I fully believe that “kids sometimes do the darnedest things” is just an excuse for bad parenting. Yeah, sometimes the wires in kids’ heads get crossed and they do eat the odd crayon or two, but you see this statement being dispensed when someone’s little snot is doing something absolutely deplorable.

In today’s story, a man realized just about the same thing when he found out that his ex-wife’s kids, who he had been raising and building a relationship with, had been hiding mom’s dirty little secrets.

More info: Reddit

Sometimes kids lie and teaching them not to is part of the parenting process, but you shouldn’t use them to lie for your own nefarious goals

Image credits: Tatiana Syrikova (not the actual photo)

The poster asked if he’s a jerk for cutting off 5 kids with a 6th on the way which were not his own, but had been parented by him for over 9 years

Image credits: Electrical_Claim_691

Image credits: Katerina Holmes (not the actual photo)

All had been going well for those 9 years until the poster found out that the kids were lying to him and covering up his ex-wife’s lies and affairs

Image credits: Electrical_Claim_691

Image credits: RDNE Stock project (not the actual photo)

If one of the adoptive kids hadn’t revealed the family’s lies to the stepdad, he may have stayed in the dark forever

Image credits: Electrical_Claim_691

Realizing that he was just an ATM and a nanny for the mom for years, he decided to take his leave and dump them all, except the bean-spiller

So yeah, the original poster (OP) has (or now had) quite the family. The mom, 5 kids, from 22 to 9, from 3 different dads. If that wasn’t enough – let me stop you right there and tell you that it was – there’s another baby on the way, freshly minted by a 4th dad. Welcome to the club, buddy.

The poster is no slouch himself with 4 kiddos, so he could see eye to eye on that. It’s even better that all the kids got along great with each other, leading to a really great family dynamic.

And although none of the mom’s kids were the poster’s, that didn’t drive any sort of wedge between them, with him mentioning that he fell in love with her at first blush and had great fun with the kids. This went on for over 9 years, even though their marriage fell apart 2 years later.

After they divorced (not yet on paper), they would still hang out on and off, trying to work through their differences and this is when things started going awry.

The mom would date men and have them over to the house, which wouldn’t be a problem per se, but when the one of the baby daddies got out of prison, he started replacing OP’s role as a father figure in the family.

They decided to keep this hush-hush from the poster, knowing that he likely wouldn’t be happy with how the whole thing was shaking out and would choose to leave.

Image credits: Josh Willink (not the actual photo)

The worst part of the whole thing is that the kids were covering for the mom. They’d rat details on when their stepdad would be coming home or would seemingly even hide the guy themselves. You could excuse the 9 and 11-year-olds from this whole charade, but from 17 and up, there’s nothing you can say to let them off the hook. Those kids should know that what they’re doing is beyond wrong.

Hats off to the one kid who finally unveiled the whole thing to OP. Turns out that he’s not even biologically related to either parent, but rather was taken in when he was abandoned by his own parents. The young guy simply couldn’t understand why the family would treat the stepdad in this way, especially when he took care of everything for them.

Maybe this kind of behavior runs in the family? Not for me to say, that’s for sure.

In the comments, the poster also clarified that the bean-spiller son moved in with him, going to the same college as his bio son. There’s some positivity in the despair to be found, at least.

OP also reveals in some of the comments that there had been signs that the family had been using him as a bank, even with his ex-MIL asking for more cash by giving the very same redundant reason she had used a year before.

That concludes this mother-of-all-red-flags of a story, unless Bored Panda will get a response from the father with some more details.

The post collected 8.2k upvotes over 4 days, with a 96% upvote ratio and over 1.4k comments. In these comments, many lamented the kids that were left with that horrible mom and patted dad on the back for getting out of there.

What do you think of this story? Do you think the mom and her kids got what they deserve? Put that all down below!

The comments praised the poster for his success on getting out of that horrible red flag of a situation

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