“Trying on my wedding dress, I sensed tension with my boyfriend’s daughter. My mind raced, and I pulled her aside. ‘I’m not trying to replace your mom.’ I never expected to start a family like this.”
‘Did she want another woman in her life? I waited to meet my stepdaughter for the very first time. My heart pounded as she stepped in the car.’ Woman explains there’s ‘nothing natural about a blended family’
‘My pregnancy crushed my stepkids. The mom and dad they’d known were gone, and now we were bringing a baby into their lives.’ Mom feels ‘remorse’ for bringing child into ‘complicated’ home
“I mourned that my daughter couldn’t be welcomed into the world with joyful innocence. She’d be born into a life of sharing Christmases and summer vacations. A life where daddy couldn’t tell mommy she was his first and only wife. I had to bury the dreams of what I THOUGHT motherhood looked like.”
‘We were court ordered to conduct drop offs and pick-ups at the police station. We were a mess. A disgrace. I knew this wasn’t healthy for our children.’
“Divorce. There we were, in and out of court, screaming in the street during drop-off like a Jerry Springer episode. At some point we realized it’s easier to put our differences aside and to co-parent these kids together. Do it for the kids.”
‘When your photographer don’t PLAY! She wasn’t missing THAT shot.’ Photographer pushes stepmom out of the way for interrupting the perfect first kiss photo
“She kept apologizing to me thinking I was going to be upset about all of this.”
