So I was adopted by my ex-step dad when I was 7, not because my dad didn't want to parent but because my mom wasn't allowing him to and he thought he was giving me an opportunity for a "normal" family.
That's not what happened. I've dealt with the abuse, I've dealth with the fact that he no longer wanted anything to do with me after he and mom divorced. After my divorce, I went back to my birth name (yeah judge).
But here's what's getting me - Step parent adoption on this forum. It's making me angry.
I keep asking why every time someone posts about wanting to adopt their stepchild. No one actually answers the question. They usually give some cryptic response about it being for the best.
It pisses me off. There really is rarely a reason for step parent adoption in my opinion. If you are married to my mom, fine, you can still have a relationship with me, but you don't need to try to make it like my bio dad doesn't exist.
I don't care if the dad hasn't been around, why do you need to erase him for your husband to have a relationship with your daughter? Answer - you don't.
If he's in a different country, again, what harm does it do to leave that legal relationship alone? Answer - I really doubt it does any harm.
So many of these cases are really more about father's rights. Too many times, the mom or custodial parent wants to move on, have his/her new life, with their new complete family. That means eliminating the past spouse/parent and inputting the new one. It's just not needed.
A step parent can be just as close to me if they put the time into the relationship. Changing my name doesn't create that relationship.
So why is this getting me now? I really just need to stop looking at the step parent adoption threads.
This is so old you may be a parent now. In any event, you definitely sound like a child when you wrote it.
Let me tell you about the charmer bio-dad to my kid: when my wife brought her daughter home he decided, the first night, to go to the bar to show off pictures of his new little girl. He returned stumbling drunk in the middle of the night waking them both up. He'd routinely come home having pissed himself and, a few times, stumble in to piss on the couch.
Visits were treated as a means of control, routinely canceled at the last minute to prevent my wife from making any plans. They were also routinely canceled mid-visit with calls to come get the kid that could come any time, day or night. Insistence on a week-long Christmas visit was met with a demand to get the child, who was unhappy, no later than 7AM the day after Christmas. In a different state, six hours away. During visits, she'd stay in whatever trailer he happened to be living in which, like his truck, he chain smoked in.
I'm an adoptive stepfather and, honestly, it's not easy. My kid has a tinge of both her bio-dad and you: entitled and ungrateful. All but resentful that I'm not grateful for the constraints, time, and money spent to be perennially treated like a stepparent. All the responsibilities and none of the rights; that's life after a stepparent adoption.
We get a little angel who skips school, sleeps around, and lives in her shiny always new phone except for the few minutes she takes to look up to try bossing me around. She has effectively no chores. And a mother who justifies it by saying her daughter had such a hard life when she was young so she now gets the responsibilities of an infant and the rights of an adult. And I can't do a thing about it without her mother flipping out and yelling and screaming. Thanks to bio-dad -- who's been gone a decade now -- my wife has the idea that men should have no rights except to provide.
I don't know what happened but you sound like an ingrate. Let me tell you what your charming bio-dad did when giving you up. He signed off on lengthy papers that it was just fine. Sat through a waiting period where he could've changed his mind but didn't. Then attended a hearing where a judge pretty much shamed him and tried to talk him out of it. He persisted and agreed over and over and over to give you up. Why? Most likely because he didn't want to pay child support. There's your prince charming.
Grow up.