Were you or are you in a family where you were a step-parent or step-child, and if so, how did the relationship go?

I was a step-dad for only about a year and a half. The whole thing was awkward because I was 22–23 and didn’t know how to be a father anyway. I played with him and everything, but there was just a strange feeling, although it went away, it always came back when the little 3 year old boy was forced to talk to his real dad that he didn’t know because of a court order. He actually asked us if I was his dad once, we just said, “Uuuhhhhh…..kind of…”.

When the relationship with the mother got bad, he saw how we were towards each other and obviously sided with the mom, which there is nothing wrong with, but she played into it. One day, we were arguing and I was so angry I had to get out of there before I made it worse, so I just walked away, although Little Boy (we’ll call him) asked me to play with him. I calmly explained that I had to go, and the mother flipped out: “Why won’t you play with him! C’mon Little Boy, he doesn’t love us anymore”!

It was just a bad time lol. I most likely will never do it again, ever.

The relationship between me and my stepdad was quite strained. I didn’t like him, I didn’t like that he had taken away my mom (who had been a wonderful single mother up until that point). I considered his presence a huge imposition and I hated him.
Ten years later, I have a huge amount of respect for him. He put up with me at my very worst preteen years.
I don’t think most children have quite the amount of hatred that I did. It didn’t help that I was an only child used to getting my own way. It certainly didn’t help that I was thirteen, and the vast majority of thirteen year olds are awful.
I certainly put a strain on my mother and his relationship. They got a divorce, so…

I am currently a step-child and I have been for about four years and I am on my 5th year now. I have been living with me and my step-dad since I was around 12 turning 13.
At first I hated him because of all I had seen in movies. Calling him names and saying he’s not treating me well and stuff because he wasn’t my real father and all that.
Later I changed and we are not very good together the whole family…
He cares for me and treats me as his own child. Actually I am his only step-child since he has no children from previous relationships.
Now he asked me I wanted to change add his name as my last name and then it would be (jóndsóttir) that´s what we do in Iceland but I don’t know if I want to or not.

When I was younger, I was a step-child. My father cheated on my mum with a very ugly woman. She was one of the worst people I’ve ever met in my life. She’s part of the reason why I was adopted and sent to America. Damn her! :(

I technically have a step-mother but I forget since she has such a minute role in my life. She married my dad when I was about 14 or 15, and never made any effort to have a relationship with me or my sister. When I was 16 and my mom was too crazy for me to deal with, I tried living with my dad and step-mother for a while. She was so awful I finally said fuck it and moved out. (Best decision I ever made.)

I have a step-dad and the relationship between him and I and him and my brother is fine. My brother still lives my step-dad and my mum.

When I was around 8–13, my mother dated and married a man she knew from church. When they first met, I felt mostly ambivalent toward him, like, “Meh. It’s kind of awkward hanging out with him, but whatever.” Slowly the relationship went downhill. I got older and he lived with the family longer, I became more aware of the controlling and icky aspects of his personality. It ended with my mom driving us to my aunt’s house in the middle of the night, and we stayed there for about a year.

When I was about 11, my dad remarried. At first I was a little intimidated by my stepmother but generally liked her. She was snarky and a little overbearing, but very intelligent. When I was 15 and my sister was 14, our mother died and we moved in with our dad and stepmother. My sister got along ok, but I went head to head with them on everything from pretty much day one. I felt pretty beleagured when I was there, because she had a very forceful personality and I’m very shy. I started sneaking out of the house and generally doing bad teenage stuff and getting into big fights with them. It ended with me saying I was going to get the hell out of there and never come back, and they took me up on it. (This was about 5 years ago.)

When I came back from my first semester of college, my bedroom was converted into a storage room and they said I could sleep on an air mattress in the basement. I stayed with friends during breaks from college and still feel uncomfortable and unwelcome at family gatherings. Obviously, a lot of what happened is my doing. I did plenty of stuff because I knew it would purposely piss them off and I was stubborn and sneaky. Other than the fact that I graduated high school, I was a pretty horrible teenager.

I have great relationships with a few of my other relatives. My grandparents are the best ever and my aunt is like a mom-away-from-mom. She gives great advice and cheers me up when I’m down, and I do whatever I can to help around the house. My parents’ choices make me want to think very carefully about my own choices if I ever have children, and make sure that I always act in their best interest.

