They say an eye for an eye will make the whole world blind, but what do you do when the people closest to you decide to take advantage of you?
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Reddit user TheKungFuPanda submitted a story to r/ProRevenge about the time his stepdad scammed him out of his laptop and then made sure he knew exactly how “easy” it was to do it.
The guy felt like he just couldn’t let it slide, so he decided to use the same trick on the old man and his car.
It pays off to know your way around cars
Image credits: NataKor5 / Envato (not the actual photo)
Especially when you can’t rely on those around you
Image credits: FabrikaPhoto / Envato (not the actual photo)
Image credits: thekungfupanda
Image credits: thekungfupanda
There’s no need to be a jerk; the stepparent-stepchild relationship is already complicated enough
High rates of remarriage and repartnering mean that a substantial share of children live in stepfamilies, and everyone needs to work together to maintain a good relationship.
“Already detaching from parents to establish more independence and differentiating from parents to express more individuality, the growing young person is more likely to be distant and discontent with a step-parent who has no historical devotion to recommend them,” says psychologist Dr. Carl Pickhardt, author of Holding On While Letting Go: Parenting Your Child Through the Four Freedoms of Adolescence. “So, attaching to, accepting, and welcoming a step-parent in their lives is simply less likely to occur.”
If you consider the point of view of the teenager, they need to go through a lot of adjustments after their parents get together with someone from the “outside,” such as:
- Intimacy with a stranger. “It's like living with an adult I don’t even know. Now I have to watch how I dress and undress in my own home!”
- Conditional caring. “When my stepparent doesn’t like how I behave, or I don’t like how they behave, there’s no history of love that we can fall back on the way there is with my parent. We care for each other so long as we like how each other acts.”
- Difficult attachment. "My parent loves this person, whom a lot of times I don't even like."
- Less attention to go around. “Now there’s more competition for attention than before. I have to wait for my stepparent to be away if I want time alone with my parent.”
- Additional loss. “When one parent moves out, you lose some of them, and when the other parent remarries, you lose part of the one remaining to their new partner. It’s just never the same.”
- The end of reunion fantasies. “Well, now I know for sure Mom and Dad will never get back together. Remarriage to my step-parent put an end to dreams of that!”
- Seeing parents change. “I thought getting used to a stepparent was going to be the biggest change, but no. The biggest change is seeing my parents become more like the person they just married.”
Image credits: Curated Lifestyle / Unsplash (not the actual photo)
Stepparents do have a role to play, and it is by no means worthless. “As an adolescent child of parental divorce and parental remarriage on both sides, my stepmother and my stepfather introduced formative influences into my life that I benefit from to this day,” Pickhardt adds.
“I gained an appreciation for reading from my bookish stepmother and some capacity for practical problem solving from my engineer stepfather. Not that we didn’t have our moments of disagreement and disenchantment, but we also had companionship and communication that mattered more the older I grew. These relationships were definitely worth the effort.”
But judging from the post, the Redditor’s stepfather treated him more like a stepbrother than a stepchild, which makes sense when you consider their age difference —18 versus 26.
As people reacted to his story, the man shared more details about his stepdad and what happened that day
