tl dr: My (25F) stepmom (60F) told me I'm not a part of her family, but otherwise is nice and supportive in a lot of ways. Sometimes I can't get over the resentment.
I moved back home nine months ago because of COVID and my depression. She was and is in many ways really supportive, and let me live with her and my dad. I started hanging out more with her three sons and their kids on the weekends, and it was really exciting to think of my family growing because my family is so small: I don't have a mom because she kind of went crazy. I referred to her sons as my brothers and their kids as my nieces, and she would just awkwardly laugh. Eventually she told me it made her really uncomfortable, that her family has been through a lot of pain and it's different because they grew up together, they were family in a way I would never be. In a sense, this is true: of course I didn't grow up with her family and they experienced the death of their father before my stepmom married my dad, but in the past she has taken in children from past relationships (her daughter-in-law who lost both parents, another one of her sons). I can't get over the feeling she thinks I'm not good enough for her. I also feel like she's ignoring my pain, too: my childhood was also traumatic, and during a couple of years I felt completely alone.
Again, in many ways she's very nice and supportive, and I go over and have lunch with them about once a week. She let me stay with them for months, she talked to me about my feelings, she got me a heating pad for my painful periods. But once in a while she'll do something inadvertently that reminds me she feels this way, and I get angry. I can't talk about it with my dad really, because he's both a) preoccupied and b) really uncomfortable in these kinds of emotional situations.
How should I deal with my feelings?
Submitted May 02, 2021 at 02:10PM by Individual-Opinion42 https://ift.tt/2POekQg
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