I don't even know where to begin.

My fiance and I have lived together for 4 years and are getting married in November. He has a 9 year old boy that lives with us 50% of the time and I have a 7 year old daughter that is with us 90% of the time.

My relationship with my ex and his new wife is great. They travel a lot so we have to be flexible about our parenting time schedule. When events come up for our daughter (at school or something) we attend together. My daughter says she has two moms and two dads. We are her "real parents" and the others are her "bonus" parents. I think she had an aversion to the word "step" after watching so many Disney movies.

I also have two grown son with my first ex husband. He and I also get along well, always have except for a very brief time right when we first broke up. In fact, when our son's are home next month on leave, we are all renting a home on the lake together and bringing our new families. I'm still listed as his next of kin/ER contact.

So that's basically how I deal with things with my children and my exs.

Now on to the drama, and my fiance.

Their divorce was a nightmare. Both had attorneys although his was worthless. The ex-wife came up with the parenting plan for their child, then 4. The parenting time schedule she came up with had their son with her Mondays, him on Tuesdays then they have every other Wed/thurs or the weekend. So a week would look like her having Mon then the weekend and him Tue/wed/thurs then the following week it would swap.

Afraid that he would lose contact with his son, he just agreed to everything she wanted. She wanted legal say in the boys school, his medical care, etc.

They have joint custody.

Let me tell you, this woman and I have never spoken. I have seen my SS parents speak to each other maybe two or three times in all these years. Usually it's her asking for money, or to trade days. They communicate almost exclusively via text.

We are never included in decisions on my SS activities, even if they interfere with our family time. So for instance on the weeks where we only have him one evening a week, she has him scheduled for things, so he's not home he's out doing baseball, or whatever.

So fast forward now to our current mess, which has me losing it.

Summer stared and my fiance asked if the parenting schedule could be changed to week on/week off to allow SS to attend the same summer camps that my daughter goes to. The BM said "no" flat out because she had things planned out for the whole summer on her days. She said though, that she would take him to camp.

They historically split all of the cost of care.....which translates to we write her checks constantly and she always asks for more.

So finally we are at dinner one night and my daughter is chatting away about camp (she's 7) and blurts out that her step-brother wants to know why he isn't going to as many camps as she is. (she is going every week, he is going to two) We explain that we tried to get things set up for more camps for him but that his mother has a lot of fun things planned and so it only worked that he could to two camps this year.

He obviously must have been wondering why my daughter was getting special treatment as we treat them the same.

Of course it comes up now that he hasn't been doing anything per say with his mother. She just said no because (WHY?).

So then one day my SS asks me if I got his friend request on FB. I hadn't. He sent it again and I accepted. I started tagging him in photos, or comments, but nothing ever showed up. I told his dad who also looked at the page and noticed nothing he tagged his son in showed up. In fact, looking at it, you don't see anything about our family, only his ex-wife, her boyfriend and his daughter.

My fiance confronted his ex. She actually said we are not his family. When my step son was logged in to facebook his dad went thru the settings and you can actually see where she is manually blocking our posts. My SS asked about the friend request because he'd actually asked several times and she had blocked each one before I saw it.

Since then she has been ruthless. She is refusing to compromise on days any longer. We asked for our summer vacation time as it is in the parenting time and she said she had plans already that overlapped three of our days.

We asked a couple of weeks ago for November 7 and 8th for our wedding and rehersal. Her son is in our wedding and she actually said she has TRAVEL plans already that weekend.

So now I'm having a melt down. How can people live like this? It's so hard on the kids. My SS is excited about the wedding, both kids are helping plan it. He's excited to get measured for his Tux.

Finally I convinced my fiance to call an attorney. The retainer alone almost made him not go through with it. Monday he meets with the attorney to get the ball rolling. The wedding is 4 months away and we have the additional costs of legal fees. All over two days.

How am I not this child's family? I house him. Clothe him. Feed him. Hug him if he's crying, take him on vacations. My heart is broken and I want to punch her in the face.

Help.

(and if you've read all this, you deserve a cookie!)