Evil Stepfather

I decided I needed a new hobby.  Something I can do at home, but does not involve computers as I already spend way too much time online.  So I picked up an electric guitar (Epiphone Les Paul) and will sign up for lessons this weekend.  The style I wish to learn is, of course, The Blues.

Update: I had my first lesson.  I told the instructor I was a complete beginner, but partway into the lesson he knew I had played before.  It’s just been over 20 years since I’ve picked up a guitar, so I didn’t think anything from way back then would still be sticking around.  I picked up the first set of chords rather quickly, but my fingertips just aren’t up to the stress of steel strings.  I need callouses!

My former step-daughter just got herself a tattoo.  I guess it’s a way for her to celebrate her coming of age.  I don’t have a problem with that.  I have a tattoo.  I’m even considering getting another one.  I don’t consider her choice of location to be well thought out.  Putting a tattoo on the lower arm means it’s difficult to hide it in situations where it might not be a good idea.  Not everyone is opened minded about tattoos.  Also, her tattoo includes the anarchy symbol (a stylized “A”).  I hope she doesn’t believe in that fringe group’s ideals.  Anarchy is not a pretty thing.

Throughout history, anarchy has always meant the weak are preyed upon by the strong.  Anarchy means pain, suffering, and death for most people, with the powerful using them as their slaves and taking what they want, whether it’s property or a woman’s virtue.  Anarchy is not something to celebrate.

However, she is still young and, as is so typical with the young, this kind of thing is a standard part of youthful rebellion.  It’s not unexpected and most of the time it does not cause long term damage.

And just to be clear, despite it including the anarchy symbol, I actually like her tattoo design.  It’s rather cool.

Because not enough has gone wrong, now I’m experiencing pretty much constant pain from (probably) tendonitis in my right shoulder and arm.  I’ve switched to using my left hand for anything I can, but some things require my right hand, e.g. shifting gears in my car.  I would have gone to the doctor two weeks ago, but I don’t have any medical coverage.  Simple things like reaching for something can result in excrutiating pain.  I had hoped that a few weeks of resting the arm and taking an anti-inflammatory (ibuprofin) would help, but there as been no improvement.  In fact, it’s getting worse.  So now I’m going to have to bite the bullet and see a doctor, paying for it out of my pocket.

Knowing how expensive doctors can be, I expect the financial pain to equal the physical pain.

Addendum: The doctor says I have buritis and gave me a shot.  I should start seeing an improvement within a day or two.  It can take two weeks to fully recover.  A side note, medical care seems to be the only business that doesn’t tell you how much it’s going to cost.  You have to wait until you receive a lovely surprise in the mail.

I just read an interesting article on “forgiving” and how men and women differ when it comes to forgiving.  One passage stood out:

“What we found is that when men recalled their own offenses, they were more likely to empathize and then forgive. But they had to do that emotional work first,” she says. “When the women started thinking about their own offenses, they tended to feel defensive and guilty, and that made it harder for them to forgive.”

The article gives advice on how to start down the road to forgiveness.  I’ve already forgiven my stepdaughter for what happened since she was not well.  I have yet to forgive my ex-wife.  Her reaction to my attempts to correspond with her always brought back the anger.

Here are the tips, but do read the entire article:

• Allow yourself to experience anger, but don’t hold onto it for months or years on end. When the anger starts to consume you, you’ve held onto it for too long.
• Express your feelings in a positive way through writing a journal or talking to a professional, close friend or family member who can help you make sense of the situation.
• Try to step into the shoes of those who hurt you in hopes you’ll see the situation from their perspective.
• Write a letter about your feelings to the people who hurt you. If you decide to talk to them, Exline recommends saying, “When you did X, I felt hurt,” instead of directly attacking them.
• Most importantly, have patience with yourself: “Remember, forgiveness doesn’t have to happen in a day.”

I’m having a tough time with the first one.  I get over the anger, then something brings it back.  Not good.  For the second point, I write this blog and I saw a therapist for a while.  The third one is tough, I did try to see things from my ex’s point of view.  I still could not come to terms with how she let her daughter control our lives and our marriage.  The fourth, write a letter, hasn’t worked out so well.  What I wrote probably did not conform to their suggestion.  That last one, patience, well, I think I’ve been damn patient.

Looks like I need to try a lot harder.

Since my ex threatened me with a libel suit, I thought I’d save her the bother of filing a case and wasting her money by pointing out why she would lose such a case.  There are many defenses against a libel suit.  I’ll cover the ones that apply to me.

Truth is an absolute defense in the United States.  Everything I’ve stated on this blog is the truth.  The last time she made her threat I asked her to point out anything that was untrue.  She never bothered to respond as she knows I have not been lying.

Statements made in a good faith and reasonable belief that they were true are generally treated the same as true statements.  If, by some miracle, I did make a false statement (which has yet to be proven), my strong belief that I am stating the truth is a defense.

Opinion is a defense recognized in nearly every jurisdiction.  My blog is my opinion.  That’s part of the very definition of a blog.

