mum, DH and everyone. Everyone said it was a bit odd tbh.
I think the birth was challenging and im not sure if DSC didn't get some type of damage to the brain due to lack of oxygen.

@SpaceshiptoMars yes very high tolerance to pain my DSC along with zero emotions. When we lost one of the babies, she was what I would say atypically upset. She said it was because she saw me be upset and thought it seemed rather awful and seemed like it was painful (it was agony she was right) and she didn't want me to die. Probably one of the only times I have seen a glimmer of emotion, but the horse therapy has done wonders.

She doesn't think oh I love this horse so much, she thinks ok I like horse riding, to continue doing it I need to learn to look after the horse because otherwise I can't horse ride or keep horses when I'm older. I have told her very explicitly that horses can sense people's intentions and won't let you ride them (which is my personal view) I also said if you ride a horse and it doesn't trust you will get hurt. Practical. I have also said horses are very very smart it's rare to meet things as smart as them.

It's very very hard. But not impossible. I dread to think what would have happened had we not got her help. Makes me very angry actually to think about it.

Coming back to this thread to remind myself of the principles of nachoing and for a handhold after a truly Kafka-esque new year's stay from the DSD... One was crying in her room and when I popped up to check on her, sobbed that she wanted to be left alone. Which I did. Upon encountering the other Dsd on the stairs, I conveyed the request for solitude from dsd1 only for dsd2 to burst into tears and accuse me of picking on her... thank God her father was there so knew it was bollocks. She then repeated that to her GPs the next day, despite my having attempted to explain the rationale behind passing the message on that morning when things were calm and apologising if she misunderstood. Luckily GPs are made of pretty stern stuff and took it with a pinch of salt.

I feel a bit at my wits end tbh! Just makes me want to utterly disengage...

Anyone in my position? After 16yrs together with ups and downs and trying and not trying and one SC not seeing us for 4 years (they’re all adults now), how can I disengage and not upset DH?

Am now a step grand parent but am known only by my name as my SD preferred to just have her mum and husband’s mum as ACTUAL “grandmas”. It’s fine. I wasn’t offended by that. Their child is 2 and gorgeous though they do live miles away and with Covid we’ve not seen as much as we’d hoped of them.

We’ve just had Christmas and no visits for any of his “children”. DH was upset. I’m upset for him. We sent gifts and cards for all kids, their partners and DGC, as we always do, and they FaceTimed us on Christmas Day to say thank you. But, no card or anything even for DH. DH usually receives something. They share photos with DH and these he then shares in our family album. I’m tolerated rather than included. I’ve tried. God! HOW I HAVE TRIED!

What I’ve tentatively said to DH is that they’re always welcome, which they are, but that he might want to visit them more often and it’s OK not to include me. I’ve lost my mum and dad in the last 2 yrs, DH has been poorly, my own son has been I’ll (still is). I nearly lost my sister in June. She’s still being treated but, it’ll be a long process. We’re all in our 60’s.

Is it ok for me to say “enough”? I’m fast reaching the stage where my enthusiasm has waned to the point of pretty much non existent after all of these years. Have to say, DH and I met 3 years after his wife left him. We married after a 4 Yr relationship. His kids were teens then and we didn’t want to rush anything. But… I’m STILL an outsider.

@TheRussianDoll I’m in a similar position to you and have said enough now. Lived with DH for several years and we married last year. He has 2 adult DD I have 1. I was NOT the OW DH had been divorced a few years before we met. One SD now has children she cut off all contact from DH when he refused to tolerate her appalling behaviour towards both of us and told her it was unacceptable. SD 2 was fine for years but very snippy towards me on occasion which I ignored for sake of a quiet life. She had a MH crisis and her behaviour towards me started to deteriorate, she was asked by DH to apologise to me after one particular incident (she did apologise and I agreed to move on) she had another MH crisis and this time decided to tell all sorts of lies about things I was meant to have said. I decided enough was enough and told DH I’m done with situation and he should have contact with his DD2 but I was withdrawing from the situation. He continued to invite her to our home and I would ensure I was out, but on times that I have been here and I’ve been very polite she was very blatantly rude. On this basis DH has said (voluntarily) he will only meet her away from our home from now on and she she is no longer welcome due to her behaviour towards me. My DD is fine and is just happy that we are happy, she has also encountered rudeness from SD2 (has never met SD1). To me the stress is just not worth it and I’m happier having NC it’s sad for DH that things are like this but he has seen for himself that their behaviour towards me is awful

@Tara336. That sound dreadful. I think NC is definitely the way to get through it.

