Rant: I hate being a parent

I agree with this.

My husband decided not to stay and just pay child support.

Primarily because he loathed the child's mother and he didn't even want the child in the first place. After he broke up with her, her sole mission in life was making him/us miserable because she was pissed off. It wasn't sustainable. She didn't even want the damn kid. She just wanted him to stay.

Eventually we got a restraining order and we pay child support. We occasionally feel guilty, because the child's mother is totally unfit and neglectful, but it was never going to work out. She currently has a 722 page DCS file because she refuses to comply with a mental health management plan or stop using drugs and drinking. She's also neglectful, unsafe, and abusive.

The mother's parents are her chief enablers but they seem to end up watching her daughter a majority of the time. I'm confident they are "safe" adults at least. Having us in the picture, when we don't want the child and make her mother act out more, wasn't even good for her. I do however call DCS when something comes to my attention that is impossible to ignore (e.g. her mother taking her to a bar while she got plastered and drove drunk).

If the child approaches us in the future, which seems likely to me, we agreed amongst ourselves to help her with college and a car. It's unfair she got such a shitty start in life and it's obviously not her fault. I'll also hand her a stack of legal paperwork and explain why it wasn't even possible to coparent with her mother if we wanted to. I think it's important she understands none of this is her fault.

I say "we" because we started dating and later got married throughout the legal processes and made decisions together.

It's a shitty situation but I am 100% sure co-parenting would have made it worse. This nutbag still posts online calling herself his wife, describing herself as a "super wife and super mom," almost TEN years later.

The kicker? Because my husband signed the birth certificate, and more than a year elapsed, the court wouldn't order a paternity test and she absolutely refused to submit the child to a test. So who knows if she's even his.

/r/Parenting Thread Parent