My teenage daughter Mary-Ann once screamed that I’d ruined her life and said she wanted to live with her father and stepmother instead. It shattered me. On her birthday, she even told me not to come. But something didn’t feel right—so I went anyway. What I saw made my blood run cold. Mary-Ann had always been my sunshine. I raised her with love and gave her everything I could, even after her father Ben and I divorced. We co-parented peacefully for years, until he married Jessica. I never trusted Jessica. There was something cold about the way she looked at Mary-Ann. But I stayed quiet—no one,
wants to hear the ex-wife complain. Things changed when Mary-Ann became a teen. She grew distant, rebellious. She stopped listening to me, and every rule I set made her hate me more. Ben, meanwhile, played the “cool dad,” while Jessica tried to be the “fun mom.” Then came the final blow: for her 15th birthday, they gifted her a motorcycle. Without telling me. I was furious. “She’s still a child,” I told them. But Mary-Ann just screamed,