When You Feel Second To His Ex and Kids....

This is constantly how I felt with my ex-fiance (more like 5th to his ex and kids) and one of the major reasons I could not move foward with marrying him.

When I brought it up...I got accused of being 'jealous of his kids', got told "I'm doing this 'for the kids'"/"I feel guilty my kids are in 2 households"/"I don't want my kids to suffer"...... and any other excuse to justify the behavior with minimal improvements

With his ex-wife and kids everything was an emergency/a need/urgent

Point blank is he had no boundaries and thought operating as if he was still married but in separate home was going to spare his kids from some imaginary suffering. That ex-wife and those kids play on his guilt and used him to keep him at their beck n call thus diminishing time/energy/resources to our household/relationship

I got tired of revolving my entire existence around them like he did and having not much to show for that extreme of a sacrifice.

https://melissathelovecoach.com/when-you-feel-second-to-his-ex-wife-and-...

He Might Have Boundary Issues

If he’s always responding to his kids’ requests out of guilt (rather than their true needs), or responding to his ex’s requests out of fear or guilt, it could be that he struggles with maintaining healthy boundaries.

Boundaries are the limits a person decides on how people can treat them, how they can behave around them, and what they can expect from them.

When people struggle with healthy boundaries, they bend to other people’s wants and demands—other people’s expectations—to the exclusion of their own well-being or the well-being of other important areas of their own life.

In order for him to honor his boundaries, he first needs to get really clear on what he wants (what are his boundaries) and overcome any fear or guilt that are inhibiting healthy relationships.

Adjust Your Expectations…Or Consider Moving On

If you’ve worked out a way where everyone’s needs can be met, that’s great!

But if your needs are continually being unmet, it could be that his circumstances…and the choices he’s making in his life right now…are preventing him from meeting your needs.

If he’s not available or unwilling to meet your needs, (which I know can be really frustrating and heartbreaking) you have some choices to make.

For example, you can adjust your needs and expectations. And you can do that by letting go of some of your needs (temporarily or indefinitely).

The difficult part about letting go of some of your needs is that you might always feel like something is missing or a certain degree of dissatisfaction.

After all, you have those needs for a reason; you have them because they are important to you.

The other option is to consider moving on from the relationship, with the mindset that you’d rather be single than settle.

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Good stuff.

We get one life. It is on us to live it to the fullest.

Including setting standard for how others will treat us and how they will behave in reference to us.

Regardless of who they are and what their relationship to us is.

If they fail to deliver to those standards or choose not to...

Then good riddance.

Good stuff, Lilly!

In many ways, you were fortunate that the ‘dudes’ ex-wife returned a month after she vamoosed, spouting forth threats of withholding the children. Had she stayed away, you might have been deluded into supposing that she and the two ‘bumps on a log’ would be a bearable inconvenience. You’d have been oblivious to the enormity of the dude’s boundary issues!

Like many divorced men, your ex-fiancé pulled the timeworn ‘bait and switch’, luring you into his web by suggesting that the children would be spending the majority of their time out of sight and out of mind. Once the ‘Tasmanian Devil’ roared back into town and returned his balls to her handbag, his bullshit was open to the air and contaminating the Lilly atmosphere.

Just think, Hon, had the director of ‘The Bitch Beck N’ Call Service’ remained afar, your life may have become excruciating, rather than full of its current bright possibilities!

This describes PERFECTLY how

This describes PERFECTLY how it was .... ugh!!!!

And yes I felt like it was a bait and switch ... first it was 'oh my kids will be out of town' to 'oh now theyre here every weekend / every holiday' to 'I want full custody' .... like itchB where did I ever say I wanted full custody (aka all the responsibility - bc i already know majority of men cannot hack it with fulltime childcare of their own kids) of your clingy disrespectful bumps on logs for another 7+ years espcially when I got my fully independent, respectful, well-rounded kid about to launch from the nest?!?

GOod point granny D ... I needed to see it on the front end (to save myself time) so that I could make move on and up more sooner. I guess the beastly breader moving back in town was a blessing in disguise

Keep writing

This is part of your healing process... getting all this stuff out helps you move past it.

Glad you have your own space & room for perspective now! So proud if you.

Keep writing as well, StepUltimate!

As we were all proud of you, StepUltimate!

I’ve been following your blogs since the spring of 2017 and cringed over every post outlining your ex-husband’s enabling of his ‘manipulating, triangulating, blame-shifting’ son. Additionally, the ex’s unrelenting financial irresponsibility, spending like a drunken sailor while you suffered increasing anxiety at trying to pay the bills and reduce the man’s debts, enraged this frugal granny.

