THE GIFT STRIKE

A 10-year-old opened her Christmas gifts table and found one thing missing: anything from her stepmother.

"I 33f decided this year I am not buying any gifts for my step daughter 10f," the poster wrote, after a year in which home life had turned into a running complaint about everything she says she does alone.

The poster, 33, says she and her husband, 35, had a baby last year, and since then, their relationship has been getting worse. She says he does not help with the baby as much as she expected and also expects her to handle most of the housework. Even when he is home, she says, he finds other things to do instead of taking care of their daughter. "The only one who does help is his daughter when she visits on the weekends," she wrote.

She says she has asked him over and over to help her take care of the baby, but he tends to ignore her. When they fight, he says "he's tired from work." The poster says she understands that he works as a manager with unpredictable long hours, but she still thinks "he needs to put in effort at home as well." According to her, "The only thing he does for us is cook dinner during the week and will cook all meals on the weekend."

The frustrations go beyond childcare. She says she made him a list of projects around the house, and none of them have been done. She also says he is careless about planning family logistics: gifts, passports, tickets. He asks her at the last minute if she remembered everything, and she keeps asking what if she had not.

So this year, she stopped doing one more job. Because of the way things had been going, she decided that if he wanted his daughter to have gifts, "he must buy them himself."

When the stepdaughter saw presents for the poster's family and the baby, she asked where hers were. The poster says she told the child "it's up to her dad if she has a good Christmas this year."

Then the protest widened. In an update, she said, "going forward I won't be getting any gifts for his family members either." Holiday and birthday gifts for his side, she said, will now be his responsibility: "It will be up to him to provide gifts for all holidays and birthdays for his family."

She says she wants them to see what she sees: "I just want them to see how neglectful he is as a spouse." Right now, she says, "his family and especially his daughter thinks he's a great father and husband and don't see the work that I do."

That, she says, is part of why she married him in the first place. "I thought he was a great father," she wrote, describing how he used to take his daughter out, play with her, and spend time with her. But she says his ex told her a different story: that he had checked out of parenting when the girl was a baby and only became more active once she turned 3. Before then, she says, "it was his mother that would pick up their daughter and force him to spend time with her."

Now she says she wants the pressure shifted back onto him. "I just want him to feel pressured to participate," she wrote. "I want his family to understand that I do most of the work that they appreciate and thank him for."