Maybe this is the real him and he was on his best behavior before. Maybe more is going on than you know. You could try family counseling. Or you could cut your losses and get him out of your house if you think it isn't going to work out. If he is acting this way with no reason to do so, he sounds like a control freak and a bully.

It sounds like he's a control freak. You don't say how your business is doing. But my guess is he talked you into quitting your job so he could control you with HIS money. If you have your own money, he shouldn't have any say in how you spend it. He is trying to control the kids into being perfect, which of course is impossible, so it will be never-ending. It's possible he was parented that way. I was. My mom would bitch at me about how I did dishes- I put them in the dishwasher differently than she would. So I wouldn't want to do dishes because I knew I wasn't going to do them right. So then she'd get mad at me...I couldn't win. It is easy to get into that pattern with skids. He just needs to stop. Period.

He is mean... And it is only with them. He's actually kind of shy in public.

*blink* *blink* So, to his peers he's shy (perhaps even meek?), and with your sons (one of whom is disabled) he's mean (possibly a bully?).

Seems like there are several things going on here to include control issues, jealousy, insecurity, etc.

However, and please don't be offended or feel defensive, how many times have we all heard on this site this same story from the other side. DH's kids are lazy, smelly, whatever, and SM tries to come in with some discipline, hygeine, whatever only to have how mean she is and how much stress she causes thrown in her face. So, I would ask you to take a step back and try to look at it from your husband's point of view. Does he have a point? Do your sons half-ass their chores (4-5 hr.s of cleaning per week for those ages is more than reasonable), take the dog walking not long enough for him/her to his/her business so that it ends up doing business in the house? I know for a fact that if I don't go back and check what my DD11 did, she will half ass it. Period. She'll only do it right if she knows for sure I'm going to follow up with an inspection. Otherwise, everything's a 90-mile-an-hour stuff'n'fluff.

Obviously, I don't know you and your situation; everything I say is purely conjecture and speculation.

Good luck!

I don't know your entire situation and am just going to go off of my experience and what you have written.
I am a clean freak! I like to have my home picked up and presentable. I think every member in a house should spend at least 30 minutes during the week cleaning and 2-3 hrs over the weekend.
I am also strict about how SS10 cleans. If he does not clean to my standards (leaves a toilet ring, partially vacuums the floor, stuffs toys under his bed) I'm calling him on it. He does things half-assed a lot and it pisses me off! I worked hard to have a home and will be damned if he's going to trash it! However, when he is finished, I thank him and then he gets to do something fun.
I think some of the others have it right: your DH likes to be in control, may be jealous of your kids, and has some self-esteem issues! Can you ask him without him getting defensive? Does he want more time with just you?

Hell I'd be pissed too at the thought of some kid keeping me up all night. So now being pissed over a thoughtless skid making noise all night is "abuse"?

I have never felt my kids are perfect, but I do try to get him to understand the concept of "punishment fits the crime" and "I love them even when they suck"

This is what I was asking about. If your DH can't grasp that concept, then he should have absolutely no disciplinarian authority until he can grasp it - to include the snide remarks.

However, I do feel that the home is yours and your husbands (unless, of course, it isn't), then your DH has the right to expect certain rules be followed. "No keeping me up at night watchin t.v." seems like a very reasonable request. However, you have to be willing to step up and enforce that with your son so DH doesn't intervene, because even in the rules on disengagement, if the kid in question's behavior begins to impede on the SP's well being, it is perfectly acceptable for SP to re-engage at that point. So, decide on a t.v. cut-off time for when your BS comes to visit and make sure he understands it ahead of time. *YOU* stay up until that time to remind your BS of the rule just in case he forgets. Because this was an agreed upon rule before BS came for a visit, there is no discussion; he must turn it off.

On the other hand, things that don't affect your DH, he needs to take a step back from. How does it affect him if you clean the house instead of BS17? It doesn't. DH needs to STFU.

This stepfather sounds a lot like my stepfather, who was terrible to me (no sexual abuse, though), so terrible that his own parents had to put me up for sophomore year in high school, my own grandparents for senior year. My mother and stepfather broke up their own household every summet to stay with his parents while I 1) stayed with grandparents; 2) visited with my alocholic father for the first time since I was three; and 3) worked for other families as a live in babysitter -- this while my stepfather and mother crashed with his parents in another state. The marriage occurred when I was about to enter 8th grade, but I lived with them for only three academic years and no summers. Not at all after I was in college, not even invites to Thanksgiving, even when I was staying in a temp. dorm with foreign students and it was only three blocks away from the house they lived in. I was barely 18 years old and have never been so alone during all the traditional holidays until I married and spent the holidays with my husband's family. This same freshman year, my mother was in the ICU for six weeks and almost died on practically a daily basis. I found out via a person I had worked for as a babysitter who almost collapsed against a desk when he found out I didn't even know my mother was sick. And no, I was not a bad kid: good grades in spite of ten schools in 12 years, top 2% on standardized tests, would go on to graduate in four years, go to graduate school, Ph.D. program and then law school. And I cleaned the whole house every week and did the dishes every night... only allowed to use the telephone five minutes at a time (so who eventually called me?), spent every moment of the day in my room unless out of the house, eating or doing housework -- oh, also the bathroom which I was alloed to use for 15 minutes every weekday morning.

I was supposed to be invisible and I did my very best.

