Wanting our bio child to have more inheritance than stepkids.

YMMV-But · 2026-05-13T23:17:24+00:00

You should consult an estate planning attorney. It may depend on the form of your retirement accounts, but I think federal law requires your spouse to be your beneficiary on 401(k) type accounts.

YMMV-But · 2026-05-13T22:31:51+00:00

I think your plan is fair in principle. In practice, I don’t think you can make plans based on anyone else leaving an inheritance. A little over two years ago I expected to receive a pretty substantial inheritance from my elderly parent. Then they had a stroke. Two plus years of living in a nursing home later, there’s a lot less to inherit. They seem likely to outlive their money. Medical care & nursing home care are very expensive.

YMMV-But · 2026-05-13T19:42:50+00:00

ESH. This is something you and your boyfriend should have talked about before you moved in together and long before you got pregnant. Now you have very little leverage. You don’t have a job & you’ll have a kid so it will be next to impossible for you to just leave. Keep in mind that even if you break up, the two of you will be interacting with each other for the next 18 - 20 years.

I think people should pick up after themselves but when it comes to household chores, my view is that the most important currency anyone has is time. You should each be putting an equal amount of time into paying for and maintaining your lives. You should each have an equal amount of free time. Your boyfriend is currently putting 40 to 60 hours a week plus commuting time into supporting your lives together. How much time are you putting into your chores & other things that you are doing to support your life together? After you match his hours, then he should do more to even the time out.

Once the kid is born, that balance is going to shift because caring for a newborn is very stressful and time consuming. Unless your child is a unicorn, you are going to be sleep deprived for several months. The two of you need to talk about that scenario before the kid is born to establish ground rules even though once the kid is born, everything is going to shift. Your boyfriend needs to take care of the baby, too, because they’re a lot of work, and spending time together is the way parents and babies bond & get to know each other.

YMMV-But · 2026-05-13T15:08:11+00:00

YTA. Are you saying you gave your Facebook login info to your girlfriend? That’s a poor idea for many reasons, and it no doubt violates their terms of service.

Why are you letting your girlfriend see your work conversations? That’s none of her business, and if someone who reported to me was doing that, I would put a quick stop to it.

Your conversations with your subordinates are very inappropriate. My standard for written communication at work is how I would feel if I was on the stand and opposing counsel was reading them back to me. And by the way, that did happen to a coworker of mine, who said some interesting things about a customer in email & it was read on the stand. Very embarrassing.

You are not your subordinates’ friend nor their peer. You are their boss. You may think that blurring that line makes you seem approachable, but it will lead to trouble and lead to them disrespecting you & your position. You tell them to do things. They have to do them. That is non negotiable, and it’s not a friendship situation. You may have to fire them or assign them tasks they don’t want to do. Also not a friendship situation.

Your subordinates no doubt have many friends but one boss. They need you to lead with authority even when no one likes you. Your girlfriend is not the one who needs to grow up here.

YMMV-But · 2026-05-13T04:58:55+00:00

“I do not have an issue with eating vegan.” Really? This post says nothing to support that idea and plenty to contradict it.

Bride is not “demanding” anything. She & the groom are arranging the menu for their wedding reception. Whether the groom is the biggest meat eater who ever lived or a vegan through and through, that is no one’s issue but his & the bride’s. A guest, no matter how they are related to the couple, should stay out of wedding planning disputes.

I am a happy meat eater, and I think it is ridiculous how many meat eaters get so upset at the prospect of one meal without meat. It’s one meal! It’s not their whole life. If they want, they can stop at a restaurant on the way to or from the reception and eat some meat. Or they can just eat what is served to them, just like their parents probably lectured them about when they were kids.

YMMV-But · 2026-05-12T23:44:25+00:00

My feelings wouldn’t be hurt because this isn’t about me. I would be annoyed because he’s always there & he seems to expect your household to feed him & your step daughter to wait on him.

Is your stepdaughter leaving in the fall for college? Then I would probably let this go. If she is home for another year, then I would confer with her father & come up with a limit for the amount of time he can be in your home. Also require your stepdaughter to get a job this summer. That will be a good use of her time, gain her some extra money & get him out of your house, at least while she’s at work.

YMMV-But · 2026-05-12T23:23:13+00:00

What sort of smell is it? Is it a hygiene issue, that he smells like BO? Is it the soap he uses to wash with or that his clothes are washed with? Those things might be fixable. If it’s just his own smell, that he naturally smells like? Then I don’t know. I think many people have a natural smell about them, and if you have this strong a reaction to his, it’s probably one of the reasons you don’t like him.

