A witch according to SD help! long rant sorry
My OH and I have been together just over 3 years living together 2 1/2 and got engaged in February, due to marry in August. We have had ongoing issues with SD who is 14 for about the last year stemming from me having some ground rules to be followed in my house, the one thats caused the biggest issues is not eating food in her room (the dog got trapped in there for quite a few hours going through her bin and destroyed the door trying to get out).
Since the summer she has refused to stay the night saying that I make her feel unwelcome. I lost it over the fact she was sneaking food up to her room having reminded her of the rule and then lied to me and OH about doing it. I basically said if she couldn't follow one simple rule then she shouldn't come over. I said she needed to apologise which took over 2 months. In the meantime OH had been having her over while I was out at work.
Things have not improved much since the apology, she refuses to stay the night and spends her time here refusing to talk to anyone and making her dad buy her clothes and coffee/ treats a master manipulator. Since we have got engaged she's refusing to come to the house at all. She's said she'll only come to the wedding if he buys her a horse!
Alongside this she has been diagnosed with Tourettes (the diagnosis was after 6 weeks of tics and at the cahms appt my OH was not allowed to attend BM and SD basically lied and said it had been going on for a year and that there had been issues since birth). OH had just let this all slide and says he's glad she's being treated even though from my SEN background it doesn't add up. Why would you want your child on anti psychotics if that's not the actual problem?
Since lockdown she won't even speak to him, wont see him, won't answer her phone. He says they've been messaging but I don't believe him. So today I did something really bad and looked at his messages. She's said a couple of single words to him in the last few weeks so has not been in touch but previous to that in the last couple of months she has been vile about me. Saying my kids come from a crap gene pool, who would want me as a mother, I'm a witch, I'm disgusting, why would he want to marry me etc. He has said nothing to her about it just ignored it all which makes me furious. I don't know whether to confess and say I looked and confront him about it or try fix things with her or just pretend I know nothing. I hate that she hates me so much when I've not done anything to her but also don't feel like she should be slagging me and my kids off to her dad and him not to say anything about it. I know I should have just trusted him and not looked arghhhhh help
Not much you can do
I don’t really see what you can do other than talk to your partner and tell him your concerns. You don’t have to mention that you looked at his phone - a fact that doesn’t cast you in a positive light. You in essence drew a line in the sand on the food issue - which was your right- but she saw you and upped the ante. Your husband doesn’t want to get in the middle and that leaves you in limbo. SD May grow out of - but she may not. It boils down to that you have all the facts in front of you and you have to choose if you can be happy in this situation as it is now- because there are no guarantees that it will change.
I agree she might not change
I agree she might not change so I guess I need to make some decision about what happens if that is the case. She has her own room here and BS and SS have to share. SS chose to go into her room last time he stayed as it's not been slept in for 9 months. Will ask partner to sit down and talk about this as it is
Dont get me started about
Dont get me started about assholes who lock large breed dogs in a room so they and ransack our house, steal money and documents for the 'their' case.
Its vial............
Somethings are not forgiveable --this is one of those things.
We have gone through a
We have gone through a similar experience. We got married when my SD was 8 (and our boys were 12) and in the beginning things were ok, SD and I got along well, and she was a great kid for the most part. It was just obvious that both mom and dad catered to her and that created kind of a monster as she became a teenager. It turned into disrespect and attitude, and refusal to do simple things like rinsing your dishes after you have cooked something. I never addressed things with her, I went through my DH, which I don't know if that was good or bad. I was hoping to avoid conflict between her and I directly by having him be the one to set the expectations, but he fought me on it also for a long time and that made me start feeling resentful and withdrawing. The straw that really escalated things was when I asked him to have the kids check in with us before they dropped by when they were with their mom. It was getting to be a daily habit for SD to have whichever parent she was with run her to the other house, and she would walk into our house unannounced a lot. I wasn't with him when he asked them, SS was fine with it but SD lost it and cursed him out. It turned into her not feeling welcome here, which I am sure my withdrawing contributed to that feeling from the other issues that were going on. BM fed into it by saying she could come to her house ANY time, and she didn't make her "do chores" (neither did we). So naturally SD gravitated to staying at her mom's more, and as DH started to recognize and address problems himself, she would punish him by not coming over and not communicating. He was not always honest with me about what was going on, and I confess I snooped in his phone because I wanted to know. I didn't find anything terrible about myself, but I saw plenty of her being hateful to him and him not addressing it, which only upset me more about everything. I don't recommend snooping, and I did come clean about it to him and haven't since.
