Photo: Canon Boy / Shutterstock
She left the kid alone, then brought her "ice-cold" takeout.
By John Sundholm
Last updated on Mar 06, 2024
Blending families is no easy task, and there are no guidebooks on how to become a stepparent — but the way one man's fiancée recently chose to handle the job left him infuriated.
His fiancée left his 10-year-old daughter home alone while she took her own kids on an outing.
In a Reddit post, the man detailed how wonderful a stepmother his fiancée, whom he's been with for four years, has been to his 10-year-old daughter Charlie — until recently, that is. After he was unexpectedly called into work one day for a 12-hour shift, he came home to find Charlie upset because her stepmother-to-be and her three daughters had left her home alone and hungry, bringing her "ice-cold" takeout to eat when they came back.
When the dad asked his fiancée about it, she confessed to taking only her three daughters out to a restaurant and then to play mini golf afterward while Charlie's take-out sat in the car.
She defended her actions and didn't understand why the dad was angry.
The father writes that his fiancée kept bringing the whole issue back to the takeout.
"But I brought her food home," she said several times.
The dad explained that it was extremely rude to exclude Charlie, but his fiancée still didn't get it, pointing out that he and Charlie had gone out together several times alone. But the dad wrote that those were not outings, they were errands — one to the grocery store, and one to take Charlie's cat to the veterinarian.
"That can’t even be compared to what she did," he writes, going on to say that they never reached a reconciliation, so much so that when his fiancée took her daughters to the dentist a few days later, she snarked, "I hope this doesn't offend Charlie too."
His fiancée blamed her custody arrangement for the incident, noting that she only gets her kids six months out of the year, while they spend the other six with their father. So when he called her "feral" for being so callous about leaving Charlie at home, she became very angry, telling him, "I don’t see my kids for 6 months, excuse the hell out of me for wanting to spend time alone with them.”
She also said her kids might feel "alienated" from her without time spent alone with their mother and told the dad to expect Charlie to be excluded more in the future because of the large age gap between her and the fiancée's oldest daughter.
The dad told her that if she expects their relationship to work, she needs to treat Charlie as one of her own.
His fiancée countered that that was unfair and that he couldn't understand since he doesn't deal with a custody arrangement like hers, which made him reconsider and wonder if he might be in the wrong. However, people in the comments were firmly in agreement that she was in the wrong to exclude his 10-year-old daughter, finding her actions shocking — so much so that they questioned the dad's desire to marry her.
"She left a child at home alone knowing you were working a 12 hour shift? And then brought her cold takeout? That's just plain mean," one person wrote, noting that being excluded from the outing aside, it's unwise to leave a 10-year-old child home alone all day. "Are you sure you want this woman in your daughter's life?" they asked.
On top of that, intentionally excluding a child from family outings is considered a form of childhood emotional neglect that can lead to several outcomes for the excluded child.
As one person in the comments, wrote, "she's showing you how she treats your kid when you aren't around. She won't stop either. Your kid is less-than in her eyes."
While it's understandable that the fiancée wanted to spend quality time with her kids, to avoid excluding her, she should have rescheduled the day with her biological kids to a day that her fiancé could spend that time with his daughter. Otherwise, there would have been no harm in including his daughter, especially considering they plan to become one blended family.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.