When I found out I cannot have kids I was devastated. For me, the world ended. After a few years I contemplated adopting but I wanted to bring a child into a stable home with perhaps a father figure. I had decided some years ago that I would not get married, though it had been a lifelong desire to have a husband and family. Due to the inadequacy I felt as a woman I was unable to love myself for a long time, and as a result, felt that no one would love me this way.
After very hard work on my confidence and self worth, I finally started to see myself as beautiful and still very sexy – all woman.
After basically giving up on searching for Mr. Right I decided, through a weird psychic encounter of my partner being someone from my past, I restarted a relationship with someone from my teen years. At first we just tested the waters to see what would happen but we ended up living together and started planning a wedding.
To cut a long story short, I was happy when he told me that during the years we were apart he fathered two children. The first child, a boy is an adult and the second is a girl in her tween years (at the time). I fell in love with both kids and the girl I have grown to love like my own child.
The story
When Steve and I got together his daughter was living with her aunt. She was a well behaved and courteous young lady whom I was happy to get to know. Â After spending the Easter holidays with her mother in 2011, the girl decided she no longer wanted to live with her aunt, so her mother took her. Now, we know that mothers have the fist say in their child’s life, however, mothers should also do what is in their child’s best interest. She knew she was unable to provide for the child or offer a stable, controlled and disciplined environment, yet she still took the child away from a loving stable home.
To make matters worse, she allowed her twelve year old child to attend adult parties with alcohol, sexually explicit music and of course horny boys. During the holidays which the girl stayed with her mother she was exposed to sex and that’s the reason the girl refused to stay in her nice quiet home.
After taking the daughter away from an aunt the mother realized that she (1) had not the finances to care for an additional child. (2) the child’s father could not fully support her, though he tried and that’s the reason his sister cared for his daughter, (3) she had no interest in caring for her daughter.
She started neglecting her child where she would not prepare meals for her and many times the child would turn up on my doorstep hungry, needing the care and attention of a mother. On one occasion when she got in trouble at school, it was I who she allowed to take her home because she refused to let her mother near her. We tried to figure the reason but she would not tell us. We figured she was angry with her mother because of an argument they had.
The situation got worse when she started running away. The first time we were told by the mother, I was the one who insisted that she contact the police. It was the following day after the child ran away that she called us to let us know. Each time the child ran away she would wait until morning, or two or three days later to call us. Each time this happens, I am the one who ends up at the police station first. It reached a point where mother said “I give up”, and I am like, “You can’t give up on your daughter.”
This is a mother who allows her oldest, a sixteen year old to go live with a man, a few houses away. That’s the example she sets for her fourteen year old daughter, my step-daughter. The mother would leave all weekend to go to some man’s house, of course there is a grandmother in the house, but what example is that?
The situation has now reached a point where this young lady says she doesn’t want to go to school, she just want to “do road”. That’s a Jamaican slang for running around for females. In other words, she want to be with whomever she wants and doesn’t care about school.
It seems the sole intention of this teen age girl is to go live with a man. Each time she runs away it’s with a different guy, locked up in a house somewhere. She’s had counselling and it made no difference. She’s had love and care and that is doing no good either. She’s been disciplined by the state but she say’s she doesn’t care if the state locks her up.
What is a stepmother to do? I am not trying to throw around blame but the mother refuses to take responsibility for the way her daughter has been acting. There is so much more to this but I am so stressed right now, I haven’t slept or eaten properly in days. I just had to vent here.