I am so glad I found this site. I finally feel like I'm not alone. I just need a place where I can vent my frustrations to sympathetic ears. Please forgive any typos as I am holding my sleeping four month old as I type.
I am a step mom to a 16 year old boy. His father and I have been married for almost four years. I met my stepson before my husband and I started dating six years ago. My husband has primary custody of his son; he only sees his mother for six weeks in the summer, spring break, and it alternates for who has him at Thanksgiving and Christmas. So in short I am with this kid on a daily basis. Since I am home with our new baby I am the person who runs SS places he needs to go, makes sure he's feed during the day, etc. I am in loco parentis, and when my husband and I married my husband made sure that SS knew that I was to be considered a parent and SS was to listen to me whenever he was in my care.
What frustrates me is that my SS is apathetic, lazy, and manipulative. He learned the manipulation from his mother. As far as I am concerned she shouldn't even be allowed to see him at all, considering what she did to him and his father. She decide when SS was about two years old that she no longer wanted to be married to a disabled veteran and so she cleared out my husband's bank account, grabbed the kid and ran back to her parents in Texas. There she proceeded to teach SS how to be autistic and placed him with the other autistic kids in her school (where she teaches and her mother is on the school board). She was able to pull this off because of how she and her parents treated SS and the fact that he is naturally shy. So he learned to sit in a corner and wave his hands in front his face and throw fits if anyone asked him to do anything that required effort. When my husband finally regained custody of him, he took him to several mental health professional and had them test SS. The kid is not autistic. However he has learned that if he doesn't want to do something, he can act up and people will leave him alone. Every new school year that my husband has had SS, he has pulled this on at least one of his teachers.
I went into this feeling a great amount of sympathy and sorrow for this kid. I determined that I would do my best help him get better. Well four years later and he isn't getting better. Not because he can't but because he won't. How do I know this: he acts perfectly fine with people when he wants to. In his shop classes at the votech school he's in he does everything asked of him, no funky behavior. English class is a completely different story. He will wave his hands, break down in tears and say "oh I'm too stressed." And this is only beginning to touch on what he does.
His apathy as far as life is concerned is really starting to wear on my nerves. My husband and I give him some chores to do, and we require that he is clean, does his school work and get decent grades. He does a crappy job of doing the few chores we ask him to do, does a crappy job of being clean, and doesn't seem to give a flying monkey butt about his grades; EVEN THOUGH HE HAS BEEN TOLD REPEATEDLY he will be kicked from tech and sent back to regular high school if he doesn't perform at a certain level. He doesn't ask for help if needs it even though his teachers and we have told him all he has to do is ask. He doesn't listen to us about different things like, don't use other people's hair products without their permission or don't pet the cat like that because it scares her. He doesn't listen, even though we have told him multiple times. We have tried positive reinforcement and punishments like grounding or revoking privileges. He doesn't care. He keeps on keeping on the same way.
This past Friday he came home from his summer visit with his mom and all the little behaviors and weird things he does suddenly began to just really get on my nerves. I came to realization that as hard I try I will never love him like I love my four month old son. At over the past year I have been coming to the realization that the older SS gets and the less he tries to work on improving himself the less I like him. At this point I am worried my bio child will try to emulate his half brother's behavior.
I could go on but baby is getting hungry and I have a 16 year old that needs his lunch to be fixed for as well.