Hi! I’m new to this site and I’m so happy I found it! I feel like I was about to lose my mind! Now I know how bad that subject title looks, but these aren’t my words. They are my SO’s. Let me start with some quick history. 

My SO and I met two years ago. I knew he had a daughter then and I had met her. He married his ex because she got pregnant and he felt like he had to. After three months of marriage, he found out she had been cheating on him for about two years, long before she was pregnant. So he left, found out his daughter is indeed his, and now has full legal and physical custody. His daughter is now three, almost four, and we’ve been together officially for a little over four months and we have been living together. His daughter loves me and so does he. Everything seems so perfect right?

Wrong. So wrong.

The BM is horrible. She acknowledges that she did something wrong, but she thinks that she and my SO are still friends. He keeps telling me how much he hates her and that he used to yell at her and tell her how much he hates her, but she is so stupid that it doesn’t affect her at all and it doesn’t make her think that maybe she should stop being so friendly. She only sees their daughter for between 1-4 hours once a week and that’s it. Period. He has had to force her to see her kid. And if she can get out of seeing her, she tries. He said all he wants is for her to stop faking her feelings for their kid and just go away. She doesn’t care about her kid, she only cares about how people think of her and how she looks on Instagram. She is trashy and doesn’t take care of herself at all. According to SO, she doesn’t even brush her teeth everyday and showers at most once a week. To compare the two of us, she is “dollar tree body spray, cheap leggings, my SO’s old T-shirt’s (you read that right), greasy hair, yellow teeth”, and I am “vintage dresses, flannel shirts, baggy sweaters, B&BW spray and lotion, perfect winged eyeliner”. I like to keep my home tidy and nice and we live in a nice area and she is such an eyesore when she comes around. The neighbors look at her like she’s a rodent. That’s just me ranting though. That’s not the worst of it.

She calls him. Okay, she’s the BM, so of course they’re going to talk on the phone sometimes. No. She calls him several times a day. Not about their daughter. She asks him what he’s doing, what he’s up to, how he’s feeling, if he’s okay, blah blah blah. AND IT GETS WORSE! She had the audacity to ask us where we were going on a date! She wanted to know where he and I would be going and what we would be doing on our date!!!! And this isn’t the first time! She doesn’t care about her child and just starts crying when he tells her to either step up and be a real parent or to eff off.

Now onto the child. SD can be a good kid sometimes, but I’ve noticed that lately, as our relationship has progressed, she has become so needy. Now I know kids are needy. That’s normal. No. She claims she doesn’t know how to put on shoes, clean her room, turn in her tv, drink water (yes for real), you name it. One day she doesn’t know how to do it, and the next she’ll do it herself. She likes to yell at him to get his attention and repeats herself over and over again. He’s told her multiple times to stop, that she doesn’t have to do that to get his attention, but she doesn’t listen. She’s emotionally attached to her tv. She tells him he’s no fun. We can’t sit alone together without her trying to climb between us and climb on his lap. I’ve accepted that we won’t have a lot of alone time with a child in the picture. But we can’t even sit together. And if we kiss she starts either yelling to get his attention, starts crying, or tries to pry herself between us. My SO is at his wits end with her. She disrespects him and tells him no. He told her to go to bed and that couldn’t watch tv, so after he left, she turned it on herself. Boy was she in trouble. Not only that, she won’t eat. She claims she doesn’t like meat and won’t eat it. She won’t eat anything we cook unless it’s junk food. He’s quit giving her snacks and junk and told her if she doesn’t eat what is made, she goes to bed hungry. She’ll put it in her mouth and then start crying and walk up to us at the table and hold her mouth open and show it to us and cry and it’s so gross. She smacks when she eats no matter how hard we try to teach her not to. She does a lot of things to spite us. She had started acting so bratty. And she is spoiled. So freaking spoiled. I have no doubts she could be a good kid, but she’s not used to having to share dads attention and she’s not good at accepting that. And she is not used to being told no because her BM and BMGM spoil the crap out of her. 

Now I can’t blame SD entirely. My SO thinks he’s a great parent. But he’s not consistent with punishments. And he’s not strict enough. He thinks he is, but he lets her get away with murder. And he does this thing where he uses jokes to punish her. “(SD’s name, do you want to catch these hands?)” He says stuff like that as a joke, but also when he gets onto her. Now I run a military household. If she was my child, she would not get away with half the crap she does. I made a comment about if she colored on my walls I’d make her scrub it off with a toothbrush like I had to as a kid and he got all weird. He doesn’t like hearing me talk about discipline. Because I have a much stricter version of discipline than him. And I told him I didn’t want to punish our children differently than we punish his child because they will wonder by she is special and can get away with more. I don’t know how to talk to him about this. He gets so defensive about his parenting and discipline style and his kid. He is a blindly proud parent. She one jumped over a piece of rope in the floor and he thought it was the cutest thing he had ever seen. I don’t know how to talk to him about negative things because talking negatively about his kid or his parenting style is a sensitive topic for him. I’m about to lose my mind! I need help! Please!