Hi everyone, I posted last year about an ongoing problem with my husband's 2 adult step daughters.

Here is the link if anyone needs to review it: http://ths.gardenweb.com/forums/load/step/msg11044009727.html?5&rnd=tI5oG

Well, lets just say it has been one huge roller-coaster ride for me and my husband with a lot of aspects of life since my last post. His Daughters are huge players in that ride.

The daughter who was having an inappropriate relationship with a man 2x her age when she was still 16 is now 19 and has moved in with the man. She was the one that when I blew the whistle on her to her father back when she was 16, reacted as if her life was ruined and started to be mean and nasty to me while claiming that either the things she said were jokes or I didn't know what I was talking about. She still lies about the "secret relationship" the two of them had while she was under age even though she rushed to move in with him right after she turned 18. Ok, yeah she can lie all she wants but she doesn't know that someone she confided in told her father everything later and everything we suspected was being lied about was true. I already knew but there is the confirmation right there. But it is no longer our problem, she has moved away and cut contact. I personally am relieved and glad and the sad part is, so is my Husband.

Her sister has cut contact with us as well and here comes the real story to this post. Why?

The whole time this drama has been going on, her sister who is going to be 21 soon has been enabling the lies. Ok, whatever, I can understand not wanting to get in the middle of THAT situation. She basically claimed to be playing Switzerland. Problem is, for basically the whole time she has been around and I have been there, possessions of mine and my husband's have been disappearing. Whenever confronted about it, she would lie and act insulted, but soon it became pretty clear what was happening to them. I harbored resentment about it towards my husband for not putting a stop to it, especially when his new shoes went missing and they then appeared at their house later. Honestly, how can you swallow that insult? It was getting worse and worse, DVDs were disappearing, other personal belongings. Inside my head I was planning to trap her and catch her red handed because that was the only way I saw it being confronted.

Before that could ever happen, something else happened that turned the whole situation upside-down.

A bit of backround into the new situation. Right after I had my first daughter of my own, my mother came up for my birthday. My mom is pretty old school so when my husband's kids blew into the house coming home from school all loud and stuff she kind of bristled. The oldest left the door open for a teeny tiny bit longer than my mom would have liked with the baby in the room and snapped at the stepdaughter to close the door. The stepdaughter pulled an attitude telling my mom not to tell her what to do. Mind you this was their first meeting. My mom shut her down completely. Not that big a deal it seemed like to me but apparently my mom and my husband's two daughters were now enemies.

So a few weeks later my husband and I were out to dinner with his 2 daughters and it came up and I started to try to explain that my mom can be a bit eccentric and rough on the surface and his YOUNGEST (the one who wasn't snapped at) Told me something about my mom that I can't type here LOUDLY in the middle of the restaurant.

I was stunned at the time and didn't know how to react other than to just keep eating. My husband didn't say anything either. I thought about that moment a lot after that and it just brewed and brewed in my mind, helped along by the other crazy making antics from both of them until one day I wrote an email to The one who said it telling her that it had hurt and how I felt about it. She first said that she didn't remember saying it, then that is sounded like something her sister would say, then that if she did say it, it was probably a joke and that I should have already known that she has a rough sense of humor and that it was on me to let her know if she had said something to offend. I then told her that she was old enough to know that what she said was insulting and anyway it wasn't on me to police her behavior. Ok, I didn't see a point in trying to make her acknowledge her wrongdoing after that because I could see that she would play little miss never wrong.

For a while after that the issue was left unresolved in my mind and I told my husband that for anything concerning his kids that added to it, the cup was full, brimming at the edge and the next time they messed with me, it would overflow. He said ok.

Then his ex wife attacked a friend of mine over facebook for a joke he posted. She took it way out of context and professed to taking the moral high-ground and saying it wasn't ok to be insulting while hiding behind humor. I probably could have done this a bit better but that is when the cup overflowed. I decided to "Challenge" her proclaimed morals and see what she would say to an example of someone doing the very same thing she was protesting. The example just happened to be her daughter. So I posted the story publicly as I remembered it and asked her if it was ok. Let's just say the birth mom flew completely off the handle condemning me for daring to bring it up publicly. Told me that it wasn't the daughter I said it was at all who said it and that it was her SISTER who said it anyway. It was said as if it didn't matter what was said, but it did matter who said it. They acted like since the OLDER sister said it, it didn't matter.

I remember vividly who said it, the tone, the look in her eyes, the sneer on her lips and the venom in her voice. My husband remembers the same as I do. It is pretty hard to forget who said something like that to you and embarrasses you in public but I believe that Older sister is trying to cover for younger sister so that younger sister looks good in the eyes of her boyfriend because she is scared that he will dump her if he finds out what kind of a person she is capable of being.

The whole thing degenerated into a contest of insults between the ex wife, my husband and I until the ex wife blocked us. I felt betrayed by the older stepdaughter and told her what I felt. I told her that I knew she was covering for her sister and that at the time she was actually pretty respectful to me concerning voicing her feelings about my mom and that it had meant something to me. But now that she is so determined to take on the responsibility of the lie, she would be treated as if she actually did say the insult. I told her that I no longer considered her a friend at that point and that the ball was in her court as to how to resolve the issue. I then unfriended her from facebook. The next day me and my husband found out that most everyone on that side of his family had blocked us on facebook.

I never did hear anything from the older daughter, no defense, no confrontation, no explanation, and this is the one who threw a fit a few months before demanding to know why I had unfriended her when I hadn't and she was looking on the wrong account. Nothing. It almost seems as if she is a puppet for her mother. But she's an adult and she can make her own decisions and if she ever decides to contact us again, then we will talk.

Personally I am glad they are gone, the tension level has dropped sharply, there was a period of depression that my hubbie went through, but he holds firm that he will not accept the lying anymore and he realizes now that he was being treated like a dog and that he doesn't deserve that from his own kids.

The only thing that nags at me is what new kind of trouble will they think of causing when things finally settle down and contact is reestablished.

Thanks for reading
NadineV

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The Stepfamily