Labors Lost: Laments on the Thankless Nature of Raising Someone Else’s Child

I avoid speaking to mr horrible unless necessary. Fortunately, there is nothing in my life or household that I need to share with him. Unfortunately, I hear tidbits of his conversation about the happenings in his household when the children are Skype-ing with him. Of the information he shares indirectly, what disappoints me the most are the reports about Jr, my ex-stepson.

Back in 2005 when mr horrible was awarded physical custody of his son from his first marriage, I took on the challenge of raising someone else’s child.

It was a trial by fire, jumping in with both feet, hitting the ground running situation.

I didn’t have time to ease into it, there were no weekends here and there and building up to living with us full time. Nope. It was like, one week he got word that something was going down and his sister had his son at her house, then the next week he was driving to go pick him up and bring him back to live with us permanently.

I did the best I could, and in the end I didn’t win any prizes, never received any thanks and walked away with only the stigma of having been the Evil Step-Mother as my legacy of that life.

What no one realizes, aside from me and my friends who witnessed it first hand, is that I took a child who had been practically raised without any semblance of a regular household or rules/guidelines and turned him from a child delinquent who had been kicked out of every classroom he was placed, into an honor student. Granted, I did this molding with the ex-stepson fighting me tooth and nail every step of the way in his own passive aggressive way, but I did it.

Then the honor student slipped back to a delinquent again when the marriage started to fall apart, mr horrible made it loud & clear that my input into how his (then seventeen year old) son would be raised was no longer necessary because the boy was of old enough to make all his own decisions.

Yeah, so mr horrible wasn’t going to do any guiding or anything for the Junior or Senior years of high school basically throwing all the progress I had made into the garbage, and there went the honor roll and any semblance of achievement for Jr.  I know that mr horrible has no idea of the work I invested into his son, and if he ever acknowledged the effort I would die from shock. Granted, the divorce was hard on everyone, but mr horrible immediately alienated me from Jr and labeled me the enemy, and Jr being a survivor was forced to pick sides to make it through this painful period of transition.

I am disappointed when I hear told that all Jr is doing with his days since his high school graduation is buy new video games and then proceed to play them 24hrs a day, the plans for the military possibly out the window. Unfortunately, I believe that mr horrible can’t see the forest for the trees. All he cares about is focusing on his new relationship and that he can boast that his son graduated from a “Blue Ribbon” High School as if somehow he can take credit for that, when in fact it is merely a happenstance of living in a school district.

The fact that Jr has no more ambitions, no direction, no plans and no motivation to do anything other than attend school and play video games doesn’t bother mr horrible in the least. I wouldn’t brag about Jr loafing and playing video games all day, certainly not at 18. Not when there is an 18 yr old holding down a job who sits next to me in my college Anatomy class.

When he mentions that his son walked/ran all the way to the video game store which is 2 miles away as an accomplishment speaks volumes as to the lowered expectations he has for himself and his son, and how little time he is interested in spending with Jr now that the ex-stepson has been left alone since his half-siblings have moved away with me.

To begin with, raising children is a thankless job.

No one gives you recognition, you labor at it daily and show no immediate results. You hope you are doing the best job possible but the feedback is non-existent so you could be failing miserably and it wouldn’t be evident until it was too late.  With stepchildren, biological parents are in the picture, usually still alive, and usually one half of the newly blended family.

It is much harder to raise someone else’s child when that someone else is present to undermine the effort daily. I found it to be even harder because I could see the relationship I had with my own children, and how they didn’t question my motives when I would help and guide them. Then in contrast the relationship I had with Jr, how he wouldn’t accept my love, my guidance, and how he would behave one way in front of me, then a completely different way when I wasn’t around.

That complete lack of trust meant I had a miserable time raising someone else’s child. It is an impossible task to be constantly questioned, to be never trusted as a parent and as an adult. To know that the love you give and show your stepchild is not to be reciprocated.

Some step-parents get lucky and they don’t have to put up with this mind-fucking drama.

I was not one of the lucky ones, and it seems that even now, months and miles removed from the child I attempted to raise for eight hard years, he is still showing just how little my efforts meant by not doing anything worthwhile with his life.

I can’t expect that after more than a decade of lazy parenting mr horrible would step up to the plate and actively guide Jr through the home stretch of his educational experience.

After everything that has happened, I feel keenly the disappointment of not being present for this final stretch of Jr’s path through youth. All those years invested cultivating Jr, teaching him life skills and trying to show him how to be the best version of himself he could be, and mr horrible is just ignoring him, letting him waste away. I regret this as much, if not more, as I do the years I wasted in the marriage.