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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]At one point [b]my dad's wife's son was doing a failure to launch thing[/b], living with them and secretly drinking. My dad was super unhappy about it, he and his wife and her son had all these yelling fights, he fought with his wife and blamed her parenting, etc. etc. You couldn't be in that house at all without this tension hanging over everything and the kid moping around hung over. It went on for about two years. It was very hard for me to see my dad so unhappy. No amount of "amicable" from my mom would have changed anything. Yes, intact families can have this kind of problem too, but blending families adds more people and gives them more stress to cope with, so it increases the chance of problems. More people, more problems. If it were a bio brother, I would probably have had a more loving relationship and been more patient with it, but since we didn't grow up together at all, he felt like an interloper and a burden and I just wished the whole thing wasn't happening.[/quote]

Same scenario here. Failure-to-launch kid has now entered his early 30’s being coddled by both my Dad and his wife and has never held a job he wasn’t fired from. No one is talking about how fast 40 comes when you have no work history. Unless he does some kind of major turnaround, he’s SOL. Which means he’ll remain on the family dole (ie my Dad’s tab) for life. I don’t expect sh#t from my Dad because my mom raised my sister and I to take care of ourselves. But watching stepbro and stepmom bleed my Dad dry because no one ever imposed consequences on this kid goes a hell of a long way to breed resentment. If he was my actual brother I would’ve sat his ass down a long time ago and sorted this out, but frankly he already has too many adults in his life carrying his water. He will eventually have kids, stay at home, and be congratulated for life for it while someone else does the heavy lifting. Book it. [/quote]

Yes. It's so hard. Of course, it would be fair to say that your Dad chose this marriage and is choosing to pay for things (probably because his wife will leave him if he doesn't). But even so, it leads to a tremendous amount of resentment that, even if not openly expressed, damages family relationships. My father chose to marry someone with a pre-teen son, someone of a different culture with a *very* different parenting style and very different approach to substance use, and I don't think he truly understood how that would play out. Nor did he understand the trauma of the divorce the boy had already been through. Of course, these things don't always happen in a blended family. But it's the divorce and the decision to blend that opens the door to these things, and the trauma of the previous divorces and transition to blending stacks the deck. As you say, if he were my actual brother I would feel more emboldened to intervene. But that tends to go poorly in a stepfamily because his mother would defend him and my father would take her side. So all I can really do is distance myself.[/quote]

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