Reply to Tips for dating divorced dads? How to interact with their kids or their mom if you meet them?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
It is definitely not that easy to be a stepmom.  For one, the kids will never really accept you, whether or not they tell you this. [/quote]

In many cases it works out a lot better if she just tries to be dad's wife and nobody's mom.[/quote]

I’m the PP who is a stepmom. Jr high age is TOUGH. my advice would be to take it really slow and avoid spending a lot of time with the kids. This is a delicate age and you’re better off trying to start building a relationship when they are a bit older (16/17 is good).

Are you sure you never want children of your own? If not, you’re golden. If you do, that makes things complicated.

The main thing to remember is that being a stepmother is a thankless job. The kids will never really appreciate you, so only do what you feel comfortable doing and don’t expect any accolades from them. If you go into it expecting them to think of you as a mother or even show gratitude, it won’t work. I treat my stepdaughter well because she is important to my husband and she is a nice young lady and deserves it. [b]But I know better than to think she’ll ever really care about me.[/b] Which hurts and sucks sometimes but is what I signed up. [/quote]

This.  Because the truth is, especially if you enter their lives when they are older, you're not really doing whatever you do for them, for them.  As a reluctant stepmom, you're doing it because it's the price of admission to your relationship with their father.  Nobody's like "oh, I love little Larla so much, I think I'll marry her dad so I can spend more time with her", right?  You're putting up with them for your marriage and they're there because putting up with you is the price of their relationship with their father.  That can be a polite and amicable relationship if both sides are realistic and nobody's a psycho or a jerk.  Maybe in time they'll like you, and they'll probably appreciate you taking care of their dad when he's older (so that they don't have to do as much), they may love you after a few decades.  But don't expect any gratitute, because they didn't ask for any of this.  Whatever you may do to care for them, they would probably prefer to have done by one of their parents, or maybe not done at all.  They didn't ask you to come into their lives and do things for them.  You're the one who wants to come in.  So there won't be gratitude.

It's very, very hard to walk into teenagers' lives with zero parenting experience, when they're dealing with a divorce, shared custody, and the major life transition of adolescence, and have it go smoothly.  You just don't have enough background knowledge to do the job, and if you don't actually want to, it will be hard to motivate.  And you will absolutely loathe planning your whole life around custody and compromising with the ex on various things like the schedule.  So save yourself the hassle and just date someone else.[/quote]

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