With the end of the year comes the end of patience for the tiresomeness of tolerating boorish behavior perpetrated by my partner's pompous progeny.

Happy early new year from a longtime lurker who, after the latest in an endless pattern of unshockingly shocking behavior by one of my husband's adult children, is hoping for some kind of catharsis from the stress and frustration in a forum of peers who "get it" and are beyond the b.s.

I've been with my husband for seven years and married for over three, but we have known each other since childhood.  It is a second marriage for us both and while I was unable to have children, my husband has two from his previous marriage who are 25(SD) and 29(SS).  My husband's first marriage broke up when the SS was in middle-school, though it took a few years for them to divorce.  My husband's wife is manipulative and calculating with a penchant for pitting the children against their father and creating a perfect storm to further her plans of parental alienation.

When my husband left his ex-wife he did so because he felt the environment was hostile for his children.  His wife was always angry, controlling and raised her voice frequently, enjoying the thrill of an argument and was addicted to conflict.  After he left she began a campaign to vilify the children's father, preventing them from visitation, calling their father over to lecture and discipline their son who was increasingly acting out.  He once relayed how their son had been disrespectful, aggressive and destructive to the extent he was called over to "handle it" because his ex "couldn't do anything with him", so he went to the house, made his son pick everything up, lectured him, gave a warning about increasing consequences for continued misconduct and acting out violently and as he was leaving he heard his ex (who had called him to come over and handle it) say to their son, "see I told you your father is an @$$hole."  This set the tone for years to come of vilification vs. victimization.
 

In the early part of the breakup the BM would call my husband's father and her own father claiming my husband wasn't giving her money to care for the children, when he was giving her half his paycheck and when he learned she was "triple-dipping" from the family and spending most of the money on herself he went to court and demanded a court order detailing legal child support obligations, as they had originally set everything up by a verbal agreement which she maligned frequently.  Once the order was in place and his legal visitation also established she still toiled to undermine any relationship with his children and worked to keep them aligned against him.

ultimately, their son started getting into increasingly troublesome scenarios and he ended up packed off to a military attitude adjustment program.  Somehow this experience furthered my SS's victimization complex while simultaneously boosting his grandiose feelings and demonstrations of superiority that have been a constant driving force for him ever since. He is a powder keg of drama that respawns and cycles back through his same biofeedback loop like seasonal clockwork each year I've observed his malignant handiwork.

While my husband's relationship with his son has always been contentious (his son refused any visits or communication with his father for all of his formative teenage years other than birthdays and Christmas when he could do a present grab and we are currently in another season of estrangement as I write this screed), he maintained a much better relationship with his daughter.  Even now in her mid 20s she remains firmly under her mother's thumb, but still makes an effort to have a connection with her father.  At the time of the divorce she was in middle school and her father would look forward to his visitation time.  His ex would, bizarrely, follow the school bus to my husband's neighborhood and demand that their daughter get in her car and hang out with her until it got dark and my husband would have to go out in the yard looking for them and signaling for her to come in so she could get dinner, do homework and actually get visit time with her father.  She stalked them on the weekends when it was his visitation time and would harass the women with whom he established any relationship.  

With all of this chaos and toxicity I'm so grateful that his son was in his 20s and his daughter was 17 by the time I came into the picture.  His ex's behavior has already been largely intolerable for me as it is, but I have rejected all attempts at forming a "friendship" with me and redirect any communication to me back to my husband or their children.

This is a loose background of my husband's failed first family dynamics and I keep hoping for health, happiness and harmony for these kids of his, but it has been a bumpy ride and the road does not appear to be getting any smoother, which is unfortunate.