When a woman’s marriage to her husband ended, she found love again with a new man and married him. However, her daughter later revealed her new stepfather seemed to have sights on her, and instead of commiserating with her daughter, she kicked her out.

On July 24, 2023, a 55-year-old woman using the Reddit username Throwawayme4158 shared her story, trying to determine if she is the wrong person in the narrative. She revealed that she was married to her child’s stepfather for four years.

The woman and her 63-year-old husband lived together. Growing up, her now 23-year-old daughter was diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder (DID) after suffering from trauma while watching her mother’s marriage to her father fall apart.

She and her child have a complicated relationship, and when her daughter told her about being bullied in school, the parent didn’t act. Instead, Throwawayme4158 told her child that she believed all children are innocent and that if she said anything to them, it would amount to an adult harassing a child.

Her daughter never forgave her and referred to a time when the other schoolchildren called her “trash.” At the time, the daughter had stopped taking care of her hygiene while suffering from depression, and among other things, her mother advised her to shower and bought her new clothes.

The bullying stopped when the ringleaders were suspended and expelled, but Throwawayme4158’s daughter still makes her feel bad about it. Once in a while, she notes how her school’s clinic volunteer said if she were her child, she would’ve given her permission to hit back if the administration wasn’t acting.

The Reddit poster felt allowing her daughter to live with her while she finished college and looked for a job would help heal some of the young woman’s childhood wounds. She also thought her daughter would be influenced well by the healthy relationship she and her husband modeled. However, she realized:

“My daughter now doesn’t get along with my husband.”

The woman mentioned how introverted and creative her child was, but she liked immersing herself in escapism. Her daughter would get annoyed when her stepfather sits across from her to eat while she tries to eat alone.

If the mother and daughter’s relationship had been bad before, the incident that unfolded next only worsened it. How the woman handled the matter didn’t help either.

The Incident that Changed Everything

Out of the blue, the woman’s husband started acting distant from her. To explain his strange behavior, the woman’s daughter revealed to her mother that “his eyes lingered for too long.”

It came to a point that the daughter was livid, accusing her stepfather of giving her strange looks. A shouting match ensued, forcing the husband to finally confess that he was “attracted” to his stepdaughter and that being around her all day was difficult, describing her as a “walking temptation.”

He told his wife that this was also the reason he had avoided sleeping with her. The mother of the 23-year-old was upset to hear the truth and said she didn’t blame her daughter.

Sadly, the situation became so unbearable that she needed time to collect her thoughts and couldn’t do so with her daughter and husband in the same house. So she gave her daughter money to go and live at an extended-stay hotel.

She also advised her daughter to use her college’s emergency financial and housing resources. This made the daughter upset, so she told her mother’s previous husband, her father, about the incident.

The commenter likened Throwawayme4158 to their mother, who is also selfish and delusional.

The ex-husband responded by painting his ex-wife as a villain on social media. The Reddit user explained that she wasn’t trying to abandon her daughter. She knew her daughter was qualified to avail of her college’s emergency aid due to her father’s unemployment and massive debt.

The social media user explained that she kicked her child out to give herself time to process things. She knew leaving the house to be with her daughter was not an option. She wanted to figure out first if she should save her marriage.

People’s Reactions to the Woman’s Story

People who read Throwawayme4158’s story reacted strongly to it, with many calling her bad and an unsupportive mother and the young woman’s stepfather a pervert. One had a hard time believing that the daughter’s DID just stemmed from her mother’s strained relationship with her ex-husband, explaining:

“DID stems from repeated trauma before the age of 9-ish.”

The commenter believed the mother was wrong to punish her daughter for her husband’s inappropriate behavior, suggesting she should have kicked the man out instead while she mulled things over.

Meanwhile, someone diagnosed with DID in 2021 and who had done lots of research on it said it stemmed from “severe and ongoing” abuse.

The person said a child had to compartmentalize things happening to them to allow “normal” development. DID is caused by extreme neglect and emotional abuse, and sexual and physical abuse, with rare cases seeing it developing if a child has “serious medical issues.”

A Reddit user speculated that the poster hated her daughter while someone else pitied the older woman for not seeing the “innocence and vulnerability” of her child. Another person said the fact the mother chose to kick her child out showed where her loyalties lay, thinking her husband was innocent and her daughter was to blame.

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