While reading all of these posts, it dawned on me. I was not alone. Do you know how good that made me feel? All kinds of mushy squishy, finally a place for me to get some advice. My emotions have been wrecked, and I feel like I have a knife sticking out of my back. So if anyone can see it, please remove it for me? Thank you. A little back ground is my dh and I have been married 2 years, and together for over 4 years I am 28 and he is 37. We have the whole yours, mine and ours at our home, and have never looked at the other's children as a step child. So they are our kids. They might not all share the same DNA but they all have our hearts. The ages of his kids when we got together was a girl 12 and a boy 7. Mine were 4 and 6 months both little girls. We were together for 8 months when his kids flew from Guam to live with us in Tx. From then on the problems started. He would not under any circumstances punish his kids, yet had no problem getting onto my daughter. I don't know about the rest of y'all but this did not sit to well with me, and yes the redneck side showed through and this lil' mama was fit to be tied. Well we got passed that. I never treated his children any different from my own. They are kids after all, and that was the rule in the family, no playing favorites, everyone gets treated the same. But if I would have known then what I know now, I would have told him just get the boy. lol Problems soon started in a major way after I discovered my husband and I were going to add to our clan. In April 2004, I found out I was pregnant. Just after our one year anniversary, and I should have been on cloud nine but being that I had my 4th miscarriage that November, I wouldn't allow myself to get attatched. Fast forward to June of that year, my dh and I were fighting yet again over you guessed it his kids. She was 13 then and I am oldschool. I was the evil STEP MOM because her being the oldest I expected her to do chores. Mind you this was only keeping her room clean, and picking up after herself. Something I stressed and enforced with the younger children. She told her Dad that I was mean to her, she did all the housework (Oh man yeppers Cinderella let me tell you), and that I was harder on her and her brother than I was with my daughters. So yes he left with his kids in tow. I told him look when you can decide to live for yourself and do what makes you happy, instead of being her buddy all the time, then maybe we can work something out. He decided to leave first, I just told him ok don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. I refused to be treated like a slave, and be hated in my own house. Just not happening in my life. Well less than a month later my husband, SD, and my son were back home with the girls and I. Then we got to deal with the Oh I'm going to kill myself, because I don't like it here. We told her Look you can choose to be a part of this family, or you can go back to Guam with your Mother. Well she went to go live with dh's brother and sister in law instead. She had the ENTIRE family on his side, believing that I was horrible. Her lies were working too, until her Aunt and Uncle found out just how manipulative she can be. She got in trouble at her other school (with aunt and uncle) by the principal because she was writing some really sexually explicit things, plus talk of physical violence against a teacher. They called and my sister in law apologized to me and told me she was so sorry she didn't come to me with this. That is the thing I do not lie about anything, my Mom taught me well. So SD came back to live with us this was in August 2004. I found out that month too that the baby I was pg with, was a boy, so of course my son was thrilled, since he'd finally have a little brother. Things were going well in the family for a bit. She was helping around the house, and keeping her grades at A's B's and C's. Then here came 9th grade. Her grades plummeted, I'm talking failing atleast 3 subjects at a time. I thought it was just the adjustment from junior high to highschool. Boy was I wrong. Manipulative as she is, and thinking it is cool to be a bad ass. She was on pot. Although we did not find this out until January 2006. This was when my youngest daughter who was 3 at the time had found a journal of her's. I of course read it. Mind you I did not snoop for it. In it I found she was suicidal, been smoking pot, boys, making out with a girl and a guy in a truck, and also wanting to kill me in my sleep. So this turned into a phone call to my husband at work. He came home, waited for her to come home from school, and then went and talked to her, without me. Which I was fine with that. But anytime my dh ever said he would talk to her about things, he never did. His excuse was well I wrote things like that as a teen. I told him well saying she is going to KILL me and my kids that is not friggen normal. I told him and her in the same room if she ever raised her hand to me, she better make sure she can back it up. She knew if she was failing on her report card or progress report she would be grounded for one week. That meant no going anywhere, no anyone coming over, no phone, no cell, and no computer. Grounding equals kid jail around here. But she found a way around it. She would say a friend was going to help her with school work. Or after groundings she would just ask her Dad. He would always say yes. And here I'd be sitting at home with the two youngest ages 1, and 3. The livingroom would be messy because of the younger ones playing, I'm still running around in my pj's, and then I have visitors at my house. I told my dh it would be nice if I would be clued in on what is going on in my own house, because I feel like a visitor half the damn time. She also skipped school too, and got busted. My dh said your grounded for a month. HA! It was not a month, not in the slightest. She would sweet talk her Dad, and he'd let her do as she pleased. Then when I was trying to enforce the punishment he had made, I was suddenly the "hammer" of the family. My reply was well someone has to do it, since you won't! Then we moved from Texas to Arkansas last July. We lived in a small town ( a little over 