I'm so sorry, both for your tragic & heartbreaking loss & for your despair. You're laboring under a crushing amount of grief, pain, depression, &, although it's unearned, guilt. You're absolutely entitled to your despair, anybody would be in despair... but don't let it kill you. You are not only the mother of 4 living children, you're the link between them & their brother, & you're the only one alive who has the memories that you have; without you, those most intimate memories of your son would be gone forever. Please call your doctor & insist on some good anti-depressants (get your husband to help if you can't summon the strength to insist); depression is a physical problem, &, while talking therapy can give you insight, *it won't make you feel better*. The synapses in our brains don't fire right when we're depressed, & that makes us feel worse, & that makes the synapses get more off-kilter... It's like a car engine that's "missing"; you can tinker with all kinds of things in that engine, but you have to get it to fire correctly to fix the "miss". It takes a while for anti-depressents to work, so meanwhile, & I know it's hard because you don't feel like doing it, get some oxygen to your brain. Enlist your husband's help if you can't force yourself to do it on your own, sign up for a jazzercise class, do whatever it takes, but move move move. Get your heart rate up & you'll get good oxygenated blood to your brain, which will make your synapses fire more efficiently & you'll function better. Please take care of yourself, & enlist the help of anybody you can, husband, friends, family, people from church, anybody & everybody, to help you do it. & please post here again. We all want you to be your own self again, & we wanna know about it.

Spoke to my Dh about your question. ANd the answer is........YES...TADA!!! A logical answer from a concerned father of a baby and his disfunction child raised 96% by biomom , aka pot mom! Yes he would phone the cops on his child in an instant and he would call his mother who lives 1 1/2 half away to go pick him up. But you see because my DH and i are on the same page about behaviour and not tolerating certain behaviours under our home this ugly situtation last year turned around very quickly. SS no longer takes out his anger on my son, aka his brother and SD has learned not to play games or lie or talk back or anything. In fact she is expressing dislike for both parents and keeps a distance from me but with sadness. I truly feel bad for these kids. I told my dh to take 50% custody the day i met him. But he wont. And now after 7 years its a little too late. The damage is done. I can't change his mind. Alli know is to butt out now and let the pieces fall. I will only intervene when i have disrespect towards me and disrespect towards my son. And no KKny and Tos, abuse is not used as an excuse for disrespect...its FOLLOWS it afterwards. Cause once they hit the disrespect level towards another human being, it doesn't take long for it to turn violent and physical. ANd to give you an example, my next door neighbour just threw out her 13 years old daughter out of her house. Because she was at her end rope iwth her. SEx drugs, talking back and then it finally turned violent to the other children. She has one child of her own and 5 adopted kids. Guess what, the 13 years old was thrown out to save the others from her abusive nature. Just stop picking lines out of peoples postings and twisting them. You two have shown such manipulation at times and you are standing proof of a human being who is miserable and having nothing good to offer in this world. I'm sure you have tons of friends eh? Get over your pasts and move on. People like me have seen quite alot. And i am a stepchild as well. Am i the evil person cause i'm a stepmom too. EH?. L:Ol , well i'm happy knowing im a fully balanced person who demands respect and i'm not a rag doll to anyone. Including my family and kids. I've survived many things over the years and i know fully well where i stand as a human being , as a mother, as a stepmother and as a stepchild. Those are my titles, I wear them well and i'm proud. I do not make people miserable. And as for kids being sent out of a home, its done usually for good solid reasons. If his SD spoke rude to me, i would tell her off myself and let her dad then give punishment. But my SD has learned i wont stand for it and so has my SS. Kids needs boundaries. Do they hate me? NOPE. Its the opposite. My SK do love me. They just wish they're parents got along and now my SS told my DH ' ' mommy always talks about you badly and says bad things about maria too. I dont like it daddy, i want her to stop saying bad things. they're not true. make ehr stop! you never talk about mommy at all." Now what do you say to a child after this? Even SD was visibly shaken. Yes my DH is not the greatest father, he procrastinates and is lazy. That doesn't mean he doens' tlove his kids. He's a typical male! human male! I find woman have more insight into things like this. I've noticed a change in SD. She has refocused her energy and anger towards school and friends. Advice i give her all the time. And i'm pround she is doing that. I dont hate my Stepkids. I do care for them. what i dont like is the loser biomom and also the lack of communication between my dh and her. But you can't speak to her. SHe's a nut!

Hate to say it, but I agree you have already been told by this man that he does not want any more children - ever. Though they say vasectomies are reversible, it does not always work. If you want a child of you own in the future, Walk Now. Further more, any bond that you thought you had with this child was that of a care giver and not that of a parent in this child's eyes. Yes he may care of you. But for a child - at the age of 5, to state to you that 'he was talking to daddy and not you', and is already questioning your authority as to being able to give instructions, he is telling you that you are NOT his parent and he knows it. While I agree with others that he is being a boy and wanting to spend time with Dad is natural, these other behaviors are not. This child already is stating that you are an interloper in his eyes and if you have the child work experience you state, you would recognize his behavior as being confrontational. It is so easy to idealize a parent child relationship. It is also easy to idealize the step family - take it from me, most of us Stepparents started out like that! But reality is starting to set in for you. The baby is now starting to grow and things are going to change with him as you are going to deal with him feeling you are taking his Dad away etc. If you stay with this man, I would recommend counseling for the family unit and yourself for the grief you will need to work through for not having your own biological child that you want so badly.

My cousin posted photos of a house she rented for 6 years. She'd done some lovely landscaping and took meticulous care of the yard. The house was sold and the new owners have not done a thing in the past 3 years. The vegetation has overgrown and even the light fixture on the drive is broken. We get loads of comments from neighbors about the updates we've done to our house in the 12 years we've lived here. The yard was meticulously maintined, but the shrubs had all gotten too big and overgrown so they were no longer flowering or looked good. And it looked like the 1960's! We've done some simple updates (pulled out the dutch shutters, replaced ugly porch supports with fashionable columns, ripped out old concrete and took out all the old, over grown shrubs and replaced them with wildlife friendly flowers & shrubs. I was recently in the neighborhood I grew up in and while there have been changes, they are definitely for the better. Mid-century builds-not MCM-but boxy subdivisions are tired looking, the improvements I saw up and down the block were wonderful. I was a little sad looking at our old house, because some of the changes my Dad had made were changed again, but my grandparents house, across the street, had been updated and looked fresh and beautiful.