Time Delay

When you're a stepmom, you drink when you know you need it. There are times when you are so upset, about children's doings, and there is nothing in the world you can do about it.

Well, except blog or post on a stepmom's site, hoping for someone to come up with some ingenious comments that will make it all better. Yeah, ok, unlikely. They'll try, but it won't help allllll that much.

Drinks are like anti-depressants or pain killers. I know, not what you want to hear me relate it to, but it's true.  It takes the edge off, as my doctor says.

You need to take the edge off, because there's absolutely nothing you can do. When they are not with you, and you find out all kinds of things that would drive you nuts, you can't do a thing. You can't talk to them. You can't ask them. You can't ask your husband to handle it. You can't tell them to at least think about what they did. You can't give them a note about how much it hurts when they do whatever it is you do. You can't give them a parable, ask them to read a Bible verse, or give them a time out. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. 

You find out about something terrible. You hear about how your stepkids lied to your face or your husband's face repeatedly, while doing something that took a lot of time, that seemed like a fun family event, that cost a lot of money. Guess what! They didn't care! That's what you realize later when you hear all the lies.

I spent the majority of my life avoiding fake people. I despise people who have to be fake. We all have gone through a phase of being fake, usually in junior high or high school, I would hope, but at some point we start to realize that those people don't have depth or anything to offer us anymore. There's nothing there, or we can't trust it.

I never thought I'd be the pseudo-parent of one. She's just a kid. It still sucks. Junior high is when I came to the realization that being fake just hurts. That the guy who stood up for everybody was my school hero. That lying about yourself and trying to be something you're not just pisses everybody off.

But here I am. With a person who comes over to my house, who I take care of, who I think about all the time, who I worry about, who I talk about, who I buy anything for- Who is completely, and totally fake. She lies like some of the ex-boyfriends I had. Yeah, her continual lying is now relating to ex-boyfriends in my life. That's the point it's reached.

Friends that lied incessantly and boyfriends who hurt me one too many times were kicked out of my life. In this case, I can't kick her out of my life. There's this stepmom concept of distancing yourself from the stepkid portion of your family, but God, how that would hurt my husband.

I'm stuck. I hit my limit. If you're an adult, you know that sometimes one too many lies is just enough. You're just done. Three years of lying after one year of her obsessing over me- and I'm just so sick of it I can't stand it. Remembering how much she followed me around and copying me- just makes how she is now hurt that much more.

I do not have that instinctual love of her as a parent. I am not her parent. I will never have it.

So, with all of this emotion, and the inability to talk to her or ask her dad to talk to her, or do anything... I blog. And drink a lemon drop.