I may be a little late to the party with blogging these days, but wanted to weigh in on my experience or lack thereof of the stepgrand experience. 

I've been seeing a lot of social media and TV shows on estrangement between parents and adult children. The last statistic I heard was one in four adult children have chosen to go no contact with their parent/s. I've seen arguments from both sides ranging from the "missing reasons," where there's a narcissistic parent who acts innocent and like they are totally shocked over having been ghosted despite being told umpteen times the reasons, to parents claiming they are the ones who distanced themselves. It's like a giant he said she said issue.

I am so tired, and my self-worth is decreasing by the day. Is it even worth sticking around anymore and just go back to my old life which was nothing but stress, unfulfillment and boring.  

SD has been here almost 2 weeks already! Really don't have anything to complain about so far and SD has been home with me during the work weeks until camp starts Monday. I am looking forward to camp starting, but I feel like I would feel that way even with DD because it is just distracting and more on me to balance while I'm working my full time job remotely. Smallest complaint I would have is SD just definitely lacks urgency, but that just means we have to adjust to make sure we give her ample warning before we are leaving the house and/or if we need to do something quickly.

I hope I don't jinx myself with this post but it's been pretty peaceful these past few months. No sign of Little Idiot (SD25) planning on coming up this summer so I am hoping/praying I won't have to see her until Christmas.

She's still living the bartender life down in FL, working hard on trying to trap The Fool into a marriage I'm sure. She was pushing hard to drag him up here to introduce him to the family but he probably didn't want to come (thank God - Goofy, her last boyfriend, aka The Cocaine Cowboy was always up for a trip here to invade my home). 

Not step parent related.. but divorcing parent related.. and will, at some point become steplife for these kids.. and the BM is my OSD.. so some relativeness to steplife lol.

Background

With less than a week, SS will be 18. Freshly graduated from high school and basically doing nothing at home. (Not really helping with stuff at home,  no job, and not learning how to drive either)

Of course, I keep seeing this theme here: Skids feeding into the destruction of relationships by consistently proving their loyalty to BMs who haven't dealt with their own issues of (pick one or all) control, jealousy, anger, resentment, feelings of abandonment, and so on. 

Are there any among us who believe that the BM has not been behind poor skid behavior? Have any skids just taken on being asses all by themselves? 

DH used to repeat it all the time, as if it was an excuse: S/he feels the need to please his/her mom. S/he gets a lot of pressure.

MIL just can't seem to help herself with her petty comments on my page. She slowed down a bit after I almost blocked her everytime I would post of picture of our family and SD 15 was not in the picture, MIL would comment "where's SD" or some BS like that. Back story, as some of you may have remembered my SD 15 started major drama the whole Christmas holiday because she didn't want to actually spend time with DH and just wanted her gifts. She has been dividing us and MIlL for years tho.

Okay , so I was thinking, maybe all of the problems are me.         I made SO cut way back on communication and take some stand  with BM. If I had just let him continue on the path he was on maybe BM would have pushed for the kids to continue to stay with him instead of letting them stop.Maybe he would have still been taking SS to every single game and formed a better bond. Maybe he would have still driven the kids to everything and they would have like him better. Maybe he would have still been spending thousands of dollars for birthdays and holidays and SKs would have liked him more.