In the particular post that set my ex off was when I accused her of theft, note the wording, “Given the circumstances, I must conclude that my ex-wife, Ildiko Weinberger, took them.” The specific circumstances were her completely ignoring several requests that she return the ring and drawing, which were in her possession at the time of our separation.  She did not deny having them.  She did not acknowledge having them.  She simply did not respond.

I did not wish to shame her in public.  I’ve kept this blog completely anonymous up until now to protect her and my stepdaughter.  In an email she sent after I made the post, she had this to say, “I promise you I will return your ring as soon as it turns up.” She could have said that the first time I inquired about the ring and avoided this whole mess.  She forced my hand.

My ex, Ildiko, had this to say in a recent email:

I was told to get my daughter and myself out of our brutally toxic environment that lead her to drinking and drug use!

She was told that by amateurs.  People who had no training in family counseling.  Who had limited knowledge of the situation, and who’s knowledge only dealt with the most negative part of the family situation.

What was this toxic environment?  I’d have to say it started with the dot com crash when I was thrown out of work along with thousands of other tech workers.  For the next two years, work was erratic or non-existent.  It was damn bad and the financial woes put a major strain on everyone.  If it weren’t for some investments I had made that were worth a substantial amount, money borrowed from family (mostly my mom), and my wife selling her European property, we would have been completely sunk.  My stepdaughter probably suffered a great deal under the stress she felt from us.  It’s not easy being a kid and being dirt poor.

Eventually I found work.  The pay was crap, but it was tech work.  Attempts at getting non-tech job weren’t successful.  Companies would take one look at my resume and not be interested, figuring that I would be gone the first chance I had.  We were still poor, but not dirt poor.  Our marriage started to improve, at first.  Then problems began with my stepdaughter.  At first she was too sick to go to school on occasion.  The “on occasion” became two or three times a week.  Medical exams came up with nothing.  Eventually the real reason surfaced.  My step daughter had started drinking.  My wife refused to believe this despite the evidence.  When I presented the proof, instead of being concerned about her daughter and seeking a solution, she denied there was a problem and said, for the first time, I want a divorce.  I was astounded.

The toxic environment kicked in full force.  It consisted of my stepdaughter binge drinking and doing drugs, my wife in denial about it, and me trying (unsuccessfully) to find help for my stepdaughter.  Eventually my wife accepted that her daughter had a problem.  What to do about it, however, was a different matter.  Her plan was to send her to AA meetings, but nothing beyond that.  There were no rules.  There were no boundaries.  There were no consequences.  We would find her daughter passed out on the floor one day, and the next it was as if nothing had happened.  No restrictions.  No loss of privileges

If I tried to do something, I was the devil incarnate.  After my stepdaughter disappeared from AA meetings every night for a week, not returning home until extremely late if at all that night, I refused to drive her to AA meetings with the reason being she was using the meetings to hook up with other teens to party with (it was one of these nights that she came home high on ecstasy).  My wife told me I was interfering with her daughter’s sobriety.  This is a typical and recurring example of how my wife blamed me for all the problems.

The toxic environment continued for two years.  My stepdaughter ran wild.  I tried to put limits on her excesses.  My wife concluded that my actions were what caused her daughter to drink and do drugs.  Not a day went by that my stepdaughter didn’t call me the most vile of names.  My wife refused to punish her for it and became angry if I did.  I was supposed to passively accept being called “a fucking moron” and worse.

My wife gained her citizenship.  My mother flew in to witness the ceremony.  My stepdaughter treated her badly as well.  At one point my mother said, “if she had been within reach I would have slapped her.” My stepdaughter treated everyone with equal contempt, even her own mother.  No one could call her on it.  My wife stood by passively as her own daughter called her a, “fucking cunt“.  If I reacted in any way to the bad treatment, my wife became angry with me.  For my stepdaughter, it was the perfect situation.  She could goad me all she wanted until I would react, typically by taking away her computer privileges.  My wife could get mad at me, and our marriage would erode even further.  All this time the drinking, drugs, and running away for days at a time continued.  In fact, it became dangerously worse.  She started having sex with strangers while under the influence.  It’s a sad thing when a fifteen year old girl wasn’t sure if she had sex for the first time or not because she was so drunk she couldn’t remember.

I eventually got a better job with a huge increase in salary.  Our relationship, however, was close to being dead.  Instead of being happy about the much bigger income and how it would help us as a family, my wife said, “good, now you can afford to move out“.  A few months later I did move out.

So now my wife had removed me and, supposedly, the toxic environment.  The result was what any rational person would expect.  My wife spent just about every evening away from home hanging out with her AA friends (and possibly having an affair even though it was supposed to be a temporary separation).  My stepdaughter no longer had any limitations on her.  She took full advantage of it.  She would invite strangers over to the apartment for parties.  Drugs, alcohol, sex.

The police visited often because of complaints from the neighbors.  At one point one of the neighbors called my cell phone to let me know about a particularly bad party.  All I could do was tell them to call the police.  I did call my wife’s cell to let her know the situation.  Her reaction was less than enthusiastic.  Her fun with her AA friends was more important than her daughter’s excesses.  She accused me of spying on her.

