Dear Michelle:

Can your husband’s adoptive father, now remarried, help you?

The fact that you have been interested in living in the same house with your husband’s adoptive mother indicates to me that you are indeed financially and otherwise desperate.

You refer to this man as a husband. He is a husband and a father only according to the strictest definition of these words: a legal marriage was performed listing him as the husband and a sexual intercourse was carried through where his sperms were introduced to your eggs.

This is where his function as a husband and a father end.

Basically, you are not really married and your children don’t … really have a father.

Do you agree? If so, accept this reality best you can, with as much calm as you can muster.

You suggested counseling to him and he refused. He is living with his controlling, unreasonable mother who treats him like trash, you wrote. There is nothing you can do to change him and make him a real-life husband and father. He is still the boy he was before you met him and for as long as he lives with his mother and for as long as he doesn’t attend serious psychotherapy, he will most likely remain that boy.

If I was you, I would no longer push to live with him and his mother/ It is a bad plan to put yourself and your children in such a damaging household. I understand that other possibilities aren’t inviting or possible for you.

If you accept the reality I proposed exists, what do you think is your next move?

anita