dh = husband
sd = stepdaughter
bm = biological mother
I go through so many times thinking that I am less of a person because I don't have any kids of my own. I don't know ANYONE else who's husband doesn't want to have kids with her -- I'm the only person. THANKS SO MUCH, BM!!!!!!!!! She is a woman who has serious problems (I know that we all say it, but this lady takes the cake) and it is because dh's only experience of sharing a child with someone has been pure hell on him he is afraid that I will magically turn into that psychotic woman if a child would pass through my birth canal. She's a manipulative, selfish, abusive, lying whore and I am paying for all of her crap. She told dh that she was on the pill while they were dating and she later admitted to him that she chose him to father her child because she knew that he would pay the support on time!!!!! So they get married for like five months and she starts cheating on him, leaving him to take care of the baby. She eventaully leaves him for some guy who has a ton of money and they try to take dh for all that he's worth. Since I've known her she's been turned into child protective services (who didn't do anything to her because she threatened the case worker!) She has allowed her children to watch pornographic movies with her. She lets her husband treat her daughter (my sd) like crap. She does absolutely nothing to help sd with her homework or anything else school related. Sd is practically failing out of school even though we do everything that we can to help her. Why does bm do this? Get this--so she can keep sd for 1/2 of our summer time b/c sd is in summer school! She continually moves farther and farther away making it harder and harder for dh to pick up sd as much as he is supposed to. Currently he has to drive 200 miles round trip to see her. Bm totally plays the victim when it comes to court and mediation and most of the time they fall for it! I have seen and heard her cuss out dh and scream her head off at sd on the phone in order to disrupt our time with her. She is constantly trying to manipulate sd into not spending time here. She is always fighting with dh and manipulating things so that it is hard for him to pick up sd...bm is always making plans on our time and getting sd excited about it and then says, "Oh, but your with your dad...you have to ask him if you can go." She tries telling dh when he can and can't pick up sd, she says that the parenting plan is "just a piece of paper" and that since she is the parent with primary custody he has to do what she says. She keeps telling sd that she can't live with us fulltime until after she's 18. She tells sd that her (bm's) husband is so mean to her that she needs sd around to take care of her. Her husband just sits on the couch when he's not out having affairs or working long hours (we can always tell when she's caught him cheating b/c she has a new big ring or a new car) and he yells at bm and sd constantly. He hasn't bought her any presents for valentines day, mothers day or birthday or Christmas in years. At Christmas, her kids always choose one of their gifts to give bm so that she gets a gift! Not even bm's huband likes her! The only reason that sd stays there is b/c she thinks she has no choice. She tells us all the time how she doesn't like it there and that her mom yells at her all the time, but she has to stay there and take care of her mom or else nobody will. What a woman...
And SHE is the reason that I may never have kids. It makes me sick! It sure *feels* like he doesn't want to have kids *with me* rather than just in general. He has said things like you're too immature to have kids and things like that. He says that *I* have put him through too much and that he has been scarred by *me* and is afraid to have kids *with me*.
Right now he is totally burnt out on dealing with bm and all her crap. I definitely understand why. She fights him every single time that he tries to pick up his daughter and he has to drive 200 miles round trip because she moved out of the area that she was supposed to. Then after all that driving he has to deal with bm and her manipulations and arguments and threats and whatever else she decides to throw at him. He's saying that he can't deal with this any longer. He keeps saying he's just going to give in to her and see sd less. He doesn't even know if he's going to bother to pick her up for this weekend! (This is a man who has never in over 10 years of visitation missed a scheduled visitation.)
Normally in the past I would have been over him like white on rice. Telling him not to let bm get the best of, tell him not to let her walk all over him. Getting angry that she has so much control of him and telling him where to find his spine and how to use it. Instead of doing any of that (though the urge is still there!) I'm simply listening to what he has to say and saying things like, "That must be hard" or "I'm sorry you're feeling...." If he directly asks for my opinion I don't even give it to him, I just tell him what the parenting plan or his attorney says (he already knows that) and let him make his own decision.
