I am so sick and tired of being told that I am wrong about things. My feelings whether right or wrong are completely valid. Being a step-parent is hard and having children around that are not mine and sever as constant reminders that your ex had a life and a family before me is not easy. Why did the man of my dreams have to come with two children. Well, one is an adult and hardly ever around but the 16 year old is a very jealous daddies girl who is very needy and attention seeking. I cannot even have a conversation with my husband without her saying....dad, dad, dad, dad..... and interrupting our conversation. She usually doesn't really have anything to say, she is just happy to have the attention. My husband feels guilty about the divorce so he often plays into this attention seeking behavior and if I say anything about it... I am the jealous one. I admit that I do have some feelings of jealousy and I think that is probably normal, but that still doesn't make it right for a 16 year old girl to be interrupting two people talking constantly. It's just common courtesy.

My SD also constantly hangs on her father, which makes me uncomfortable. She sits on his lap, walks in between us when we are all walking together, wrestles with him and jumps on his back demanding a piggy back ride because she is "tired". Is she like this because she is afraid she is going to lose her father. It just doesn't seem normal for a girl this age to be so all over her father. I have a sister that is less than a year older than my SD that commented to me that she thought it was wired that my SD would not go to bed without her father walking here there and would sit on his lap or ask him to find her a snack to eat. A part of the problem is that my husband always babied his daughter and since my husband didn't have custody of his older son, she was pretty much the only child. Because of this and my husband waiting on her hand and foot for years she is extremely lazy, spoiled and immature. My husband has come to see these things are issues as several people independently of me have said things to him about her immaturity. I have being dealing with it for so long now that I have lost my patients with it and every time she acts helpless or spoiled I get upset and say something to my husband. He then gets upset with me because he feels like I am always on him about things. But really come on.... a 16 year old does not need her father to tie her shoes for her or open the gate at the pool or pour her a drink or cut her food. When does it end. The other day when my SD was mowing the lawn at 7:30pm (because she procrastinated all day) she told her father she was lonely and asked him to come and sit and watch her mow the lawn. I never imagined he would actually do it, but 5 minutes later he had drug the lawn chair across the lawn and was sitting facing her watching her mow as he ate a piece of pie. All while I was inside putting a baby and 6 year old to bed alone wondering where my husband was and why he wasn't there to help me. Of course I was more than a little mad when I had a child that needed to get out of the tub and a screaming baby and had to go looking for my husband only to find him watching his 16 year old mow the lawn. Things like this happen often and I am so OVER them. The more they happen the more angry I get and the more short tempered which just causes more issues between my husband and I.

On top of that my husband works long hours at work and during the summer his daughter is with us all the time. This means that I am left to parent his child. I do it and for the most part her and I get a long very well, but it is very difficult to parent someone elses child and there are lots of times that she just doesn't listen to me. My husband is very bad at discipline and is afraid to make his child mad at him. Which makes it doubly hard for me. At the same time he has too high of expectations for my almost 7 year old and expects more from her than is appropriate for her age. He has endless patients and is too much of a push over with his own child who is 16, but with my 7 year old he is short tempered and not realistic. I am not sure why he acts like my child is an annoyance while his lazy teenager is perfect. It annoys the hell out of me though.

One of the most painful thing that has ever happened to me was the day my 10 month old was born. My SD needed to be driven home (her mom lives 1.5 hours away) my son was born at home and was less than a day old. My mother was here and offered to bring my SD home so that my husband could stay with me and his new baby, he said he would just do it. My mother offered several more times to drive her and I wanted him to stay (specially since he had to go back to work the next day) but he left to take her any way. He ended up being gone for 4 hour an hour longer than the drive took. I understand him wanting to reassure his daughter after having a new son with another woman, but that was not the time. I feel like that was the one day/time I should have come first. Maybe I am wrong, but I want to be my husbands number one. I feel like as his wife I should come first and be his priority. The kids should be important as well, but my feelings and our relationship shouldn't come second to them. Am I just wanting something that is not possible because we already have children and this is a second marriage. I look at my brother and his wife, who did things right and got married and then had children and are very in love. To my brother his wife is his number one and the kids are the kids. Why do I feel like I am the other woman and not as important as his kids. Don't I deserve to be what a wife should be even if I am the second one he has had?

What am I suppose to do. How do I help the way I feel and help to make our relationship not so effected by this stuff?