That is an excellent attitude!! Stick to your guns and make sure DH knows they aren't welcome in your home unless they can be respectful.

"God is great, beer is good, and people are crazy" and you can't change crazy!!

I have discovered that to "detach" from the skids is the only way to keep your sanity, plus it makes you feel like you are BACK IN CONTROL of your own life.
Hope things work out for you!
hangingin

Your plan for 2010 is exactly what I started doing in 2009! DHs adult kids chose to treat me like poo on their shoes for years--AND they seemed to enjoy the game. So I stopped playing. It took DH a few months to get used to the idea of "his kids--his problems."

I asked him to stop telling me about them because their antics dominated our conversations. I stopped answering the phone when they called for DH, I stopped attending their events, and they were no longer invited to our home. No more cards and gifts. No more attempts to connect. GAME OVER.

Then they wanted to know what was "wrong" with me! Why did I have so much HATE in my heart? The adult kids did their best to convince DH that I was the "real problem, " however at the same time DH was experiencing a much happier wife and a much calmer home.

DH finally gave up his fantasy that we will all just get along like a happy family. With me he has a peaceful life now. When he visits them he gets the same old drama. So I have noted that he visits his adult children a lot less this past year, and doesn't much look forward to it. I guess it's difficult to handle all the drama on his own.

I wish you all the best for 2010, and your decision will free you!

Good for you!! When my stepdaughter snubbed me at her graduation in 2008 I told my H that I would no longer make her welcome in our home. She didn't get a graduation gift either. It amazes me that these so called "adults" have less maturity than some 13 year-olds. What angers me is that our spouses enable this kind of behavior. Grrrrr!

It sucks having 4+ stepchildren. I was treated like crap in my own home Christmas Eve. I'm like you. It's my house so my rules. I told DH I'd rather pay a huge restaurant bill to take them out to eat than have them come to my home and destroy it like a train wreck. I'm not a laundromat and being a stepmom to grown kids is a thankless job. I didn't have the stepbrats to raise in their growing up so the evil I see is what is already there that WILL NOT change. I don't even believe God can change the evil stepchildren cuz trust me I've prayed for patience with them and just when I think they are seeing "the light" I get treated like crap again! I've told them if they want to see their dad homeless, keep it up! He was piss poor when he married me. Just because he and I took vows doesn't mean I agreed to be a doormat in them..hardly. He agreed to love me for better or worse and his worse is his children aren't welcome in MY house unless I say so. I don't care how much he bitches or denies me sex to try and punish me. I'm a strong person and ready for 2010 to be my year of having fun and living for myself.

***** Follow me on my blog! Me (41). DH (54). Married since May 2007. DS (9) from my 1st marriage where that husband is deceased. I have 6 grown stepchildren who do not live with us. 4 biological and 2 my DH helped raise with his 2nd wife.

I've been at this for 28 years having helped raise my adult skids since they were about 5 and you are right - it will never end. This is however, my last round with them. Like you I have decided this past year that H will have to meet them elsewhere if and when they decide he is worthy enough to talk to again.

I and my minor BDs are done. Unfortunately skids are behind the scenes still trying to manipulate the rest of H's family. I will not miss susceptible family members of H either if they start to participate. I have already cut off ties to a couple of people in H's family that still are cozy with the ex wife and skids after 30 years and can just expand this list if I need to. It really is not a problem for me either way so I have no idea why skids are working so hard at this.

Removing yourself from Skids selfmade drama and insanity is the only way to achieve a little bit of peace in your life. Ihope that your SO supports you in your endeavor because after 15 years you deserve it!

Isn't it odd that adult children can react more negatively to the addition of a stepmother into the family than little kids do, although these adult children will proclaim that the remarriage was of no consequence to them. Why would that be? You would justifiably think they are grown up now, they have learned good manners, they don’t need daddy as they did while growing up, they have spouses and children of their own, and they should, you would think, want dad to be happy.

At first, you really want the adult children to like you, which is the beginning of the “stepmother trap”. Their liking you, is important to you, it is important to your husband, but it is of no importance to the kids. This deep desire to be “liked” by the kids hands them a great deal of power to destroy your marriage, which is often their intention. Moreover, the thinking in the family goes that if they dislike you, it is because you are hateful, not because they hate you for reasons they either aren’t aware of, or will never admit to. The children, sensing dad’s confusion, are well aware that their active dislike of you causes him to question his choice of you as a partner. Which is of course is what they want him to feel and think. A lack of recognition of your real status by your husband reaffirms to them, your powerlessness and if you don’t take steps to correct it now, you will be reduced to a rival with the children, rather than an equal partner with your husband as one of the two partners in charge of your household.

Because your husband hasn’t communicated to his children your importance to him, they will sabotage you, insult you, treat you with remarkable contempt and even hatred, in your own home, and then after all that, will make every effort to convince the rest of the world that it is YOU who is the problem, and YOU who has done those things to them. Unfortunately most people will believe those distortions because everyone wants to hate a stepmother. We all know stepmothers are depicted as loathsome, cold, greedy, jealous, intrusive witches, scheming to drive a wedge between dad, that formerly all great guy, and his sweet defenceless children, even though many of these alleged “children” are close to middle aged men and women. Fairy tales kind of lose their potency when Cinderella is calculating, caustic and approaching 40.

Why is it that we can’t bring ourselves to see that children of any age are capable of being malicious? I myself was shocked by the unrelenting animosity directed at me. For years I examined my entrails for personal problems that would cause me to be so hated, and then finally I thought to look outside myself. It was then that I found myriad resources pages filled with women having almost exactly the same experience as me, and I mean blow for blow, identical. I wasn’t the only one!

The issues are complex and I see that one hurdle we have to jump is the common belief that when there are problems, it is dad’s wife’s fault. The whisperings you hear in the family about you are that if SHE would just try harder those kids would warm up to her. False. Fact is it doesn’t matter how hard dad’s wife tries because if she is the only one who is trying it ain’t gonna work! And, when there are problems, which is almost always, EVERYONE is responsible for the problems and outcomes, …not just dad’s wife, or “whatever she is”. Until we understand stepfamilies as a system the truth, still difficult to accept, is that “stepmothers will likely (remain) excluded outsiders in the stepfamily system, and more often victims than villains.”

Among the many, many books and articles I have read over the years to understand “my predicament” by far and away the best was Dr. Wednesday Martin’s book called Stepmonster: A New Look at Why Real Stepmothers Think, Feel, and Act the Way We Do. It is remarkably informative and speaks volumes to those of us who have a troubling relationship with stepchildren of all ages, and how the problems are uncannily similar from family to family which shows it is systemic, not personal.