ArcaMax

Dear Amy: I need help. My partner and I have been together for almost six years.

Through infertility treatment, we have a 2-year-old daughter, and I am currently pregnant again.

I love my partner. He is a wonderful man. However, I cannot bear his 10-year-old son, who lives with us half the time.

I have felt this way for most of the relationship but kept trying to make things work. I just can't do it anymore. I am angry and miserable, and my partner refuses to do anything to change our living environment or to change his custody arrangement (which isn't working for me and is harmful for the boy -- he doesn't have a base, both parents have started new families and he doesn't know where he fits in).

I'm now faced with leaving the relationship and breaking up my child's (and future child's) family, or remaining in a cold, angry, polarized home.

The reality is that I should have walked away at the start, but I didn't, and now I find myself mired in this heartbreak and dysfunction.

What should I do?

-- Desperate

Dear Desperate: I have to wonder at your judgment, to bring two children into a family and household from which you plan to flee. My heart also breaks for this 10-year-old boy. You seem to have sterling insight into how dislocated his life is (how can he succeed with the deck so stacked against him?), and yet you don't seem to have much compassion for him, presumably because you "can't bear" him.

With professional help, parenting instruction, therapy for the child and lots and lots of effort from you and your partner, your little fractured family would stand a chance of succeeding. As it is (you hostile, your partner checked-out), I don't imagine you will commit to attachment.

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