I got to say I have been very lucking I have a step-father and he is wonderful to us kids, but I think the way my step sister looks at my mother and her fathers relationship is much different. My father passed away and there is no divorce or ill will for why my mother was not with my father however her parents divorced so she sees it as her father leaving her mother and views their relationship in a different light. It took a lot longer time for her and her brother to come to even like my mother at all and approve of their relationship. But she has since accepted it now that its been over 15 years since they’ve been together now.

I guess its all in the perspective you look at things and how willing you are to accept the new person into the family as well.

I am both a step-daughter and a step-mom.

My folks divorced as I was entering high school. Both parents remarried quickly – my dad remains married (20 some years later) to my stepmom, who I adore.

My mom divorced and remarried a third time..she’s happy. And, in the words of Forrest Gump: “That’s all I have to say about that.”

My stepmom was the one to comfort me when during my first heart break, my first prom, my first surgery..she met me at 16, but I wish I’d had her in my life my whole life. Not that she always agrees with me – she tells me like it is and I love her for her honesty and her strong opinions. I love her dearly.

I married a man who was a single parent to an infant daughter. His ex..(long story, and don’t feel like I should share her information on the internet)..has not been a very consistently involved parent with her daughter since birth essentially. Her time with her daughter really..varies. Ebbs and flows sort of.

I feel as if I am the REAL mom to my daughter and..her biological mom…well, she may have given birth but she’s just “the fun one”.

We do our very best to support our daughter spending time with her mother—we probably have a uniquely close relationship with his Ex…one that I don’t always enjoy but that definitely benefits our daughter.

I’ve raised my stepdaughter now for…12 nearly 13 years. Truly, it feels the same with her as it does with our other kids (the ones I gave birth to).
She doesn’t remember a time without me – I’ve been with her since before she turned 2.
I see a lot of ALL of her parents in her.. definitely her mother’s pretty blue eyes…she has her father’s excellent sense of humor and slightly curly hair..and her love of foreign languages and talent for sarcasm—definitely my contribution. :)

Although it’s been tough at times to parent in a triangle (as I like to put it) – overall my relationship with my SO is strengthened.
It’s hard enough to parent children together (even just parents don’t always agree on matters of discipline and expectations, etc.)—it’s just a bit harder to parent with 3 people in the mix. Otherwise, not a big deal.

I am a step-child and my husband is a step-father now.

My relationship with my step-mother was awful. I respect her for taking on someone else’s children and I acknowledge how hard that is, but she had very different attitudes to raising children from my father and I found it very hard to go from being in a family that talked about anything and was allowed to play with other children to being told literally “children should be seen and not heard” and “you must not leave the garden and play with the other children in the neighbourhood”. We just did not get on at all and I left home very young.

My husband is amazing. I think any step-relationship can be challenging and he, a man who has no children of his own, has had to deal with some challenging issues with my own children. Going through the teen years with my son. Dealing with resentment because my son’s real father is so absent and my current husband has had to deal with the fallout from that. He has dealt with it though and his relationship with my daughters is excellent and the relationship with my son is much, much better. I feel the challenges they are facing are as much to do with two males going through the transition of growing up as much as him being a step-parent.

I’m a step-daughter, a step-mother, and am married to a step-father. I’m even a step-grandma, now!

My mom wasn’t married when she had me, and I never even met my bio-dad til I was 18. My mom married my step-dad when I was 4, but I’d known him since I was born and already loved him before they got married. As soon as they got married, I started calling him Daddy. He was a huge part of my life, but really had no say in disciplining me (my mother wouldn’t allow it). After they divorced when I was about 8 (they were much better friends than spouses), he maintained his presence in my life, just as if he were my bio-dad. I saw him on weekends, he took me on trips, he took me shopping for the school clothes my mom couldn’t afford, and he walked me down the aisle at my wedding (which my bio-father was a guest at). I still call him Dad, and he is a wonderful grandfather to my three kids. I couldn’t possibly love him more if he and I were actually related. He’s remarried to a wonderful woman, but only about 2 years ago.

My mother also remarried, but I was well into adulthood when she did. I never considered him my step-father, just my mother’s husband.

I’m a step-mother to my husband’s (grown) sons. I’m in no way their ‘mother’, but I am a parental influence in their lives. We have a very good relationship, despite them having had a bad experience with their first step-mother, my husband’s second wife. His oldest son now has two children, and I’m a grandma to them.