My mother was humiliated by what was going on in her house. When I was in college, she had to leave the house to telephone me from a public telephone if she wanted to speak to me. I never told her about how she could have died (and maybe been buried, too) before her husband let me know she was ill. I don't think he told my grandparents either....Until she'd finally had enough, she used to say it was just one of those things, shades of gray, he tried to be nice to me but... Actually, he used to feel bad about how he treated me and would cry. Or so she said. This was to show me how senstive he wasy. No comment then, no comment now.

My mother had no money even though she worked as a college tracher. Why? Because she got short changed by $20 at the bank one time and stepfather used this to justify pocketing her salary. The only time she defied him by slipping some money to me was on the verge of her great illness. She gave me, not a check, but a money order so I could attend freshman orientation. Orientation was all filled up, so I was putting the money order back in her mailbox at work (the English Dept. at Indiana University) when one of the guys I used to babysit for told me about her illness. He gave me her doctor's name and told me to call the doctor. I was so tense about money, I waited to be back at the dorm before I made the call; I didn't want to spend a dime to use a pay phone. And from the outside perhaps our "family" seemed normal for those pre-feminist times. How many stepchildren have been written off, ripped off and dropped off because the person with the power (then almost always a man) just couldn't stand having a third party in the house, a stranger that someone he loved unaccountably loved without his permission!

In my case, loved not so much, I have to say it even though my mother is almost 90 and I am 65. All these years, and it still hurts us both. Her life corroded with guilt and anger at me because I maker her feel guilty. The drinking. The rages. Now the alzheimers.

But to return to the contemporary stepfather with his own business. I told my own story to drop this word of wisdom: If you don't have a certain degree of closeness and caring in a household, with time, you're going to have hatred. No one wants to live with strangers, and if your husband or wife thinks of your child as a stranger (and does his/her very best to make sure you do too), the hatred just grows and grows. The petty resentments grow. There is a ring around the bathtub; a stranger broke a glass; a stranger used someone's personal back scrubber -- it was wet, and why else would that be!! The kid eats too much, talks too much and is altogether too ugly, too short, too fat, too tall, too thin, too much like the biological parent. Worst of alll, this stranger does not adore the stepfather, who works to put the food on the damn table!

THere should be more than one definition for parent alientation syndrome. One where a biological parent alienates the child from the other parent, the other where the new spouse alienates the biological parent from the child.

If your husband is alienating you from your children,he's gonna keep on doing it. The less love and emotional comfort in the home, the more the hatred. It's like the mining term "angle of repose." Until the real emotions in the home are made real, there will always be little landslides. And in one of them, your children will be swept away or buried alove, emotionally at least.

If you divorce, he'll probably get a bit of a prick of conscience esp. if he goes on to remarry and has children of his own.

You on the other hand will always wonder what your children are really thinking. They may bitch you out, or they may be as I became -- choosing exile from the so called family even in the face of my mother's attempt to reconsititute it much later, even hoping that we might both become lesbians. Or rather, that as she did, I might also.

So why did I keep silent in the face of my stepfather willingness to let her go to the grave without notifying her only child? Well maybe not the grave -- he might have told me she'd died while her body was in the hospital morgue. We'll never know. But why did I not "tattle to my mother?" He could have asked someone from the families I had babysat to call me, saying he was too busy.

Why did I not even tell my grandparents, whom I loved and had lived with for a school year only six months before? Or his parents, whom I loved and had lived with? Because I was so gone. And I guess during the years when my mother had been a single parent, I had learned to fear the need to take care of her, maybe already felt I was taking care of her, had better judgment even when I was 10. I was a bit like the kid in The Good-Bye Girl. I wanted my mother to be happy without being the one to make her so. I had "bought" my freedom by not becoming drop out, a drug addict or a trailer park single mother. I was ready to resume my life leaving my enemies and non-friends behind.

This is who many stepchildren are: We are hypervigilent. We are parentified. We watch you when you are not watching us. Our eyes are on the TV or the book or looking out the window, but our ears are following you, your words, your tone, your silences. We read your tone of voice. We need to know what is in the hearts of the adults around us, as our precarious emotional survival may depend on them. We have gone to ground. We are hibernating. We are having trouble sleeping and concentrating. We are asking why? Why are the exact behaviors that other kids are rewarded for castigated in us? True, we wet the bed. Some of us have encopresis. Maybe we need therapy NOW. But always, our eyes are on the prize: independence. We just want to find a there there. We don't want to have to pretend to be normal once we're no longer living with our "families." We want to be part of real families some day instead of oprhans of living parents.

Zuma you've gotten a lot of advise here and I'm not going to read it all. I just wanted to make sure you got this piece. He's not going to change back, not easily anyway.

I agree that its a matter of control and its time you took that control back.

Try the "big threat". Either he gets out of your kids faces or find another place to live. Print this out and tell him to do it or else:

http://www.steptogether.org/disengaging.html

I had a situation similar to Natalia's. In fact, my mom is still married to him. And I tell you Zuma, if someone treated my kids the way you describe they would have a pair of scissors through the heart. Also, your husband's behavior has the potential to permanently damage the relaitonship you have with your sons. And I realize stepkids are no walk in the park. But at no time in my 30 yr marriage have I treated SS36 with anyting but decency. He had to live by the same rules of the house as my bios, but I reinforced with a firm but loving hand. I would never DREAM of insulting him ("you'd think you could figure how to set your alarm clock") because I know how it feels. I lived it. My mom basically threw my brother and I to the wolves- gave up her kids for a husband. Meh. It's your decision- I know what I would've done a long time ago.