My stepdaughter has started excluding her father
I'm living with my boyfriend of 12 years and am a "stepmother" of a 17-year old girl who hates her father. My SD is in foster care in another state and I've been working with her since her mother died a year ago to reunite her with her estranged father (my SO).
Her father has a mild form of autism (non-diagnosed) and can be difficult to get close to. I have managed to do so since I understand his condition and have learned to work with it.
The father/daughter relationship has been estranged since her parents divorced in 1999, but she has become fond of me and my family over the past year. Now I'm in a position where she wants to include me in things and exclude her father! *facepalm*
She recently came to our town for a spring break visit and stayed with my adult son and his family as she really loves them and didn't want to stay at our house. She invited me to come visit and when I told her "we" would come over, she informed me that she only wanted to see me and not her father. Did not want to see him at all.
I explained to her that I would not exclude him and that our family doesn't exclude people in family functions. I stood my ground because I refuse to give in to anyone's emotional blackmail, let alone a teenagers'. Since she's so bent on hating her father, she wouldn't change her mind, so neither one of us went to visit. I'm not sure what I've just done to the relationship with my SD, but I suspect, if nothing else, I've given her something to think about.
I'm in the middle of a father/daughter feud and trying to set boundaries with both of them. I hate the chaos, stress and heartache this causes everyone and I really don't know how to deal with it all sometimes. I don't know who to turn to for help and support. Her father relies on me to help him through this and I feel very unqualified for the job.
Her high school graduation is coming up and I already know she does not plan to invite her father to commencement and he just informed me that he's going. I feel like I'm in the middle of a bad dream and just want out.
Anyone have any general advice/thoughts on this big disaster in my life?
Well this may be the exact
Well this may be the exact opposite of just about every other situation I've read about here .. a first for me, surely!
Is therapy an option? Could the three of you attend a family therapy session together? Or maybe she could go weekly, and her father could go with her once a month?
I have no real clue how to handle this, but my sympathy goes out to you. I can imagine how exhausting your situation has to be .. it doesn't seem right or fair that you've become this all-important middle person.
Well I'd probably just let it
Well I'd probably just let it go. You can't force anything. She is almost out of school and will be an adult shortly. If he was out of her life from about the time she was 3 years old he is just a stranger to her. DNA is all they have in common.
Think of it this way if as a young adult you discovered a "father" that you had no memory of would you automatically love him? Don't know why she hates him but it probably is not going to change.
Let her lead her life without the sperm donor.