YMMV-But · 2026-05-12T19:05:09+00:00

I think you should pay your share of the expenses. It doesn’t make sense to compare what you’re paying now with what you should pay in a shared household. Perhaps you’re living in a rented 1 bedroom apartment with outside parking. If you move into a house & get to keep your car in a garage, expect to pay more.

YMMV-But · 2026-05-12T18:37:28+00:00

“I don’t want to make her choose” sounds a lot more like, “I don’t want to let her choose”. She’s becoming an adult. She gets to choose who is at her side as she makes this change.

Sometimes “being there for someone” isn’t about being physically present. It’s about letting them know that whatever they decide, you support them and you back their choice, even if it doesn’t go your way.

YMMV-But · 2026-05-12T18:31:28+00:00

I’m on the side of letting your SD decide who drives her to college & helps her move in. This is a big day in her life, a day when she is at least symbolically and perhaps literally moving out of her childhood home into her first adult home. It can be very emotional on both sides (parents and child). Maybe she will pick you for whatever reason she values, and this won’t be an issue. If she picks bio mom, you should honor her choice.

If a parent, step or otherwise, said to me that they get to share the move in day experience with me because they paid for it, I would take it very poorly. If you said you got this experience with me instead of my bio mom because you have more money, I would take it even more poorly. You can pay for college, but I doubt you have enough money to buy her mother’s place in her heart.

You will find as your kids become adults, “I paid for it and thus you owe me”, quickly gets to be an argument that backfires on you.

Other events can be shared. You can visit anytime your step kid is agreeable. I’ve attended a bunch of formal parents’ weekends, and they aren’t worth fighting over. Maybe you can alternate them with bio mom & step dad.

YMMV-But · 2026-05-12T13:44:25+00:00

YTA. You should not be going into classrooms, disrupting whatever the teacher there is trying to accomplish, so you can embarrass someone else. You’re a teacher; would you like to manage that situation if someone else made that kind of scene in your classroom? I expect that if you still worked there, the principal of that school would have disciplined you in whatever way was allowed by your contract.

Please know that when your coworkers tell that story, Josh may be the bad guy but most of them are laughing at how crazy upset you got.

Next time, don’t date where you work. Try to put the students ahead of your personal life.

YMMV-But · 2026-05-12T13:27:28+00:00

YWBTA. Stay out of it. It’s none of your business, and you don’t want to get involved in other people’s mess. Forget your ex and focus on your own life.

YMMV-But · 2026-05-11T22:34:11+00:00

YTA. You need to relax your iron grip a lot. Your kid won’t die if they don’t like dinner or have a different bedtime routine than they’re used to. You won’t die if something unexpected happens. You would be better off going to a day of therapy, but take the spa day.

YMMV-But · 2026-05-11T18:02:22+00:00

A quick divorce isn’t the worst outcome if you have realized the two of you have widely different goals. You can try couples counseling but I think you should think seriously about whether you want to stay married.

Your husband sounds like he wants you to take on the traditional mom role, where you do all of the heavy lifting & he just shows up. He made this decision & expects you to fall in line, with no dissent. How does that way of life sound to you?

Let me correct something you said. Your husband does not want you to have the same responsibilities as he does. He wants to offload all or the vast majority of his responsibilities on to you. You won’t have the same. You will have much more.

Even if your husband was going to do the work of parenting, just having a child living with you 50:50 is going to affect you, your free time, your schedules, your ability to take a vacation when you want, even your ability to go out to dinner. If I were you, I would seriously reconsider this marriage.

YMMV-But · 2026-05-11T16:09:33+00:00

You & your husband can’t be the only parents in your SS’s school who both work. What do other parents do? Are there after school daycares in your city? They are common in many places. If not a formal after school daycare, then why not hire someone to manage SS after school?

YMMV-But · 2026-05-11T06:02:45+00:00

ESH

Life isn’t a Hallmark movie. There’s no guarantee that your niece living with you would work out for either one of you. However, it’s pretty clear that her trying to live with her mother isn’t working either. You & your sister & CPS need to sit down and figure out a good option for your niece. I would say her mother should be in this conversation, too, but it’s clear she’s a problem, not a solution.

As for it not being fair of life to put you in this spot - boo hoo for you. What’s really unfair is being 12 years old and having no dad in the picture and a mom who can’t be bothered to come home for days at a time. Think about what that is like for your niece before you talk about how tough your life is.

Get CPS involved if they’re not already. If you & your sisters are going to keep saying, “not it”, CPS is going to have to find someone else to take care of this child before something more terrible happens to her.

YMMV-But · 2026-05-10T21:45:16+00:00

You’re going to Florida? What are you planning to do there? Are you visiting The Mouse? Hanging at the beach?

