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Step Parent Part 1

Step Parent Part 1

By Deanne JensenPublished 7 years ago 9 min read
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Photo By Tobi Dami

Parenting is hard under the best of circumstances, but under the worst circumstances, it can be and is a nightmare. It's like a walk on a long dirt road all alone, no one to talk to, no one to share what it really feels like. No one cares no one sees and everyone just closes their eyes to your pain; it doesn't matter to them they only see what they want to see. So why do it? Trust me, I have asked myself that question more times than I can count. Still do to this day. My mother said once that I must enjoy making my life harder than it has to be. Truth is I love my husband and would never leave him. Truth is no matter what is thrown at me and no matter how much I am hurt by these children, I do love them. Does that make me pathetic? Honestly? I don't know. Some times I feel that way. Sometimes I get in the car and drive, music cranked up and I scream as loud as I can. I yell. I cuss. I cry. But at the end I drive back home and start again. This is my story. This is what I have been through and this is what I have felt and do fell. It is my rant. It won't be pretty and it will not be sugar coated. For years I have kept this all bottled up and hidden in the darkest places of my heart, mind and soul. I haven't shared this with family and only one friend has heard most of this. So why now do I write this down and share it? Simple, I can not keep it locked away any longer. I no longer feel embarrassed. What I feel is pain and anger and I feel done most days. I feel alone in this and I am done feeling alone. Maybe others can relate or maybe others will hate me, but if there is just one person out there that is going through the same type of thing and that person feels alone, then they will know that they are not alone. And since I decide to write this all down and throw it out into the world, I feel a weight lifted from me. For the first time in a long time I feel good. So here it goes and I'll see where this journey takes me. Who knows maybe I'll even be happy in the end.

I have been called everything from Dad's bitch to demon to evil incarnate. The one thing I have never been called is Mom. Why? Because I married a man who already had children, not once, no I didn't learn from my first experience as Step Parent, no I had to do it all again with my second marriage. Only the second time was a hundred times harder and more painful. The most enduring introduction that I have ever heard from his children was, this is Deanne, my Dad's wife.

My first marriage was to man who was 13 years older than me and had two children from his first marriage, I was his third wife. His children, Jim and Kathi, lived with their mother in another state. I was 23 years old when they became a part of my life and they were 11 and 9. My exposure to them consisted of summer visits and maybe one or two holidays a year until they became adults and moved closer to us. They did try living with us once and that lasted not even a month and they wanted to go back to their mother. That's another story in and by itself. So not much parenting there. That experience did nothing to prepare me for my second relationship with a man who has three daughters that he has full custody of.

I never had any children of my own. No experience there to draw upon. My second husband, Kolby and I had met when I was 18 and we saw each other on and off for a few years. We lived in different towns in Wyoming and saw I him when I would go visit my Dad. Oh, yes my parents were divorced so I was a step-child as well. I had a step father and a step mother. Hated my step father and when I was young was completely indifferent to my step mother and have only recently started to have a positive relationship with her and I'm going on 54 years old. So I know that sometimes it takes awhile to develop a positive relationship with a step parent or child. Anyway back to my relationship with my second husband, we met in 1982 and after 1988 we pretty much stopped talking to each other and never saw each other again until 2010. I had moved to California and he had moved to Illinois. We both had long term relationships, me with my husband for 22 years and he had an 18 years relationship with the mother of his three girls. No he never married the woman. Both of our relationships oddly ended about the same time and both ended badly. I found him on Facebook and we slowly began talking. I had nothing left to stay where I was living because I had built my life around my first husband and we lived where his family lived. So after months of communication I decided to move to Colorado where Kolby lived. I put in for a transfer at work and within months I was moving to Denver. Kolby and his girls lived about 30 minutes from Denver. There begins the beginning of this crazy world.

I think I have always been a solitary creature, while I had many half brothers and sister and many step brothers and sisters, I was my mom's only child so I was basically an only child. As I said earlier, no children of my own and my first set of step children did not live with me. So while I was all excited about having a family with three daughters who I could spoil and love, I was not at all prepared for the opposite to happen. Maybe I was living in a fairy tale world. Maybe I had watched one to many episodes of the Brady Bunch when I was a child. What ever thoughts I had on having a beautiful relationship with these three beautiful girls quickly went south. I was not prepared for the hate and the resentment I received because their mother and father were no longer together.

Kristin, the oldest, was 15 when I met her. Everyone who knew her said she was the most happy and loving child until one day her mother decided she had had enough of being a mother and left Kolby and their girls. One day she just left. This changed Kristin. Kolby sent the girls away to his sister and father's for awhile to get his life back in order. He brought Kristin back earlier than the two younger ones and he noticed a huge change in her from the minute he brought her home. Gone was the loving happy child and now he was faced with an angry scared teenager who didn't really know how to handle the changes she was going through. So afraid of losing her, Kolby gave into everything Kristin demanded and very quickly she became in charge of everything and began to control him and by the time he saw what had happened the damage was done. I had never heard a child talk to their parent the way this girl talked to her father. Never had I heard a child use threats in the way this one did to get her own way. For example, one day me and Kolby were walking out the door to go for a car ride. Nothing special just a drive in the mountains we hadn't had much alone time and we just wanted to get out of the house and drive. Kristin met us at the front door and wanted to go. Kolby told her no not this time but later he would take her out for a drive. She stormed back downstairs saying I'm going to kill someone! Nice right? But that wasn't the end of it. The entire time he was getting text messages threatening to harm herself. So we cut the drive short and returned to his house. This wasn't a single threat; this threat would be made every time she did not get her own way. Didn't matter what it had to do with, no matter how minor, she would threaten to harm herself in some way. Time and time again her father would give in. Whether it was not going to school to cleaning up after herself to running off to her mother's. This pattern of behavior never changed for either of them and it's been over eight years now and she is not even living in the home as a matter of fact she ran off to her mother's when she was 16 and because she threatened to harm herself when he brought back home he gave in and let her stay with her mother. I might want to add at this point her mother, who did and still does drugs and I'm talking about smoking pot no much harder drugs than that, left Kolby for the lowest of bottom feeders, a man who spent 12 years before he met her in and out of prison for drugs, theft, and stabbing his pregnant girlfriend oh and yes sexual assault of a minor. A real winner who even to this day is in and out of prison, jail, and halfway homes. She has been married to the bottom feeder for over six years. And this woman told Kolby she wanted a criminal background check on me. My reply? Go ahead, I worked in a skilled nursing facility I already had background checks done on me and more importantly I knew I wasn't a criminal. Anyway back to Kristin.

Kristin began living with her mother and all was well. Not! My husband blamed me for her leaving and still continues to blame me. Now I admit I made mistakes but I do know that I did nothing wrong. I was 48 years old and I wasn't going to live my life by the whims of a 16 year-old girl. Sorry wasn't going to happen. I tried to be patient. I tried to make the best out of the situation. I tried to be a friend. And as the years have went by it has not improved it fact every day it gets a little harder to deal with the attitude, the hate, and the outright disrespect that comes from three children.

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About the Creator

Deanne Jensen

I love to write. The one thing I don't like writing about is myself, ironic because that seems to be the one thing I do write about. I'm 53 and married for last time. I walk for stress release. I love Matchbox 20 the music fits me.

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