Hi Everyone,

I'm having a hard time right now, and I need somewhere to vent away from family and friends, where my frustration won't negatively impact my relationship with my SO. I've been with him for 2 years. I was in college 5 hours away and after I moved in last summer, for the past year I have commuted each weekend from school to home. He has a daughter, 8, who means the absolute world to him. There is nothing more important to him than being her father, which is a good thing. Her BM is a mess, has at least two diagnosed personality disorders, and gets 6 hours of sv each weekend, but is otherwise uninvolved.

SD ( I guess, even though we're not married) stays with her (alcoholic) grandmother and her grandfather fewer than 15 houses away. The arrangement began about 6 months before SO and I met, because he was beginning a new job with unpredictable hours (he's gone back to self-employment, but with even longer hours). His mother hates me, in part I think because she feels I'm encroaching on her territory.

SO wants to transition to having SD home more, and his relationship with his mother is increasingly rocky and almost beyond repair. The most important thing is that he wants me to be a full parent to SD. Since I moved in a year ago, I've tried hard to love her and care for her but it's just so hard. There are so many conflicting ideas of what should be going on with her, so many people have a say, and the whole situation is just awful. SD gets plenty of structure (schedule/routine) at her grandparents' but no discipline or regulation of her behavior, and she can be just unbearable. She's MENSA, and manipulative, a braggart, rude, still wets herself during the day and at night (no medical issue, she just refuses to wipe and waits until the absolute last minute to use the bathroom despite constant reminders) and always smells like pee. She is completely helpless, or treated as such: someone gets her in and out of the bath, picks out her clothes and gets her dressed, cleans her room, makes her bed, she honestly does nothing for herself. I know that kids need a lot, but she can't bring her dish to the sink or clean up her own toys in her own room? She's been in constant trouble at school because of her rude behavior, tantrums, and overall defiance.

Before I moved in last year, SO and I had a meeting with SD's play therapist to talk about how I should interact with her and to ease the transition into being with her more. She warned me that the biggest issue will be boundaries and limits, and that is absolutely the case, but a lot of that issue is that SO and his parents set absolutely no limits for SD so she just doesn't care about boundaries, and she's smart enough to get around rules and manipulate adults.SD can be very sweet 50% of the time, but the other 50% she's just a nightmare. I think there's a class issue when it comes to my expectations of how he should approach her behavior: He's all for letting her be a free spirit and an independent thinking, but respect and kindness to others is of critical importance to me. I think the two are compatible, but there's a disconnect between SO and I around not only how to deal with undesirable behavior, but even which behavior is undesirable.

I'm so frustrated and recently can get pretty b*tchy after a few days in a row with her, which makes everything worse. When I try to withdraw, SO doesn't get angry but he gets very sad thinking I don't like her. Which, often, I don't. I love my SO, and I am financially dependent on him right now. I'm in the middle of the hiring process for a great job, but job or no job I'm committed to this relationship and to doing what I can to make it work. I'm not with him because I have "no other choice" or anything like that. Up to now I've always felt such a connection with SD but recently I'm feeling detached and various levels of annoyed. I knew this transitionary period would be hard now that I've graduated and am here full time, but I'm worried that this isn't the passing phase my SO thinks it will turn out to be.

My situation isn't that bad, I know. SD is not horrible all the time, just rude, disgusting, and disrespectful, like many other kids. But I feel terrible that I'm getting progressively less emotionally attached to her and SO has noticed and is concerned. He doesn't address her behavior because he doesn't want her to be sad or feel left out or cry, which I think is ridiculous, and we've started to fight about it quite a lot. I know this is long but I just need to hear someone else who has dealt with anything like this. I kind of need some kind of reassurance and for someone to tell me how to step back and catch my breath when she's driving me up the wall, like yesterday when we spent the day together at an amusement park for Father's Day. I'm hoping this forum can be some kind of support. We live in the suburbs with nuclear families and it's pretty unheard of in his family that we live together unmarried. It's very lonely.