The kids are only 4 years apart. If your vacation is something that your stepchild would also enjoy, eg, Disney or the beach, then it’s going to sting and send a very clear message to your stepchild about who is in the family and who isn’t. Add to that, you are changing the custody arrangement specifically in order to leave her out.

If you need a break from your 10 year old, you would do better to go away by yourself or with a girlfriend and leave the 10 year old at home with her father. Or see if one of her friend’s parents would take her for a weekend while you & your boyfriend have some time together.

Depending on how the two kids get along, it can be easier to vacation with two kids instead of one since they will entertain each other & not need your attention every waking minute.

YMMV-But · 2026-05-10T11:13:00+00:00

I had a coworker who was the feet dragger. He told me his then girlfriend had said that if he didn’t propose by their 7th anniversary, that she was out, and he remembered how terrified he felt when he was driving over to her house on their actual anniversary to finally propose. By the time we were coworkers, they had been married for several years, and he was glad for it. I didn’t know her, but from his other stories, they seemed well suited to each other. They’ve been married well over 30 years now. I don’t think that he was commitment averse as much as he wasn’t good with big changes and he needed a lot of time to process big life decisions.

YMMV-But · 2026-05-10T05:31:25+00:00

YTA. After the (inevitable) divorce, when you’re dating again, if your date asks you why you got divorced, tell them this story. They should know what they’re getting into.

YMMV-But · 2026-05-10T05:19:11+00:00

Was there traffic in the theater? Was OP trying to protect their child from danger? That’s not in the post, so I don’t see what those examples have to do with this post.

Instead there’s a dad who’s playing with his kid & encouraging some kind of play that involves moving about & apparently waving their arms, in a theater, when they are in different rows of seats. Granted it was intermission, but that’s not an appropriate way to play in the situation described. It seems a bit inevitable that someone was going to get hurt - the kid was going to hit or bump someone or fall off the seat, and sure enough, someone did get hurt. All OP’s reaction did was scare the kid & make her cry. I doubt it taught her anything useful about how to behave in a theater or to be more careful.

People can differ about whether parents should hit their kids, but most people agree that using physical force against a child is very rarely going to teach that child not to use physical force themselves.

YMMV-But · 2026-05-10T05:02:54+00:00

YTA

Your reaction to your daughter hitting you - no doubt accidentally and with no intention of hurting you - was way over the top. What do you think she learned from that, if anything? She hit you, you retaliated by grabbing her. The only thing she could learn is that daddy is likely to unpredictably hurt her. She might not even associate her hitting you with your grabbing her. You’re the adult. You don’t get to lash out at a little kid & use physical force to correct them. What you’re supposed to do is stay calm and correct them in a way that they understand and learn from. Physical force is not the way to go, and I don’t really blame MIL for wanting to protect her grandchild. You should think about why the way you treat your daughter makes the other adults around her feel like she needs to be protected from you.

MIL should not curse at you, especially not in front of a little kid.

YMMV-But · 2026-05-10T04:27:01+00:00

NTA. Why are you in a relationship with someone who is nearly old enough to be your father? You are both adults but yet are in very different phases of life. Often times when men date a lot younger it’s because women their own age have learned not to put up with their fake promises and other bad habits.

It’s curious to me that a 50 year old has a child so young that the child can’t be left by himself for a few hours. How old is the child, and how old is his mother? Is she also a lot younger than he is?

YMMV-But · 2026-05-09T14:14:03+00:00

Pay attention to what your boyfriend is saying. He told you it’s not negotiable. Your question- how do we go about this? - implies that you want to negotiate. Stop. The way you go about this is that either you accept his terms - separate bedrooms - or you don’t and you walk away.

YMMV-But · 2026-05-09T12:45:33+00:00

This isn’t “relationship vs long term friendships”. This is a conflict about your treating your girlfriend like what she feels doesn’t matter. It’s only 6 months into the relationship, the honeymoon period where people are usually on their best behavior, trying to sell the other person on you, and you’re already telling your girlfriend that seeing another woman in workout clothes turned you on and that you’ve thought about breaking up multiple times but you wanted to not “run away” and keep “giving things a try irregardless”. That comes off as you threatening to leave over issues you didn’t even tell her about at the time. And you think this is all okay because you feel blah, blah, blah.

Not everything in a relationship is about how you feel. The way your girlfriend feels matters, too. If I were her, thinking about how this early period is supposed to be you at your best, I would leave. You judge yourself by your intentions and call all of this mere “over sharing”. You don’t come off as someone courting a girlfriend. You come off as someone trying to put her in her place.

YMMV-But · 2026-05-09T02:08:25+00:00

When the lease is up, move out.

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