I have been a stepmom for 26 years. The first years were hellacious. My husband was a "weekend warrior" (his description, but probably would have been more truthful to have called himself the "weekend red carpet"). His children at the time were a boy 10 and a girl 13. He had been divorced for seven years. His idea of "parenting" was to get them on the weekend (or whenever mommy wanted a sitter) and strew the path to his door with roses. The time then was spent totally doting on them, no discipline. After all, he wanted the time to be "special". Let mom do the discipline. Except she didn't. She was too busy bedding one man after the other and running off the stepkids in her own marriage.

I was vulnerable when I married him. My kids were as well. We had just emerged from an abusive situation. We had no preconceived notions of stepfamilies. We didn't know any. My new husband arrived on the scene like a knight in shining armor supposedly to protect us from the man who threatened us on an almost daily basis, sometimes trying to run us off the road, sometimes waving a gun around threatening to kill us all. Abruptly all that stopped when I married again. Amazing. My mother always said my ex was a coward, that he knew what he could get by with where I was concerned, but put another man in the picture and he was a coward. Apparently she was right.

But I traded one hell for another. And this is all I can write now. These memories are hard.