For me it’s slightly different in that I have permanent indifference and barely concealed disinterest. That’s why I don’t want to waste any more time on them. I support DH fully in his relationship with them. He loves them dearly and so, so wanted us all to “get along”. I’m sad for him but… enough is enough.

Wishing you well.

@TheRussianDoll I would have loved it if we could have all got on unfortunately his DD decided otherwise. I put up with a lot and seriously considered leaving as I just did not want this kind of thing in my life. Any decision he makes I make sure he does without my input so I cannot be accused of anything. DH believes his ex is behind a lot of the nastiness as she feels threatened and was worried about inheritance! That is ridiculous tbh when I met him I was the one with money, he was living in a rented property and had just lost his business and was starting again. We have built the business up together, I own my own property and have also jointly bought a home with DH, but as I’m younger I must clearly be a gold digger, why let facts get in the way?

It’s a sad situation but it is entirely of their making, I have no interest now in making any effort (same as you) I’m sure that’s frowned upon too but I actually don’t care

Oh, I MAKE THE EFFORT. Every day. Interest (usually genuine) and I like to hear what they’re up to. We’re all meeting up next week. But I know I’ll come away from it feeling sad, a bit lost and very insignificant.

@TheRussianDoll and @Tara336 am in a not dissimilar position.

Last year I drew a line (I’ve known his kids for about 5 years) and now fully support DP to nurture his relationship with his dd (who is 20) entirely separately from me.

Sadly I had to say she is no longer welcome in my house. For a number of reasons. Contact tended to take place here, with a dynamic fitting of much younger kids (us running around after kids) and I just cannot be doing with it. 19 year olds whining for pudding. My kids grew tired of it. After a spectacular toddler tantrum from her in my home I drew the line and absolutely don’t regret it.

Overall it’s sad. Christmas felt rubbish with another ‘compartment’ - DP doing his own Xmas with his own dc. After 6 years it’s pants but I can only control what I can control.

We live separately. Mainly due to the poor fit between their interaction and what happens in my house. If this is how it will be for ever (if this gives us all the right emotional space) then so be it.

It’s not easy. Not easy at all.

@TheRussianDoll I prefer to keep my distance and what I have noticed is that ANYTHING I say is taken, twisted and turned into something it isn’t, this puts me on a permanent edge terrified of saying and doing the wrong thing, I am so careful about what I say I actually remember what’s been said as I’m concentrating so hard as to word things carefully and not be misquoted ie I said to SD2 “your parents are worried sick, please either stay with your DM tonight or here with DF so they know you are safe” this was after one of her MH crisis where the police and coastguard were out looking for her. SD2 waited a while and then told DH I had said “your fxxxing parents are worried sick about you, your either staying here or at your DM house tonight”. SD1 also has this talent of recounting things said or done to DH that don’t actually represent what was said, how it was said, or the intention

@LatentPhase I was careful to let DH make the decision to not have her in our home, as I am not willing to myself in the firing line any more. She was blatantly rude to me in our home Christmas 2020 and so has not been invited back since. I’m glad as I want nothing to do with her and I hate the negativity she brings into our home.

I’m sorry your going through this too, but also strangely comforting I am not alone in this situation

Reviving for a rant. Our weekends are taken up by SC's activities (for context I have older DC and we have a shared DC so I bear the brunt of looking after shared DC during this time). This weekend DH wanted to take his DS out somewhere and so asked me to have his DD for him. I didn't say no but I did say I wanted him to talk to her about behaving, not being rude etc (she's 9, and she has previous - I won't discipline her, what I see as rude, he sees as 'cheeky' our tolerance levels are very different). Cue a hissy fit and he took her with him instead and hasn't really spoken to me since. He really feels like I should suck things up even when I don't want to. We have the same argument over and over. I already lose my own free time (I work all week) to suck up his kids activities, should I have then given up my evening too?

@CornishGem1975 - I was just listening to a podcast on this very topic! Radical stepmom (American obviously- but very informative). I feel you on this! 💐

Ooh I will have a listen! @Ketakones

I'm starting again to try and disengage. Totally fed up of walking across landmines with the eldest SC. I react and then have words with my DP. Little support and juggling a busy career, trying to organise a home and a child who knows what buttons to press with me (to annoy) and her Dad (to be the golden child!) is just too much. I've told him how I feel and of course he has said it's all in my head, I take on too much. Who will grocery shop, who will cook and plan time, who will be a sole parent when at out house? Looks like it needs to be him from now onwards. For my own sanity and wellbeing I need to look after me and let him take care of his lot.