I Want to Adopt My Wife’s Daughter, but Not Her Son, Wife Says I’m CRUEL and HEARTLESS

We all may have faced difficult family situations. But when there’s trouble that involves kids, things become even more dramatic. One man came to Reddit with a very powerful post. He asked the community to advise him about his tough family case. He wants to adopt one of his wife’s children, a younger daughter, but he doesn’t want to do the same with his wife’s teenage son, and he explained why.

The Reddit user and his wife faced a controversial situation.

The original poster, 41, and his wife, 39, have been married for 2 years and together for 5 years in total. The man’s wife brought two children from her previous marriage into their relationship. Her son, James, 15, and a daughter, Becky, 8 got to know their mom’s new husband about 6 months after the relationship began.

The family moved in together after a year. Becky recently came to the man and asked him to adopt her. The biological dad of the kids was absent and neither of them have seen him in years.

The man was very pleased that Becky asked him to be her adoptive dad, but he says he didn’t plan to adopt James, too. That is where the real problem started.

The relationship between the man and his wife’s son is difficult.

The man explained his unwillingness to adopt James, saying, “If Becky thinks of me as her dad then James absolutely does not. He’s never liked me and has no interest in bonding with me. He won’t come on one-on-one days out with me and never really has, will barely speak to me, doesn’t want me to come to his school sports, doesn’t want me to know about his life or his friends or his hobbies etc.”

But his wife seems to be infuriated about this approach. The man reveals, “My wife then said to me that if I adopted Becky I also needed to adopt James out of fairness.”

He said that his wife also makes remarks like, “You’ll be excluding him from the family if you don’t adopt him, how could you be so cruel and heartless. You’re not the man I thought you were.”

The man now has a real life dilemma and hopes for a good piece of advice.

Speaking about his further intentions, the man writes, “I love him on a familial level because he’s my stepson, but I don’t feel connected with him. My wife has now said if I don’t adopt James I can’t adopt Becky (because apparently I can’t be trusted to treat them fairly) and I can’t say that to her because it would break her little heart.”

He also plans to try to bond with James, but doesn’t believe it will be a success. He wrote, “I will speak to him about it, I just don’t want to because of how uncomfortable it’s making me as I know 99% he’s going to be unwilling (and my wife says if he says no then I can’t adopt Becky either out of fairness which is devastating) but I will speak to him.”

And here’s another controversial adoption story that’ll definitely make your heart melt, because of the sincere heart of a mom who adopted her husband’s ex-wife’s son, so that the kid doesn’t end up in foster care.