Step Families

[Sun_Sparkz]

I would assume that in this day and age many of us are living with, or have come from blended families.

I am writing this because for the first time my step mum and i had to spend a few hours alone at home last night and we actually spoke to each other. (mind you she has been my dads girlfriend since i was 3 months old)

It wasnt too bad, the conversation went quite well, but then this morning it went back to avoiding each other in the hallway.

It got me thinking about stepfamilies and LOVE. i love my bilogical family. but i only love about 25% of those in my step family situations, even though they have been there the exact same amount of time that my bio family has.

Anyone else care to share?

[elSicomoro]

My 2 stepsisters are fucking ate up--both of them are in their 30s, alcoholic and on welfare.

When my mom and stepdad got married 23 years ago, they lived with us for a while...they were 9 and 12 at the time. Ultimately, they decided they did not like the rules imposed, and moved back in with their mother--a 30-something welfare-mooching alcoholic.

On the flip side of the coin, my brother is a 21-year old certified EMT. I am a 28-year old college grad making slightly less money than my stepdad does at age 59. Those girls were smart as whips, too...a real shame. All they do now is harrass my mom and break my stepdad's heart.

The rest of my stepdad's family is/was pretty cool...it's as if I'm a blood relative of the family.

I am the object of my stepmom's ire. She's always been jealous of the fact that I'm the only child of sperm donor. We got along until they got married (1985), then it went downhill for a while. There was some civility in the 90s until sperm donor and I quit speaking 10 years ago. Fuck her...fuck him. I got along with members of her family, but really wasn't around them a whole lot.

[Sun_Sparkz]

I have the same problem! my step dads kids are nuts! I am always nice to them, but they are very strange and brainwashed by their whacko mother. But my step dad is great.

I think my step mum hates me because i am my dads only child, and also because i look like my mother, who is 100 times more beautiful than she is, and because my dad still has a lot of affection for her.

She is not good enough for him anyway, i could pick out 50 different women who would be better suited to him just in our street!

[Clodfobble]

My stepdad's family was fine, got along great with all of them. Stepdad himself was abusive, and because I avoid all contact with him I don't get to see his family, which is a bit of a shame.

Stepmom's family were ok, they tended to think that my dad was only with her because they were rich (couldn't have been further from the truth) so they by proxy didn't think much of my brother and I, but they were always polite. Had she and my dad stayed together, I don't imagine we would ever have been close with her extended family.

Gotta say though... I now have a much greater understanding of how hard it is being a stepparent. It's a lot of work to separate the child from the Other Parent whom you almost invariably hate, and even harder for them to understand why you don't think their other parent is the greatest just like they do. Everyone loves their mother, but even mothers are capable of doing horrible things to make other adults hate them.

[Sun_Sparkz]

So Clod do your step kids live with you?

And how do you cope with their real mother?

[Clodfobble]

They live with their mother most of the time, they stay with us every other weekend and 6 weeks during the summer.

We deal with her as it comes, I suppose. She's utterly absurd--she's been taking the 5-year-old to a therapist for two years now, for example, not because of any displayed emotional problems but because she wants to head off any such problems before they occur. And of course ever since she started going, Megan's (my stepdaughter's) manipulation skills have become simultaneously better and totally warped. For awhile she was drawing pictures of herself being sad if she wanted something (trivial things, like dessert or something) because that's how the therapist taught her to communicate. Fortunately we broke her of that habit, but in general I feel it'll be an uphill battle their whole lives trying to do damage control from their mother's actions and make them normal upstanding citizens. Her mother actively encourages her to be passive-aggressive like that, because of course as a child--and a girl!!--she must be too weak to simply speak her mind. Anyway, I think a lot of the problems come directly from the fact that their mother comes from a very traditional Vietnamese household (and currently lives with them, her mother, grandmother, two sisters, her and the kids all in one house). They are unhappy, to say the least, that the kids are half-white.

[wolf]

Mixed race children are still a point of shame in many Asian cultures, particularly in Vietnam where such children (obviously adults now) are as seen as a sign of the western invasion of their country. Bui Doi ... Children of the Dust, IIRC.