James' World 2

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Dear Prudence, 

My boyfriend and I have a toddler together and he has an 11-year-old daughter that lives with her maternal grandmother half of the time. Her mother is serving a serious prison sentence. My boyfriend tries to make it up to his daughter by fawning all over her when she is here—kisses, cuddles, and a constant shower of gifts.

Around our child, he acts bored and irritated. He barely interacts with our baby unless he has his phone in his hand. The only routine he does is bath and bedtime because I have night classes online. He claims that I am making stuff up and just spoiling our child. We had a huge fight because our baby had a growth spurt and needed new clothes. My boyfriend claimed he was broke until his next paycheck. The very next day his daughter came in with bags of new clothes from the mall! She just got an entire new wardrobe two weeks ago for the start of school. My boyfriend claimed he just found the money and that it wasn’t a big deal. I am dressing my baby and myself in stuff I find in buy-nothing groups and yard sales.

My mother never wanted me. She favored my brothers and treated me like a bother growing up. I never want to put our child through that. I loved how devoted my boyfriend was to his daughter. I thought he would be the same with our child. I can’t afford to leave. I take care of 90% of all the household chores. What do I do here? My boyfriend tells me I am acting as though I am jealous of his daughter. I am not. The difference between how he treats her and our child is like night and day.

—Worried

Dear Worried,

It’s clear to me that you are not “jealous of his daughter,” though I do believe you may be envious of the support she receives from your boyfriend. You don’t write anything negative about the child or about your perception of her, you focus on his behavior, and that indicates to me that the issue isn’t how much he gives to her, it’s how little you and your daughter receive at all. You don’t want to be treated like her, you want to be treated like he cares about you, and your child as well. Telling you he doesn’t have enough money to help clothe you, or your child, then “finding” enough to take his daughter on a shopping spree is a wild thing to do, and you deserve better.

Because you mention not being wanted by your own mother, and now this fear that your child will ultimately be rejected by their father, I think it might be useful to talk to someone, a therapist or mental health professional, who can help you process some of those lingering past hurts. When you grow up feeling unwanted, the hardest thing to develop is self-trust. But you can learn to trust yourself, and you can teach the same to your child. If the worst case scenario happens, and they are rejected by their father, they will have you.

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Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Getty Images Plus.

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