I have been married three times. The first time was to the father of my children, when I found out at 17 that I was pregnant and good old-fashioned southern values pointed us straight to marriage. We were married for 16 years when I finally decided the physical and mental abuse was enough, especially towards the kids. Can't say why it took me so long to leave, too long ago and doesn't matter. My son is now 24, married last October and living way too far away. My daughter just started her Freshman year at a local university and decided to live on campus.

The second time, I married a man with two sons who had issues, one with Aspberger's Syndrome and the other seemed just "off" though SH would never take him to have him tested for anything. I ended that marriage after 3 years when I found his online dating profile on an adult website. :jawdrop: That will be a story for another blog entry...

This is my third and final time. We have known one another for 18 years, since I was pregnant with my daughter. He has a daughter who is now 20 and one who is now 8 (oops). While he was in the process of a divorce from his ex, he made a dumb decision and she ended up pregnant. He left anyway, his youngest was mere months old. Enter guilty father syndrome. During this time, I was dating and then married to SH but remained friends with him. We grew closer as friends during and after my divorce from SH but he was in a relationship with someone. After a couple of years, we found ourselves single at the same time and started to date. While we were friends and while we were dating, I LOVED him and his kids to death. My daughter and I (unless she was visiting her dad, then I would go alone) would go spend time with all of them having dinner, watching movies, playing games, just talking about our days.

We were married 2 1/2 years ago and then the troubles started. I'm starting to think that I'm just not meant to be a stepmom, hell, maybe I'm just not meant to be married, not sure. SD20 only comes over every other weekend. She is extremely intelligent, a self-proclaimed geek who talks way above our heads (she is studying to be an aerospace engineer) yet has very little common sense. The Yeti ruined SD20's relationship with her dad by trashing him for years (I know this as I was part of the entire circle most of the 18 years I knew all of them and heard it for myself). He did make terrible mistakes, but the thing about mistakes is that you make them and then they're over...only the consequences remain - those are worse but you can't avoid them. Anyway, she is very loud and obnoxious, yells at him and basically just displays zero respect for him. She and I get along famously, except her volume and the way she talks to her dad just irritate me but I can live with it.

Then there's SD8...another story entirely. She's with us 50% of the time (God bless those SM's out there who have their Skids 24/365). Clingy, needy, disruptive, argumentative, you name it. Guilty father compounds the issues...they are both highly physical, affectionate people and it drives me mad. She climbs all over him, insists on sitting next to him at the table, on the couch, everywhere. She follows him everywhere, he has had to FIRMLY tell her to leave the closet so he could change clothes, or leave the bathroom so he could use it. While he is in the bathroom, she will pace, come in and out of her room to see if he's out yet. They are constantly touching one another, he pets on her, kisses her on the head, she climbs on his lap all of the time. For the first year and a half of our marriage, she was coming into our room in the middle of the night, waking him up and then he was going back to her room, climbing into her bed and spending the rest of the night in there with her. I ended that. It was arduous, but I ended it. I told him that he is married to me, not her, and he was not spending the night in her bed. FINALLY got him to stop laying down with her to try and get her to go to sleep at night (he usually fell asleep too) which I felt was causing her to wake up, find him missing after falling asleep with him beside her in bed, and get scared, inevitably coming to find him.

She interrupts every conversation, she shoves herself onto him any time we are talking or just sitting together, even if we were just holding hands. So, I stopped holding hands, I stopped sitting next to him and when he lets her interrupt, I stop talking and refuse to talk again until later. I spend my evenings zoned out in front of video games, games she isn't allowed to watch, just to keep her away from me. If I'm in the room, she whispers to him or plays charades, dramatizing everything, as though she doesn't want me to hear her. He still cuts up her food (yes, even pancakes), mixes up her spaghetti, her cereal, whatever he can to do baby her, he's all in.

I have lost a lot of attraction to my husband after only 2 1/2 years and that's a pure shame. I love him fiercely, and I am grateful that someone who knows me as well as he does, still loves me and wants to be with me (because I'm one screwed up cookie!). But any time I try to think of him in any intimate way whatsoever, she comes to my mind and I just lose all interest. This is really getting difficult for me to stand on a daily basis and with my kids gone, it's even tougher because I have no one to divert my attention to. I'm very lonely. Thankfully, since my daughter's school is local, she comes over at least once a week and that helps. But she gets as irritated at them as I do, so she doesn't come as often as she probably would.

More to come in another post.