I don't even know where to start but l i guess i will go with the fact i have a knot in my stomach that has got worse as time has gone on. I used to only get it on a Friday when my partners daughter was due to come and it would ease over the weekend. Now the weekend when she is here has me on edge because i know me and my partner will fall out during her stay at some point. If not while she is here then after she goes home and the hostility will stay for days. When we are just getting back to normal again it is time for her to come again and so it begins again. My partners daughter is 8, her mum has gone above and beyond to make our life hell. I have moments when i get on well with my partners daughter but she can be very sulky and complains of tummyaches when she doesn't want to do something. Once she has gotten out of it she is leaping about all over the place again. If i put a meal in front of her that she is unsure of she rubs her eyes and instantly cries before even trying it.(there is no build up to these tears) Complains of tummy ache and if we say she need to try it she says she wants mummy. My partners reaction to this is to try and diffuse by pandering to it. I have two older children and one was a fussy eater and i think she needs to miss dessert and has learnt that this baby act gets her out of stuff. It causes so many arguments between me and my partner as he wants to protect her. He gets very defensive and takes her off away from the family and it leaves me feeling i'm the enemy. He emphasises that she is his daughter and not ours when we fall out and it really hurts. This week has been awful after another meltdown because i offered her a meal she had eaten a few weeks before, he took her home becuase she wanted mummy. I told him she has worked out how to get her way. He said he thought it was awful that i gave her no warning about what was for tea! I had even baked chocolate cruch and chocolate custard becuase she has asked for it for dessert. Anyway, he felt i was in the wrong and said he was leaving. He was back a few hours later, then left again the next day, then back again. Now he is home and wanting to working things out. I'm dreading his daughter coming again at the weekend. It's her birthday and i was going to bake her a heart shaped cake which she asked for and make a birthday tea and now i just feel like shit. I had no bad feeling about her and she has been in my life for 3 years but i feel my partner emphasises the divide when we fall out. He has planned to see her this saturday too. I didn't know anything about it and it looks like it doesn't involve us. At the begining of lock down we didn't see her for weeks and we had no fallouts and we felt like a family. When she is with her mum during the week he acts like we are his family. She interupts me when i'm talking about stuff and says "i know what we can talk about now". and her behaviour is very hyperactive, she talks constantly over people and if we are sitting quietly she will talk loadly discribing every detail of a game she is playing on her tablet, if we ask her to stop she hums. My partner just calls her a little character and a chatterbox and laughs it off. I think it is intentional as she also does it when my daughter is trying to talk. She also says things that inflate her ego such as "because im so clever" or Because i'm lovely and blatently says she is a mischief maker. I find it difficult to deal with as i feel unsure if this is normal behaviour. She comes out with stuff in the way that an adult does sometimes. I started to think maybe she cant help it and something more is going on but her school report came back perfect, no tummyaches, crying, or interupting there! Anyway, i know i'm rambling but really needed to get this all of my chest. I have litteraly gone above and beyond to bond and i treat her like one of my own but i'm starting to feel tired of the whole thing.