600 people), and we figured with my husband making more money, and plus moving to a town that was over 60,000. There would be more for her to do in ways of going to the Mall, movies, arcade, and staying away from the bad crowd. But while a nice dream, it turned into a nightmare. A bad one at that. My dh and I were heading for divorce this March right after our 4th anniversary. Because once again he was letting her at 16 do whatever she felt like. She was disrespectful towards me, her father, and a butthead to the 4 younger kids. Our son who is 2 now literally hates her, she could not get around him without him screaming his head off and him telling her to go away, and leave me alone. She had what we thought was an allergy to makeup, where her eyes would swell, and her lips would swell. So I went and spent a pretty good ammount of my money buying her hypo allergenic cosmetics. But it was still happening. I had asked my husband do you think she is doing drugs again, something other than pot? He said he didn't know. But it came to a head one night, when she was at the movies with friends. She was supposed to be home by 11, and finally at 12:30 she came home. My husband was unglued, and silently in my head I was saying it is about damn time he finally gets fed up. He had been talking to her mother and she was going to go back to Guam this summer to visit. My dh had told SD that look you know the deal made between you and your mother, you have got to keep your grades up to stay with us. Well the grades got worse. I even emailed her teachers trying to find out about tutoring, or something to get her grades up to passing. When the teachers emailed me back and told me she would be passing if she put forth the effort and did her work. Yes I was upset. But once again he didn't stick with anything. So when I went back to Tx in March for my nieces baby shower, things were not good at all. If it wasn't for my Sis I honestly think I would have lost it. I told my husband that you need to do something with her now, because I can no longer deal with her. He said well we will give her 2 months to prove to us she can bring her grades up and start being a part of this family. I said ok but at the end of the school year if things are not going well then her Mom needs to have fun with the teen. (She is her Mom's only child so therefore is spoiled royally beyond belief.) It was affecting mine and my husband's relationship, plus my 4 other babies. It came to a head one day when the baby heard his favorite movie on the girl's dvd player. You know how when it gets on the main menu the music that plays. So he of course being a stubborn 2 year old would not watch that movie anywhere but in there. I figured ok since I have atleast an hour I'm going to get a book from her closet and read it, since I had read all of mine. In the top shelf of the closet I found an empty tequila bottle. After that the search was on. I also found zig-zags, visine, what looked to be a joint but was actually tobacco rolled up to look like one, and an empty wine bottle. Yes I am a livid at this point, because this room she shares with the younger girls. All I kept thinking was what if my 4 yr old found that bottle (wine bottle was in a drawer) and drank it. Then here my dh and I would have taken her to the hospital, and then CPS would have gotten involved and the rest of my children taken away, because what is a 4 year old doing with alcohol poisoning. So I called my husband and I told him I am glad you are coming home early (had a parent/teacher conference at the younger kids school) because if you weren't, I would have probably shook the crap out of her when she got home. So I had asked my husband later if he talked to her about it, and he said yes. I said well good now I'm going to have my say too, because this could have affected my baby girl's life, and she needs to realize that. I was proud of myself, I handled this conversation very well. Even though I was shaking, and just could not understand why she would do this to herself. When I explained what could have happened if her youngest sister would have drank the wine, she rolled her eyes at me. My composure went out the door, and I told her young lady this is serious and if you roll your eyes at me again I will come up out of this chair and slap the shit out of you. And yes my husband was sitting right beside me when I said this and he did not say a word to me. He knew better, and he had reached the end of his rope with her so to speak also. She had been buying pot at school then smoking it outside after my dh and I went to bed. Her excuse for this was because she was grounded, and she did this everytime she was grounded. I told her you will call your Mother and you will tell her everything. My husband told her you know your Mom was going to get you this summer, and she was not going to send you back in August because of your grades. She talked to her Mom that night, and my husband also talked to her. He told her look this is what is going on, and told her everything. He also said that if you got her now it would not affect her grades any because she is failing 3 classes, and in danger of failing the other ones. So on April 19th of this year, she went back to Guam. Let me just say after all the drama she caused my family...PEACE!!!! Finally some peace. We've talked to her once. She of course hates me, and that's fine. The BM thought she could do such a better job than my husband and I. Oh SD won't do that here, I'm a cop, I live with my sister who's a drug counselor. Well obviously they have alot to learn. All the BM has to do is read comments she has left her friends on myspace, to see that she is smoking pot, and talking about sending it to her friends and she would if she could and not get in trouble. Not to mention taking pictures of herself with white powder in a little bag. So apparently she is up to her old tricks yet again. I feel badly because at one time she was a bright kid, now she is turning into another statistic. But my other 4 babies are great. They have not mentioned her at all. My home is finally drama and stress free, and it is great. I still love her, but I am happy she is gone.