The relationship between my kids (all teenagers at this point) and my husband is very good. They love each other. He doesn’t factor into the parenting dynamic much, though. He’s 9 years older than I am, my kids weren’t little when we married, and we have very different parenting styles. I always tell him it’s a good thing we met after we were done having kids, because our marriage would never have survived having kids together.

I’m technically a step-daughter, but I never see it that way. I refer to her as “my dad’s wife” (if I’m being polite, like here on Fluther – the rest of the time, she’s “The Whore”), because she didn’t enter our lives until I was 18, and has never been any kind of mother figure towards me. Our relationships is… strained. We both make an effort to be civil most of the time, but I can’t stand her (I don’t know how she feels about me). I always felt that she was really unremorseful about sleeping with a married man, and cheating on her husband, and that she flaunted it in front of me within weeks of me finding out my dad had left my mom for her. She seemed more to want to say that she totally deserved to be with him than that she might have carried a plan out poorly, or done some very hurtful things. Even once you get beyond that, she’s really an annoying, inappropriate, unstable person. She wore really slutty clothes around my sister and I and would be pretty physical with my dad in front of us (the most my parents ever did in front of us was no-tongue kiss). She’ll bash my mom around me, and feed me all the gossip about her/my dad/my mom. One minute, she’ll be trying to be my BFF and tell me about the first time she and my dad had sex so that I feel better about my first few times, the next she’ll try to be my parent and lay down new on-the-spot rules about phones at the dinner table and what topics we can discuss (nothing that ever creates tension or conflict, apparently. That seems healthy.), and tell us how because she’s an army brat, when she’s says dinner’s at 6, it’s at 6, not 6:01, not 6:45, even though I have never known her to be on time and she’s been over 2 hours late on several occasions when meeting me for dinner (with my dad, obviously). She’s kinda a bad parent, being really unstable, picking fights with her daughters, laying down some pretty harsh punishments for fairly light infractions (she’ll have nothing left to up the ante with should either do something actually bad, like try coke), and generally demands that they never, ever be human – and I actually like my stepsisters. To top it all off, I don’t know that she actually makes my dad happy. So I pretty much hate her, but can be civil towards her.

I’m a step-daughter and my husband is a step-father.

My parents divorced when I was 18, so when my mom remarried, it wasn’t really a big thing for me. I had already moved out and been on my own. My step-father is really awesome though and has always been there for my brother and I when he could be. He is a wonderful grandfather to my son and my niece. We don’t call him dad, but I look up to him a lot and would be there for him if he needed me.

My husband is step-father to my son. He came into my son’s life when he was 5. My son doesn’t know his biological dad (his choice), so my husband is the only dad he really knows. They get along really well and my husband and I have very similar ideas on parenting. When we disagree on parenting issues, we talk them out. Sometimes it goes my way, sometimes it goes his. It always goes in the way that we think is best for “our” son. We’ve never fought about parenting issues and we always back each other up. My husband is going to be adopting my son. We started the process once, but it got held up thanks to my ex and then we had to move, so now we have to start it all over again.

Also, my mom has a guy I think of as my step-dad, even though they aren’t married (nor do they want to be – they’re both pretty burned out from their respective failed marriages). He’s awesome, because he let me take my time getting to know him, never tries to presume his role, is always appropriate, and generally has a “I’m here if you want me to be, and not if you don’t want me to be” kinda attitude. He’s a total mensch, and not only makes my mom happy, but calms her down from her crazy so she’s better to be around as well. Plus, he’s Jewish, which is always a bonus in my book.

I have been a stepchild for most of my life. My stepmother was always cool, though I’m not sure she really considers herself a parent. She never wanted kids, and I think our relationship is basically the most she’d want out of the situation. I don’t mean to make her sound distant—she’s definitely not. I think she just never wanted responsibility for an infant or a toddler.

My stepfather is a little different. Our relationship has steadily improved, but we’ve had issues regarding just how much authority he really had over me. He also seemed to think it was important to let me know he was smarter than me all while I was growing up. I remember coming home one day when I was in third grade and mentioning something interesting I had learned about ants. His response was, “I majored in biology, I already know that.” He has definitely evolved as a person, however, and was much more nurturing toward my younger sister.