Reply to Stepdaughter (16) is out of control

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This is a troll right?[/quote]

Sadly, this is probably not a troll and why you don’t want your kids to have step parents.[/quote]

It’s easy to demonize a stepmom but notice which parent cares enough to write this post?  Workaholic dad is escaping into work.  Stepmom is at the end of her rope.  She CARES enough to ask for help here.  She is clearly not the villain.  Dad is the one who needs to take time off and parent his daughter.  Maybe even take a demotion or forget about being on partner track.

I was this stepmom 15 years ago, powerless as I watched the train wreck before me and frustrated and pissed that my DH and his ex were basically refusing to parent.  I posted here so often asking for help and advice and I was lucky to occasionally get a nugget or two of wisdom amidst all the stepmom hate.  My DH and his ex were so caught up in avoiding conflict with their daughter (because they didn’t want to “lose” her to the less strict parent) tha they let her get away with SO MUCH self-destruction; it was torture to watch.  And torture for my SD who was screaming, screaming (through her increasingly self-destructive actions) for someone to SET SOME LIMITS and boundaries in her life.  She ended up a heroin addict, finding her habit through stripping and later worse.

I was the only one who saw the truth of what she was doing. I did get her into voluntary rehab once, but she stayed only 30 days and it didn’t stick.  (Her mom came to get her, didn’t stick to any of our boundaries, and set her up on a road to death again.)  She was arrested I can’t count how many times.  The only thing tha finally got DH to cut her off was when her BFF oD’d and died.  We told her we would pay for inpatient treatment and nothing else, no lawyers, no bail, no rent.

She is clean now, and has been for 7 years.  I am closer to her than either of her parents, and she has told me more of what she went through than either of them know.  I am not her mom, and I never will be, but I know my love and care helped guide her path back to life.  Her parents’ enabling nearly killed her.

OP’s DH needs to be a dad.[/quote]

She only posted this because she cares about her money and her peace. She does not care about the daughter.

You married a piece of shit. [/quote]

I didn’t marry a piece of shit.  Parenting teens is HARD WORK.  Even people who put in a lot of effort and try their best screw it up.

OP’s DH seems like he cares more about being a lawyer than being a dad.  My DH cared a lot about being a Dad.  He just didn’t have the emotional skills himself to do it well.  He was a GREAT dad by many measures…he was home every night.  Cooked her dinner every night.  Took her to every sporting event, every dance practice, every trip to Target or CVS.  What she asked for, he gave her.

But parenting a teen well, especially a troubled one, isn’t simple.  He couldn’t cope well when all of a sudden, a kid who had never been defiant, who had always done well in school, who he thought had been always honest, was lying about EVERYTHING.  And really, really good at it.  But was failing school.  And (to me, clearly) going off the rails with drug use and really unsafe friends. I became the bad guy for a while because I was trying to get him to notice what he wouldn’t see and stop accepting her word as truth when there was ample evidence she was lying.  He didn’t have ANY of that in his parenting toolset, and losing half custody of her when his ex left was traumatic enough; he was terrified of losing her if she just decided to stay with her mom because he was too strict and her mom let her get away with everything.

He wasn’t a piece of shit.  He just didn’t have any strong skills for parenting a tough teen.  They don’t come naturally, and the skills of a loving and attentive parent to an easy young kid don’t always translate to parenting a troubled teen. [/quote]

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