Anyone dealt with stepfamilies?

Smash, I'm sorry about your situation. Sounds like a mess. sgreenwell has a good point. You're his daughter. You should come first. He should be willing to make some adjustments for your sake. Does he realize how frustrated you are?

After reading KY's story, I'm just happy my father's second wife never asked me to call her "mom." Not a chance in hell. I didn't even refer to her as my stepmother. That would suggest that she had some role in raising me and I was a senior in high school when they met. I have one mother and it sure ain't that fake little wanna-be.

Can you tell I don't like the woman much? Long story, but this is about Smash's situation. Not mine. Let's just say my father's widow can give Smash's stepmom a run for the crazy bitch title.

 

Thanks everyone for the thoughts/ideas/commiseration, and a few specific replies.

Double J - My younger sister has mastered the use of sarcasm as a weapon, and she doesn't have the same fear I have of looking like I'm undercutting this woman in front of her son/our brother. She has the same set of issues with her but is also a lot more willing to interject herself into the conversation and forcibly change the subject. I try to be "polite" to the point where it just all blows up in my face. I don't know if there have been comments made about our mom in front of my sister. i should ask.

I try to keep up the lines of communication with my brother. He's a sports fan, so that helps. But he's also typical teenage boy and not the world's greatest communicator with anyone except his peers.

My dad doesn't travel to me because there's not a whole lot to do when he's in my town. When I'm there, he usually works during the day while I catch up with my in-town college friends, then we have dinner and go to the driving range or a sporting event or bum around and play who wants to be a millionaire on TV. He'd be bored at my apartment all day, though he came up here for Thanksgiving one year along with the stepmom, my sister and halfbrother. That was much less painful that I thought. She was much better behaved on "my turf" other than one stupid argument about dessert.

OOP - One of my dad's bigger personality flaws is that he'll lay back in family confrontations in an attempt not to pick sides. it's obviously an impossible place for him, particularly because she's the mother of my half-brother, his son. As much as I want to throw a temper tantrum and say "show don't just tell that you put me first!" I know that's not going to be productive in the long run.

He's been very open about letting me skip out on things when she's there, from the wedding (which she insisted be scheduled the Saturday after thanksgiving, one of the only times in college I could get home to visit my mom) to "family get togethers" and not complaining when I need to get up and take a walk in the middle of lunch. But he's not willing to tell her to lay off in the moment, and while that's frustrating, it fits in with what I expect.

What I really, really want (and why I was hoping maybe a stepdad or stepmom would chime in here in how they'd worked through difficult relationships with their stepkids) is a way to initiate a discussion with her as adults. I hope, maybe unrealistically, that if I tell her that all the possessive and passive-aggressive shit bothers me, that I'm not trying to break them up or steal his affection from her, that I'm willing to do things as a group with her and my brother and dad as long as it's about all of us, not just her/brother/dad with me as an interested onlooker, that we can have a decent, distant-relative style relationship. And that has as much to do with her raging immaturity and insecurity as it does with her being married to my father.

But I don't know how to have that conversation. I'm afraid if I do, she'll just act all victimized and cry to my dad about how mean I'm being to her, want more to push me out of their lives and just lead to more jealousness, possessiveness and passive-aggressiveness.

 

Smash, I admire your attempts to handle this in a mature manner. Sounds like she isn't capable of doing that.

I hate to keep saying it, but it IS your father's job to try to step in, not yours. I don't want to say much more for fear of being negative about your father. All I can say is how I feel as a father. My daughter comes first, ahead of anybody. That even includes her mother, and I know Mrs. OOP feels the same way.

 

Oh, I know he isn't necessarily handling it the best way when the group of us are around. He's been extremely supportive in our (very long) conversations about it, at least.