Don - You SHOULD read my thread because I doubt you would have the same opinion if you did. He put me and our kids through HELL for years by pretending to go to fake medical treatments that allowed him to be away from us with “permission”. The entire time, I was having to reassure our kids that daddy wasn’t dying and take on all of the responsibility for their care whilst simultaneously worrying about my ill spouse who I literally told on a regular basis how much I admired him for facing his illness with such courage. Four years of that Don. Four years!!!! Every single day, he got up each morning and made the decision to keep putting us through that. He saw how much we were suffering and he did not care… he did it anyway. We spent birthdays and Christmases without him… all the while thinking he was in a hospital getting painful treatments. And you tell me that I just simply don’t like him so it doesn’t matter what he does, it will never be enough. For the record, I’ve given him plenty of credit when he has done something good for our kids… both on here and in person. I’ve also been more than fair to him (again…if you had read my story, you would know that). The notion of me liking him or not liking him doesn’t really resonate with me. It’s not like I sit at home ruminating about him because most of the time, he doesn’t actually enter into my thoughts much at all. When I see him and we have a pleasant interaction, I like him just fine. When he does things like send me the text equivalent of a condescending pat on the head, it triggers me, I write about it here and then I get over it. It doesn’t impact our coparenting relationship any more than that. Today’s a new day.
Dawn… I do think you are personalizing this. I’m a stepmother as well and I have a great relationship with my SD22. However, I came along seven years after her birth and had nothing to do with the demise of the relationship between her mom and dad (such as it was…her mom “dated” him when he was engaged to his first wife). In fact, his daughter met both me and XH at around the same time. I am the reason her dad was in her life at all and her mother, as difficult as she is, recognizes this and has told SD how happy she is that I am still in her life and still a big support to her. We aren’t friends but we do have an amicable relationship. It wasn’t easy to get there though because SD’s mom and XH hated each other and I often got the brunt of that from both sides. I became the go between, despite it being an unending source of stress, with the hope that not having to deal with the mom would enable XH to build a better relationship with his daughter. As I have written about on here before, though, it was all for naught as he f’ed it up anyway. So I give stepmothers all the credit in the world…it is a difficult job and it was a horrendous job for me for years.
As you pointed out, though, you came along after his marriage to their mother had ended so you weren’t part of that. This is not that situation and that makes a huge difference. She and XH dragged our kids into their affair by introducing them to her under false pretences months before I had any idea she even existed. A completely selfish move that did not, in any way, reflect any kind of consideration for our kids’ wellbeing. That’s not my definition of love. That aside, I do recognize and appreciate that she is good to my kids and I’ve never said otherwise which is why I write about my feelings in this forum and keep them from my kids. They are my feelings and I get to have them. Maybe I’ll feel differently in a few years, maybe not, but that’s for me to decide.
