A stepmother has cancelled Christmas for her two stepchildren after an ongoing family row came to a head.
According to the stepmother, the 12-year-old girl and 14-year-old boy are “vindictive, liars, master manipulators, so disrespectful and tell anyone who will listen that I mistreat them”.
Taking to Reddit, she explained that her relationship with the pair has been rough since 2018, having been with her husband for the last seven years. Their biological mother has five children and has “signed her rights away” for three of them. Since 2019, the stepmother and her partner have had primary custody of the two teens.
“They are little clones of their mother,” she said. “She is the actual scum of the earth.”
She explained that the relationship between her and the children started breaking down after their wedding in October 2020.
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Her stepson acted like an “a**” during the wedding, she said, and while staying with his biological mother during the couple’s honeymoon, the kids insisted they wanted to stay, citing alleged mistreatment and abuse at home. The couple allowed them to stay with their biological mother for two months, but “of course she sent them home when she decided she was done with them”.
“This occurs every single weekend. They run my name through the mud when I’ve literally done everything I could for them the last 7 years,” she said.
Last weekend, she and her husband were notified that her stepdaughter had called someone “the n word” at school. They punished her by taking away her electronics and she wrote “they are so nosy, f*** them” in her diary. After going to their biological mother’s house last weekend, they put on “a show”, saying they are “so mistreated and never want to come back and this woman is evil and has put my husband through hell since they were kids”.
Things continued to escalate throughout the week.
Two days ago, her stepson “said awful things” about her to “a bunch of people including his bus driver and we couldn’t take it any more.”
She said: “They don’t want to live with us, this has been happening for years, and it’s so bad my husband and I are on medication now and I’m being referred to a cardiologist and suffer from PTSD.”
The couple hit breaking point, and decided to return all of the children’s Christmas presents and send the kids back to their mother.
She added: “I know you all probably think I’m awful too but we have tried everything! Everyone says ‘oh but they’re just kids, this is normal teenage stuff’ but it’s not! There is so much more to this even than I wrote here.
“No one understands unless they are in the situation. We didn’t want it to come to this.”
One commenter reckons the children act out to try in a bid to get sympathy from their mom. They wrote: “It seems they are just desperate for their mother’s attention and they think that by making you guys into monsters it will make their mom love them and want them more. It’s unfortunate things had to turn out this way but you have to protect your sanity.”
They suggested she “disengage” and only let their father communicate with them from here.
Another pointed out: “Calling someone the n word is definitely not ‘normal teenage stuff’, I agree with you. I honestly can’t believe you only took away her electronics for that.” The original poster replied to say she was also grounded and received a long lecture about how wrong it is, adding: “We don’t use that word and it is completely unacceptable”.
“When you’re being wound up to the point of PTSD and being referred to a cardiologist it’s definitely time to take care of yourself,” another Redditor said. They added: “For the kids, the phrase ‘be careful what you wish for’ comes to mind.”
One asked: “Are these poor kids in therapy?”
Sadly their Christmas tree isn’t the only one that will have little to no presents under it this year due to family tensions. Earlier this week, a mother-of-three said she is cutting back on gifts this year as her “spoiled” kids “don’t appreciate” the presents she’s “wasting money on”.
