I was a stepmom before I had kids, and now I am a single mom to two of my own. Psychopath EXH lives with his gf now and I've thought about many of you. I made many mistakes as a SM and I see you all doing the same thing because you don't have the perspective of having your own kids. I feel like I should apologize to my exSD and her mom because I allowed EXH to control things and went along with things that I should not have. For instance, I was probably there on Father's Day when it should have been the two of them. He was constantly injecting me into their relationship or life, and I didn't know any better. He had me convinced that bm was a horrible mom and that we would get married and go after custody so I needed to be THE Mom to exSD. Now that I am dealing with a man who sees his kids MAYBE once a month and can't come see them without the gf, I wonder what stupid things I did when I was in her shoes. Sad thing is that she has older kids and she is older than I was; she should know better. But there is no doubt he has made up all kinds of lies about me so she needs to swoop in and make their lives great.

If I had to do it over again, I would understand better what a child needs from his/her parent and would do more to foster that and step out of the way. Of course it would not have made a difference in my case because my EXH is a psychopath and literally will never have a relationship of substance with his kids. I'm sharing this in hopes that some of you will try to see your situation from another perspective and wonder if there is an issue that you have caused that you might be able to repair.