I'm not sure how all of this is going to pan out. He is really at the end of his rope. I don't think that I've ever seen him like this. He's so tired of all the hassles and stress. He says he doesn't think that sd will ever live with us because bm has such a tight grip on her and is so manipulative. Bm can guilt sd into doing just about anything. He's tired of fighting with bm and wasting money on court and mediation which have only turned around to bite him in the butt because bm actually found a lawyer that is bigger liar than she is.
Am I evil for hoping that if does give up some of his time with sd that he might actually want to start a family with me? Don't get me wrong, I would love for sd to come and live with us and be a part of our family. But I know that dh is ALWAYS stressed out because of bm and until he gets rid of that stressor in his life he will not have the energy or desire to think about more kids. To him, having more kids only means putting up with more of the crap that bm rations to him. He is always so focused on bm and what she is doing (or if she's not doing anything, he's focused and worried about what she is plotting). If she would ever get out of our lives, that would be my shot at having my own kids and my dreams coming true.
I know that in my dh's custody agreement it states that the visitation times which are in it are MINIMUM visitation for dh. He is supposed to be able to get more than that if he and bm can work it out. As far as the moving thing goes, it states very clearly in dh's custody agreement where bm can and cannot move. Even though it states very clearly, she moved about 50 miles out the area that she was supposed to. You know what the courts did about it? NOTHING. They won't deny a mom to move if they have a "good" reason and a good reason can be anything from a job promotion, to a better school district, to whatever sounds good.
My dh is supposed to have 9/10 weekends from Friday afternoon until Monday morning with two over nights during the week, and also half of all vacations and holidays, including summer. Well, what he ends up getting b/c of bm's move is Friday evening to Sunday evening (too far to drop off sd at school on Mondays) and zero weekday overnights for the same reason. You do the math and bm was only granted 2 over nights in an entire week and now she has five and dh only has 2. We can't do anything to get more time with her unless we can prove that she is beating sd senseless.
Bm got pregnant while she was lying to dh about being on the pill, she even went as far as to admit to dh that she chose him because she knew he would pay the child support!! You just don't get much lower than that. And yes, that is why we have a smaller house and live with less than would could. I would never pull something so underhanded. Believe me, I would have my children already if I was that kind of person. But I believe that children should be a joint decision for a couple and both people should feel good about it.
One time sd was telling us that when she got back from a weekend with us, bm had written sd's name all over the front of sd's school notebook and also inside of about four pages. Sd asked why she did that and bm said, "Well I missed you so much while you were gone all I could do was write your name all over your notebook. I just don't know what to do when you are gone. I just miss you so much. It's not fair that your dad gets you so much." PU-LEASE!!
The first year that we were married, bm stayed on the phone with dh for TWO HOURS talking about CHRISTMAS PRESENTS one night! I was so mad, especially since we were in the CAR the whole time and I could hear their whole conversation. Bm has the most annoying voice you have ever heard, it's so nasal and so loud. I couldn't even get away because we were on the road far from home. I had a talk with dh after that and expressed my frustration and that has never happened again! Bm buys the gifts for HER house and we buy gifts for OUR house and if sd gets doubles, then so be it.
It took me a very long time to convince dh that he could sever a conversation with bm where she is being hostile. He has only just very recently started to do this. I don't understand why they have such a hard time telling their ex's to go suck an egg. Obviously it has something to do with sharing a kid with the woman. I had to explain to dh that he was married to ME and not her, that he needed to be more concerned with being united with me than her. Because when we were first married he was definitely more interested in being on the same page with bm than with me...and that did not fly!
Bm buys sd inappropriate clothes and shoes. (No surprises there.) We really think that she does it to bug dh. That's just the way that she is, she would let her daughter wear that kind of stuff if it really upset dh. I personally believe that she gets sd high heeled shoes to get to ME. She knows that sd is taller than me and she must think that it bothers me or something, she just wants to bother me more by getting her high heeled shoes! It doesn't bug me that sd's taller than me it bugs me when people think that I am dh's daughter and they assume that sd & I are his "girls".
