When you marry someone with kids, you want to have a good relationship with the children as much as possible, but that is not something that can be forced.

What would you do if you expected the kids to treat you as a second mom (especially after the biological mother passed away) but they don’t see you like that?

That is the situation the step-mother in this story finds herself in, and she is upset that her therapist and brother aren’t telling her what she wants to hear.

Check it out.

AITA for telling my sister she needs to be the one to decide if she can stay in her marriage and remain “just a stepparent”?

My sister got married 5 years ago.

Her husband was divorced and shared custody of his kids with his ex-wife.

My sister’s stepkids are okay with her. There was never any really bad patches.

But my sister’s expectations out of their relationship have never been met.

And because the stepkids mom passed a few months after my sister married her husband, her expectations grew and she expected to be looked upon as a second mom.

But the kids don’t look at her that way.

It is ok to struggle with it, but she may end up pushing the kids further away.

My sister has told me repeatedly that she struggles with this.

She and her husband have gone to marriage counseling, they went to family counseling because she didn’t like the role she played in the family and when she had her own child with her husband this only got worse.

She said it felt like two families in one house instead of one family.

They went to several different family therapists who all said this could not be forced and she would need to accept the fact the kids do not consider her a second mom.

Recently she spoke to the latest therapist alone and this therapist went a bit more in-depth with her.

My sister was apparently focused on why everyone seemed to think she was wrong to want a motherly relationship with her stepkids.

Does she think she can force the kids to want what she wants?

The therapist told her she was not wrong to want that, she would be wrong to try and force it against the wishes of the other two people involved because she wants it.

She told her people can want things and it’s never wrong to have your own wishes and desires.

But she told her a part of growing up is learning to understand that we cannot always get what we want.

We need to accept not everything happens as we would like.

She told her for her, that meant she had to accept the fact they don’t want her as their second mom and decide if that’s something she can live with or not.

My sister vented about this all to me.

She was annoyed at what the therapist told her.

I asked her if she expected a therapist to tell her what she wants to hear just because or does she really believe she should be able to force her step kids to see her a certain way.

She has very unrealistic expectations.

This set her off on a tangent about how people expect you to be the new mom or dad as a stepparent and when kids were so young when you met them and still very young when they lost the bio parent.

Then she said she loved those kids and hated being unloved in return.

She said being liked enough by them was not okay by her and it was breaking her heart because she didn’t love them any different to her bio child but she knew the relationships were so different, more different than if they were all just her bio kids.

Then she started saying she didn’t know if she could commit to a life of being liked by them.

And then she wanted me to tell her if I thought she should stay married or not and accept being “just a stepparent” or not.

Does she just want to be told what to do?

I told her I could not make the choice for her and it would need to be her decision.

That nobody else, including her little brother, could make this decision for her.

Then I told her to talk to her husband.

She told me I didn’t help her like I was meant to.

I don’t think I could have helped her more.

She’s an adult and needs to make her own choices in my opinion but maybe I’m wrong.

AITA?

She really has unrealistic expectations and needs to try to see the situation from her step-children’s point of view.

Read on to see what the people in the comments say about it.

This commenter says she is not a good stepmother.

Building a relationship takes time.

Yes, she sounds extremely self-centered.

This person says she doesn’t care about the kids.

She sounds very immature.

She is being extremely selfish.

If she wants to bond with her stepchildren, she needs to put the kids first.

If you thought that was an interesting story, check this one out about a man who created a points system for his inheritance, and a family friend ends up getting almost all of it.