Seven Step-Parents And Zero Family

My parents spent my entire childhood searching for happiness. I spent it searching for a home.

Note from TBU: What sets Them Before Us apart is our commitment to amplifying the voices of the real victims: children. When adult desires are prioritized, it is children who pay the price. This is Stephanie’s true story that might have identifying information changed to protect anonymity and minor edits for clarity.

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I (Stephanie) was raised by divorced parents who shared custody of me. If you ask my parents individually who raised me, they would each say they were responsible. My parents decided that no-fault divorce was the best thing for our “family” when I was less than one year old. I can only remember a time my parents were both in the same room together as a “special occasion.” My childhood consisted of two divorced people living separate lives and passing me off to each other…back-and-forth between each household every week.

Other kids might say I was spoiled because I had two rooms all to myself in two different houses, and on Christmas, I visited each house and got to open presents at each location. I, on the other hand, recall longing for a family that I never felt I had, even as a very young child. I remember feeling very lonely as an only-child of divorced parents and longing for a single family in one home. I felt jealous of kids who had one home and just two parents instead of four. I remember wishing I felt loved. I longed for siblings I’d never have. At school, I would always have to describe my family in class as just being “my separated parents and me.”

I was told to “play” alone a lot as a child and learned to read and draw as creative outlets that would pass the time and keep me “out of the adults’ hair.” I never saw my mother and father in the same room together except twice: my high school graduation and my wedding at thirty. In my mother’s house, I saw her struggle as a single mother to keep us in an apartment or a condo until she began to date someone at her work, and eventually that person would become my first of three stepfathers.

My mother remarried for the first time around my 7th birthday. I was able to be a flower girl in her “dream” wedding and didn’t fully comprehend what was happening at the party until the man she married moved us into a house and out of the apartment my mother and I shared. In the house, she claimed we would have a better life, and when they went on their honeymoon, and later, on any vacation together, they would send me to stay at either my grandma’s house, my dad’s house, or my cousin’s house. My father remarried around the same time, and when I was with him, I enjoyed some of the same things (like my own room to decorate), but his home with his second wife was much stricter than my mother’s. When he and his wife needed time alone, I would be sent back to my mother’s house. My first stepmother was an only child also, and I remember bonding with her and enjoying her company, but she never had any children of her own. I saw my dad every week during this time for dinner for a couple of nights, and stayed overnight at his house every other weekend with him and my stepmother. Sometimes the three of us would enjoy going bowling or spending time outdoors.

In high school, my dad divorced wife #2 and married his third wife. I was told that he “found his high school girlfriend at a reunion and she was now divorced… so he had a shot at getting together with her”. He dumped my stepmother at the time and almost immediately moved out of state to be with his new wife. I only received one letter from her after they divorced, and I always wondered where she was. I found out recently that she was deceased. Because my father was no longer going to share custody, I began visiting him only once a year when he would pay for my flights to see him and his new wife and her kids (from her first marriage).

My mother, during this time, decided that since my dad was not going to be around every week to visit, she would move her, her husband, and me closer to my aunt, 1,000 miles away from where I was born and raised. I was uprooted without any consideration for my feelings in the middle of high school. Around this time, I started to notice some very unusual behavior between my mother and stepfather. They seemed to be fighting more and began to act really strangely. I found out later that they were in the process of becoming “swingers.” During my high school years, I came home to other couples staying at our house with my mother and stepfather, and later learned about and walked in on some R-rated situations in the house.

During my college years, I visited my dad once a year and grew increasingly jealous of the life he led with Wife #3 and her children. My father was more actively involved in their lives than in mine and in every way seemed to enjoy their company over mine. Every time I visited, I felt like a third wheel stepping into their lives.

Meanwhile, my mother and stepfather moved to a different state, then got divorced, and she moved back to the town I’d grown up in. She began to date both men and women and eventually settled on my Husband #3, a man who had his own children that he was apparently estranged from. I wasn’t fond of my first stepfather, who was verbally abusive to me. My second stepfather shared much of the same personality. My second stepfather was rather poor and seemed to get himself into financial situations that caused my mother to make large purchases she probably would have never made otherwise (three boats, for example). Eventually, she separated from him, and before she could even remove all of the items from their shared home together and place them into a dumpster, she had already begun to introduce us to a man in the running for Husband #4.

Current Day

Recently, my mom moved to another state, leaving her only grandchildren and me, for the latest love of her life. She has added her current boyfriend’s name to her will, and has given neither her only sister nor me a copy of it. She’s been living in his house for the past year with very little contact.

My relationship with my biological parents is minimal. There have been times when they were more actively involved in my life, but their involvement has always been contingent on their relationships with their girlfriends, boyfriends, wives, or husbands. They always seemed to value their love lives more than me, and I have always been an afterthought. I have sought therapy for years to try to understand and resolve my feelings that I was not good enough or deserving enough to be given a real family. I speak to them rarely now and do not consider them actively involved in my daily life or the lives of their only biological grandchildren. They chose to selfishly live their lives as if I were a minor accessory to their lives, and it has impacted me into my late 30’s. I feel responsible for ensuring my children know their grandparents, but I also want their everyday interactions limited. I don’t want to inflict the pain and suffering I felt as a child on my own children. They ask me similar questions I asked my parents as a child, and never got an answer to:

“Why aren’t grandpa and grandma married?”

“Why are they living in other states?”

“Why don’t they visit regularly?”

As a 30-something-year-old with children of my own, I notice that I still feel anger and jealousy over the fact that I was never provided a stable and loving single-family home. I still struggle with feelings of loneliness, even though I am happily married. I still have difficulty trusting people and keeping friends. I push people away and out of my life and I have, if I’m honest, only two close friends. I struggle with oversharing my trauma in social situations when meeting people, especially when someone casually asks about my childhood and why I moved so many times. It’s simple, really: every time either of my parents remarried, they moved.

I know that my anger and jealousy are caused by the fact that I was never shown a role model of true love and acceptance as a child. I cannot understand why chasing selfish happiness at the expense of providing a child a stable home and family would seem logical. I know what popular culture claims, that a happy parent makes happy children. Perhaps that’s sometimes true. But I have also seen what happens when adults mistake selfishness for happiness and assume their contentment will ripple outward to their children. It doesn’t. Not when adult “happiness” means their children have to suffer.

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Stephanie’s story doesn’t have to be repeated. Every child deserves the safety of their mom and dad, not the pain of sacrifice. You can be part of rewriting that future. Join the movement, whether by giving, sharing your own story, rallying your church or business, or simply starting conversations that put children first. Together, we can defend the rights of kids who cannot defend themselves.

Them Before Us is a global movement committed to defending children’s right to their mother and father. We believe that adult desires should never come at the expense of a child’s fundamental needs.

We are not professional lobbyists or political insiders. We are ordinary people with an extraordinary conviction: children must come first in every conversation about marriage, family, and fertility.

We exist to make one thing clear: when adults sacrifice for children, society thrives. When children are forced to sacrifice for adults, everyone pays the price.

Learn more or support our mission: www.thembeforeus.com