When the ex-husband vaulted far beyond the pale, laying out a small fortune for a ‘muscle car’ (despite your strenuous objections), my blood pressure shot off the charts! Hon, when you refused to accept further abuse and removed yourself from that cluster-f**k, I uncorked a bottle of wine and had a celebratory drink.

Like Lilly and a few other brave and determined ladies on this site, you got tough and rescued yourself. it’s great to see you posting and providing needed advice to other struggling women who believe themselves to be stuck in miserable relationships.

Thank you GrannyD!

Appreciate your kind words of encouragement.

I am jealous

I feel I rightfully so feel I was put second. And is jealous about it. That my DW wanted a different relationship with me. Then she had with her ex. The ex got the better relationship. Hw wasn't made to feel second to an ex and her kids. That just to get a hour alone, like going to McDonald becomes a logistics nightmare. Need a babysitter, a $10 meal [dating myself] comes with a $20 babysitter in fee. And we have to get the kid something.
Nobody understands this, unless you live it. That you lose all respect for your SO for dumping there kids, or your made to feel second. Or the ex does nothing, but you are the bad father..

'YOU are not SP Material. Nothing wrong with that . Trying to find a man who can balance all of this is very hard especially when you have a ex who wants to dump her kids every weekend. He made those kids, he has to take care of them. That why he not relationship material

Ugggg this is so true

I got accused of being jealous of this dudes kids which wasn't true because they didn't have anything I want and I'm not comparing myself to some kids

if im honest maybe I was a little jealous of the ex wife because of like you say all the perks she got (no ex and kids from prior relationships in her marriage; dude fully provided/procured a house/paid her out when relationship ended/stayed with her for over a decade so she gets his ss checks

He did all this stuff for this woman he claims was so mean to him

Then I treated him and his kids better than she did and yet I have the sloppy scraps of a man (financially/emotionally drained from his needy failed prior family, emotionally enmeshed with his failed prior family, obnoxiously disrespectful skids invading my space 48+ hrs weekly, bitter ex that I have to split coins with/help raise her kids/split my resources with her kids)

So yeah.....I often felt like I got the short end of the stick and staying with him (as long as he made little to no changes) meant the math wasn't mathing

The ex got the better relationship. Hw wasn't made to feel second to an ex and her kids.

It always irks me when

It always irks me when someone accuses someone else of "not being stepparent material", but it's obviously being said in an accusatory manner. What is "stepparent material?" Someone who is ok without privacy? Someone who is ok without having any knowledge or control over who will be in their home and when? Someone who is ok with their spouse's ex in their home, at their holidays, on their VACATIONS in some cases? Someone who is willing to put up with disrespect in their own home?

People who accuse others of not being stepparent material and mean it as a negative must not realize the bullshit some stepparents are put through and, in some cases, told by everyone in their life that it is their duty to put up with. I admit, i might have been one of those people who said "It's not about you, it's about the KIDS!" back in my early 20s. People without experience of stephell have no idea.

Note - I'm fired up about this today. I made the mistake of reading Reddit AITA and some poor woman wrote in and said she was about to marry a guy whose ex wife was at every family function. The poster would have to step aside while her fiance and BM took family pics with the skids. Pretty much everyone who replied wrote "YTA! It's not about you! Get over yourself, the ex will always be his family!" I'm pretty sure the downvotes are raining down on my reply lol.

IMHO, breeders who tell a new

IMHO, breeders who tell a new mate that they are "not SParent material" have in all liklihood proven that they had no business polluting the human genome by procreating in the first place.

Though my pragmatic black and white perspective is to comment on information provided by an OP taking that as what it is. It is the information provided. Unfortunately, many mates of SParents are as culpable in the trash children and their related behaviors that they bring to a new marriage as their X is. Either actively culpable having created the shit spawn behaviors that the SParent constantly tries to fight through, or by not addressing it assertively and effectively. Coddling, Disney parenting, eternal facilitation of the crap spawn behaviors, enabling the spawn and the Xs, etc, etc, etc....

I am truly blessed that the woman I make a life with is not one of "those" breeders.

Those prior breeders that pollute the lives of a new mate like this grind my molars to nothing.

Yes, parents owe a duty of care and support to their children. However, that same parent who enters into a relationship with a new mate owes an even higher duty to that mate to parent effectively and keep a toxic X in their place and protect the newer marriage and newer family from the failed family shit.

Also yes, StepDads have a difficult role. However, IMHO, SM's win the difficulty litmus test in the blended family universe. For some reason, dad's often appear to be far weaker in maintaining standards for their prior spawn in a new marriage than moms are.

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When You Feel Second To His Ex and Kids....

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