My SD has not stayed here in over a year. When she was 15, my DH picked her up from a party falling down drunk, and when he tried to enforce consequences by preventing her from going to a party a couple weekends later, she called her mom to come rescue her and she hasn't lived here since. She has only been in our house a handful of times, either for family gathering or to collect money. Overall of course our home is a lot more peaceful, but DH and I are both broken hearted over the way things are. We both just want a healthy, normal relationship with SD17. I know there are things I could have done better, but I feel like overall our situation went so far due to the feeling of power and entitlement DH and BM gave to SD from a young age. If you can't say to your child - hey, don't have food in your bedroom - without there being a huge incident, there is something much bigger going on. I would consider your future carefully before deciding to get married. I love my DH, he is a wonderful person, but we had a very rough few years that I am afraid it will be hard to repair the damage from. I would recommend looking now to find a counselor or pastor who is experienced with divorce and remarriage for both of you to talk to, to help navigate through all this and help you understand some of the things that may come up. I wish we had that before we got married because there was a lot we didn't think of when it came to our differences in parenting. We were blessed to find someone a couple years ago who helped us tremendously, but unfortunately by then the relationship with my SD was already hurting. I really think if DH and I could have been more on the same page from the beginning, maybe she would still be a part of our home right now
This really feels so familiar
This really feels so familiar to how things are with us. I have realised reading all these comments that it's not really how vile she has been about me (thats where i was with the inirjal shock of reading them) but how hideous she is towards my partner despite him trying to do everything to make her happy. When we talked about the current situation a couple of days ago this was the overwhelming issue that kept coming up. My worry is that it is too late for him to put in those boundaries now and we will end up with her completely rejecting him and that will be really painful for him. I also wonder if maybe I need to take a complete step back and not get involved or comment? It's so difficult, I would never allow my own children to behave this way towards their dad despite the hell he put us through but I guess what she does is beyond any control of mine.
I can't speak for everyone of
I can't speak for everyone of course, but in our case it was really, really difficult for my DH to start setting boundaries with my SD at 14/15, and it did result in her rejecting him. He spent years ignoring disrespect and actually catered to it. For example, her rudely demanding he drive her to her mom's to get something before he was done eating dinner, and he would rush to get done and leave me to clean up so he could take her instead of teaching her to be considerate and wait. It was seeing that out of him that started turning me sour, which transferred to feeling that way toward having her around in general because that is what her time here became - her making demands and him literally jumping to fulfill them. It was a several years long build, and it took me being ready to walk out the door and us going to counseling for him to see that what he was doing was not contributing to a healthy, balanced relationship with his kid. I often wonder how their relationship would be if I wasn't around to influence that happening. I feel some guilt over it, because I assume she would be living her best life at her dad's because his attention would be on making her happy, like it was before I came along. I struggle with that, I hate my role in contributing to the way things are now.
I do think that it is probably better to address some things with our skids directly, instead of leaving it up to our SO's to do when they feel caught in the middle. Not jumping in the middle of everything, but if there is something in your home that you expect, like the food in her room, I think there is no reason you can't be the one to say something. My reasoning for not speaking up was coming from the perspective of being a skid myself and feelings I remembered having, so as a stepmom, I was trying to stay in the background and not interfere. I don't think never speaking up allows for an authentic relationship though. If people are going to feel like a family, i think they need to be able to express the good and the bad, as long as it's done with love and respect. If I could do it differently, I think I would have spoken to my SD directly about the things that directly impacted me instead of withdrawing. And that includes seeing my husband be disrespected. There are ways to do it without "yelling at them", and if I had done it in the beginning when she and I were good, maybe what I had to say would have got her attention. It's hard to say. In any case, I wish you the best and I hope that everything works out!
I’m curious to know if he is
I’m curious to know if he is going to buy her a horse re: the wedding.
If he does buy her the horse your married life would not be off to a great start because she would know she can manipulate on a rather grand scale.