Lovethehub, these are kind of long answers, but they might not make sense without a little back story.
The first year it was probably my kids. I know everyone thinks their kids are perfect, but I could relate many stories of people coming to me and telling me how they had done some sweet thing. W insisted they were uncontrollable brats, and would lash out at them constantly, and tell me it was all my fault they were undisciplined and awful. Everyone of our friends told her she was wrong. We even did a 6 month experiment where I took over all discipline for four kids, and our family was GREAT, but W just couldn't stop herself from griping and started getting back into discipline. If she felt I didn't punish harshly enough, she'd not speak to me for a week. It's interesting fast-forwarding three years, and D10 (D7 at the time) is starting to act JUST like D13 (D10 at the time). Payback's a B!
She started going into depression year two - would spend a lot of time in bed, on her phone, on her laptop. She'd be in bed when I got home from work, get up for an hour and make dinner, and take her dinner back to her bed, and stay there all night. I would tuck in all four kids, but if they didn't come to our room to see her, they wouldn't see her. I even made deals with here where if she would get out of bed by 10:00am and stay out of bed until 8:00pm, we'd go somewhere nice. She finally got on medication, and that helped a little bit.
Year three, it was money, although she still spent most of her time in bed. Her XH stopped paying child support, and when he was going to pay the back money, she was mad at me, so told him to put it in an education fund for them just to spite me. She specifically told me she did it to spite me. I also caught her buying stuff online, and she would sit and scroll through shopping sites for hours - I would come home every day to delivered packages. Also, January 2013, the XW stopped paying child support again (I had asked W to set it up through bank withdrawals, and she refused). She wouldn't do anything about it, and of course, I'm not going to let my stepkids go without, so I paid for everything. I told her she didn't get any spending money until she corrected it. She was livid, and went around telling everyone that I was giving her no money - even though I was paying all the bills and she had a credit card.
I think those are the biggies. She wanted to not be bothered by the kids, to be able to spend whatever she wanted, and just lie in bed all day shopping or playing games.
