A
female
age
41-50,
*shejm6
writes:I am confused and don't know if I'm doing the right thing. I met a man three months ago whom I thought was my soulmate. Everything went so fast and we were in love after just a few weeks. We spent hours on the phone together and the more I learned of him the more I fell. He is a single father of 7 and I a single mother of 4, but the kids were never a problem for either of us. Now, the only negative which never really bothered me was that he was a bit of a know it all. We decided to take a vacation together last week to the beach which was about a 9hr drive with 11 kids ranging from age 3-14. After being there a couple days, he starts talking under his breath whenever I would discipline one of my children which is very irritating to me and it was something he had never done before. I guess that is what started the ball rolling in the wrong direction. Maybe I should have called him on it when he did it to find out what the problem was. I believe his comments were regarding that my 7 year old didn't immediately stop doing whatever I had asked him to. I chose to ignore it and the second or third day when we came back from the grocery store, the first thing out of my son's mouth was Mr. D's son E who is 10 said "when is my dad and stupid C (me) coming back".Well my boyfriend at the time took his son in another room and asked him about it and then he tells me the other boys were messing with him and he decided to get back at my son by calling me stupid and that was it. I got no apology. I guess in his eyes it was okay for his son to use me as fair game to upset my child. Needless to say things just kept getting worse and one day Mr.D's two oldest boys E (10) and I (13) get into it over a video game and I thought Mr.D had been totally unfair to I(his oldest son) and I only asked him do you always do everything that E tells you to? Well as soon as I said that it was on. He goes into how I don't know the whole situation and that he thinks I've been either cruel or ignorant because I've been trying to get his 4 year old to open his own snacks for weeks and that he wasn't sure if I was just cruel or ignorant. He goes on to attempt to give me parenting advice. I was in shock at this point that he could speak to me so coldly. I then said forget this when we get back home let's just go our separate ways. He later did apologize for being so rude, but we still decided that maybe neither of us is really ready to put in the kind of work required to make a relationship work at this time. We came back Saturday and haven't spoken since. Truth is I do love him very much and even though logically it makes more sense to keep going my own way. I would be willing to work on it, but my pride won't let me call him to tell him that. I'm pretty sure he won't call me either for the same reason. I must say I'm very proud of how I handled the situation because I could have easily gone into a verbal abuse match when he did but I've been there in my previous marriage and I told myself I would never do that again with anyone.
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female
reader, lexilou  +, writes (2 June 2008):
 You have both been on your own with children and you will naturally have your own way of dealing with things that dont always make sense to the other.
It must be very very hard for both of you to suddenly accept a large ready made family into your lives and suddenly become one big happy family. Sadly even parents who have been together from the start dont always agree on matters of dicipline with their children so your case is probably even harder and I'm sure you really didnt expect it to be easy! Sometimes a lack of discipline may actaully be the result of embarrasment on one persons behalf, it may be for example that you know if you pushed your child to stop immediately it would escalate where as if you calmy talk to them two or three times it will stop, yet your partners children or some of them may respond better to firmness from the word go. The other party just sees the bad behaviour and doesnt understand why you havent acted the way they would. I have three children and I only had to look at my daughter and she would stop bad behaviour whereas my middle child spent half of his childhood on the naughty step!!
One thing I will say that 3 months is still pretty soon to have taken all 11 children away as you have not really had time to get to know the ins and outs of each others parenting styles or really honestly know each other (not having a go me and hubby moved our realtionship on very very quickly and were married with a baby within 18 months of meeting AND it took 6 months to GET pregnant).
If you had been together say a year and spent more time as a large family unit then you nay have found it easier to accept each others 'faults' as you saw them.
I dont think you should necessarily give up on this relationship just yet but you do need to talk to each other and understand that you are bound to have different ways of doing things. Maybe each of you look at your parenting skills and recognise any weaknesses that the other could help you with.
It is never going to be easy whether it is 1 child each or 20 there will always be times when you cant agree and the only way to resolve these issues is through compromise and understanding the others point of view. I hope you can work this out x
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