I spent the next couple of days thinking very hard about the situation and concluded that I needed to contact Child Protective Services and report my wife for negligence.  I chose to wait a couple of days because we were to have a marriage counseling session.  I planned to hear my wife’s explanation first, and only call CPS if I wasn’t satisfied with what I heard.  It turned out that morning my daughter was finally taken to a camp for troubled teens in Utah.  There was no longer a reason to contact CPS.  My wife also chose that day to end our relationship permanently.

So what exactly was this toxic environment?  It was my wife and I constantly disagreeing on how to deal with a difficult teenager.  We saw numerous psychiatrists, psychologists, counselors, and therapists.  I was perfectly willing to go with the plans set forth by any of them.  No surprise, they all said basically the same thing, boundaries and consequences.  My wife, however, had her own ideas of how to do things, backed up by the blathering of ignorant AA friends of hers.  It didn’t matter that her system of ignoring the problem and it will fix itself hadn’t worked for more than two years.  In fact, it made things worse.  Far worse.  I would try to do what the professionals suggested, my wife would disagree, almost always in front of her daughter.  Her daughter would be overjoyed because she was still free to do as she chose and I was in trouble yet again.

Despite my wife denying that she blamed me, the facts speak for themselves.  There was a toxic environment and the only way to fix it was to remove me from the picture.  She could not look at her own actions.  She was (and still is) incapable of accepting criticism when it comes to her handling of her daughter.

Too often, after emailing her or posting something here, my ex would reply with something along the lines of, “anyone who could say such a thing couldn’t possibly care about me or my daughter.” I’m still trying to figure that out.  If I’m all niceness I’m, at best, ignored, more likely she would find something negative in anything I’ve said.  If I write about things that I am unhappy about, the same.  If I make a reasonably founded accusation, I’m threatened.  Basically, anything I do (short of dropping dead) gets negative results.  I’m in a lose-lose situation.

She denies being spiteful, but her actions show otherwise.  I suppose I shouldn’t criticize as I’m a bit petty and a lot bitter, but what the hell.

The point I’m trying to make is if no matter what I say, good or bad, if it’s taken in a negative light, what incentive do I have to tread softly?

Just before we separated, my wife started wearing a ring that had been given to me by a friend.  I had that ring in my possession for over twenty years and it holds much sentimental value.  I told her, “you are welcome to wear it, but please don’t lose it as it is irreplaceable.” Shortly thereafter the temporary separation became permanent.  The ring, along with a drawing that also held great sentimental value, disappeared along with my wife.

Recently I asked her to please return those two items.  She became rather indignant about the whole matter.  She never said she didn’t have them or offer any kind of explanation, she simply refused to discuss it.

Given the circumstances, I must conclude that my ex-wife, Ildiko Weinberger, took them.  Whether by accident or on purpose is unknown, but it doesn’t really matter.  Even if they were taken by accident, her current conduct makes it theft.

Addendum: Shortly after posting this my ex sent an email saying she would return the ring if it turned up.  If she had done this in the first place I would not written the accusation.  Since, however, she had refused to discuss it, she forced my hand.  I’m not optimistic about the ring and drawing being returned.

My former stepdaughter just turned 18.  Now that she’s an adult, I wonder what she will do with herself.  I hope she’s cleaned up her act.  I looked at the relapse rate of teens who go to camps for troubled teens like she did, and am not optimistic.  My ex did say she was staying clean and sober, but I’ve learned not to trust what she says.  Hell, she thought her daughter was making progress before she was sent to the camp, despite the facts staring her in the face.

My stepdaughter’s idea of legal adulthood (when she was 15) was she could do what she wanted, when she wanted.  Life would be free and easy.  I tried to tell her that reality was quite different from that, the responsibility of working and paying bills because there was no one to take care of you would rear its ugly head, but she didn’t hear me.  It’s impossible to get a “normal” teen to listen to facts, so there was no chance what I said registered in her brain.

Every single step-parent who has divorced hears everyone, even close friends, tell them to forget about the step-children.  “Forget about them,” is a common statement.  They would never say that to a biological father, but a step-parent is supposed to just “get over it.” Supposedly, we are incapable of bonding to a step-child.  We can’t possibly love them as much as a “real” parent.  So after years of being a parent, we should just walk away as if nothing happened.

I was a step-parent for eight years.  I helped raise her.  I was her dad and wish I was still her dad, despite all the crap that has happened.  And you expect me to just turn off my heart and forget about her?  I am not a robot.  The love I have for my step-daughter is genuine, despite the silence imposed by my ex-wife for the last two years.  Attempts to get my ex to let me correspond with my step-daughter were rebuffed with, “you don’t really care for her” and other equally vicious lies.

As a former step-parent I have absolutely zero rights.  The courts do not recognize the role a step-parent plays in a child life.  They do not care about anyone’s feelings in the matter except what the biological parent wishes.

Even if I could contact my step-daughter right now, I doubt anything good would come of it.  After two years of forced silence and god only knows what my ex wife said about me, there is no chance my step-daughter would have anything to do with me.