We had to deal with the stupid phone calls from bm. She just thought that she had the right to call at any hour and disrupt our lives. Unfortunately, my dh has no concept of NOT answering the phone. He thinks that if it rings you have to drop ANYTHING that you are doing to answer the phone. One morning early in our marriage we had our bedroom door locked because we were BUSY. Anyway the phone rang and since we didn't have a phone in our room he didn't get it, but sd picked up the phone and a minute later was pounding on our door, "Daddy! Daddy! My mommy's on the phone!" Dh jumped up, threw his robe on and ran out of the room get the phone. I was FURIOUS. Actually, the word furious doesn't do justice to how mad I was. When he came back I had an earful for him. He was all, "Well, it's her mom. I need to talk to her when she calls!" More earful. End result...sd lost her phone answering priveleges for like 4 years (seriously) and we got caller id and ignored her calls. Later when we moved, we didn't give her our new number, all she gets is dh's cell phone which he keeps on him all the time anyway. He still doesn't answer her calls, let's her leave a message first beause she usually has something crazy to throw at him and he wants to hear the message first so that can figure out how to respond to her.
Another thing is the double standard. Bms are always giving the kids hair cuts, highlights, and now even hair color and the dh's don't have a say in it. Why is it that they are allowed to do whatever they want with the skids hair, but the dhs will get yelled at if they were to cut/highlight the kids hair? The same goes with ear piercings. I guess it's all because this society still thinks of the bioligical mothers as MORE real parents than the dads. That's why you never see a bm who has 50/50 paying support to the dad. I hear of dads with 50/50 custody paying CS all the time, but never the bm.
Bm doesn't communicate anything about school either. The only reason that she did one time was because she thought that she was sharing priveleged information. You should have seen her disbelief when she found out that dh got a report card, too. She has always done her best to keep dh in the dark as far as sd's schooling goes. He has had to fight very hard with sd's elementary school all the years that she was there, you'd think they had never heard of a divorced dad the way that they treated him. The school was incredibly unhelpful. I had to get online and look up district events just to find out when sd had a performance or whatever. I was never able to find out any teacher's email addresses or anything, which was too bad because most of sd's teachers wouldn't return dh's calls. Especially the last two, bm lied to them about dh and they were pretty rude to him because of that.
You would think that bm would be happy that dh is interested in his daughter and goes to as many events as physically possible. He also pays his support, not on time, but EARLY because bm requested a different day than appears on the court papers. She should talk to some friends of mine who don't get ANY child support and who have to deal with their children being sad because of their dads serious lack of interest.
Sd's report card came recently, we got a copy of it in the mail because our address is on file at the school and the school sends us copies of all the parent mailers. Unlike her elementary school which would only give dh info if he pulled their teeth. We got the report card while sd was here and we praised her for doing so well.
Bm calls the next day and leaves a message saying that she needs to talk to sd. We know that she must have gotten the report card too. Turns out she was calling to congratulate sd on a job well done. Sd was so excited that bm had something good to say that she was LITERALLY jumping up and down saying, "My mom is actually proud of me! My mom is actually proud of me!"
So we go to drop off sd the next day and bm is telling dh about sd's report card, like she has some priveledged information. Then she says, "Would you like me to show you her report card?" To which dh says, "I've already seen it. I got it on Friday." Bm's response? "They sent ***YOU*** a report card?! Why did they sent one to ***YOU***?" Dh said, "Because I'm her FATHER!" And she just had this look of total disbelief and she asked again why he got one!
Sometimes I really feel like I never see my husband. He works long hours and drives 200 miles round trip to see sd once in the middle of the week and then again on Friday for the weekend. Since he has to do so much driving he has to leave work early those days and work extra long the other days. If we're lucky we have dinner together at 8:00 pm three nights a week. He pays up the creek in child support regardless of how much time he has her. Plus he pays all kinds of things that CS is supposed to cover just to shut bm up. She throws major fits any time that she has to pay for ANYTHING for sd and demands that dh pay half of everything for sd ON TOP OF CS. Plus we pay for EVERYTHING that she has here: brand new bed, newly decorated room, full stock of clothes, food, entertainment, you name it. Bm could fall off the face of the earth today and sd could come here to live and we wouldn't have to buy her a thing b/c she has everthing that she needs here. You don't see us demanding that bm pay for any of that. You bet that she wants us to pay for that kind of stuff at her house! And bm has a husband that makes 5x as much as dh and I combined. Like she needs OUR money! We constantly have to go with less stuff because of all the money that we pay to bm. She's just greedy, that's all.