I found this forum today and I was so relieved to find that I was not alone in the problems I am having with my stepdaughter.

I need some advice and I wanted to ask fellow stepparents who understand how children can emotionally blackmail their parents what I should do in this situation. I especially need advice on how to convince my husband to put our marriage first and that he needs to get rid of this girl for the sake of the rest of the family.

This is a rather complicated, and I’m embarrassed to talk about this to any of my friends.

I have a 12 year old son from my first marriage, and my husband has two sons (ages 6 and 8 ) from a previous marriage who live primarily with their bio-mom and visit every other weekend. We’ve been married for 3 1/2 years and dating for about five. We were very happy and very much in love.

For a step family, I thought things were going well. I had a great marriage. The boys all got along well and I don’t have problems with my DH’s ex. I felt blessed.

The trouble started when my DH’s 14 year old daughter came back into his life. He was never married to her mother and she was the product of a short, unfortunate relationship when he was 19 and in the military. Her mother has struggled with mental and substance abuse problems, lost custody, and the girl was living her grandmother, who passed away last year. My husband had been financially supporting her, but she lived in another state and he rarely saw her.

Then three months ago, she moved in with us and all hell broke loose.

I have never met anyone who is more hostile than this girl. She is belligerent, uncooperative and expects to be treated like an adult, yet shows no respect for anyone and excepts no responsibility for anything. Everything is someone else’s fault. And she’s an absolute drama queen.

I know my husband feels guilty for abandoning her. But now he’s absolutely desperate to make things up to her and she’s completely using it to her advantage.

Whenever there is any attempt to discipline her (for poor grades, bad behavior at school, being disrespectful to me, being mean and nasty to my son, lying) she throws tantrums like a five year old and storms out of the room. And nearly every week she locks herself in the bathroom crying to retaliate over something.

She constantly rants that she hates it here and wants to go “home”. But I don’t see why she would want to leave. She has her dad trained that when she’s upset, he does anything she wants to make her happy.

She’s also turned my stepsons against my son, so now when they visit, they gang up and tease my son about his weight and the fact that he loves Pokemon. She’s so jealous of my son receiving any attention. Now it’s so intolerable for him when my stepsons visit, he’s staying at his grandparents’ house during the weekends they’re here.

The girl is in counseling, and I know she spends the entire time bitching about how I’m the source of all the problems, that I hate her and that I am trying to get rid of her.

And she loves driving a wedge between me and my husband. I swear, she enjoys it.

One of the issues is that we are living an a two bedroom condo after tough times due to the recession. There truly isn’t room for this girl in our home and buying a large home in this school district is not feasible.

Buying a house we would be able to afford (with assistance from our parents) would require moving away from friends, family and changing schools for my son to considerably lower quality school - all to try to appease a girl who’s made it perfectly clear she doesn’t want to be part of our family.

My husband is trying to find a rental house in the same school district or a three bedroom apartment, but there are not a lot of options in our price range. Honestly, I don’t want to be forced to move some where that is not right for our family for a girl who shouldn’t be living with us. My son and I are happy where we are, just without her there. I hate uprooting my son over this. He’s already miserable as it is.

Her therapist keeps telling my husband and I how “we” (meaning me) need to make accommodations for her, make her feel welcomed and wanted and provide a safe and secure home environment since she’s faced such a unstable childhood.

Then when I get back home, I am greeted by her telling me to go to hell or f*** off.

While I understand this girl is very troubled, I don’t think she should be allowed to continue to take precedence over the rest of the family.

She has her father wrapped around her finger. If anyone does anything to upset her, she rushes off to the bathroom, locks the door and starts crying. Her father is desperate to spend time with her, but if I piss her off something as simple as telling her to stop being rude to my son, she storms off and pouts and it’s all my fault for driving her off.

When I try to talk to him about this, he tells me to be “more understanding” of what he’s been through. He’s upset with me not being able to make this completely messed up situation work and always takes his daughter’s side, no matter how horrible her behavior to me and my son has been.

Last week, her cell phone was taken away after she was failing most of her classes at school. Then I found out that she had stolen it back out of a drawer in the master bedroom. But when DH confronted her about this, she gave him a sob story about texting her friends back home and half-sister and he let her keep it - even though she had been rummaging through our bedroom to have found it and her grades and attitude have not improved.

I have no ability to deal with a teenager with these types of problems.

I’ve been trying to convince DH to find some place else for her to live even before he agreed to take her. I've been looking into ways to get financial aid to send her to a therapeutic boarding school that would be more equipped to deal with her. Or, she could go live with her older half-sister who goes to college in Washington
(She keeps threatening she’s going to run away so she can go back to Washington and live with her half-sister.). I wish her biological mother would get her life together so she could regain custody. Honestly, I’d be fine with putting her into foster care.

I will do anything to get this girl out of my life.

I know this is different than a normal stepfamily problem. This girl has issues and virtually no relationship with her father or biological brothers prior to three months ago. While it’s nice that my husband is trying to do the right thing, the fact that he’s sacrificing our family for a girl he previously ranted about wasting so much money with child support payments is driving me crazy.

My DH is letting her control our lives with her behavior and demands. If this continues, I don’t see a future for our marriage. He knows this and he’s still continuing to let this girl live with us.

I simply want peace and quiet back in the house, but I don’t know how to get my husband put our marriage first and send his daughter some place where she can get the help she needs. (Or the next time she’s throwing a tantrum about going back to Washington, drive her to the airport.)