19-year-old confesses to his mother that he resents the fact that she remarried when he was a child: 'I resented her for remarrying when she made life worse by marrying a guy with more kids and all that debt'

A young man reflects on how his mother's remarriage turned family life into financial and emotional chaos.

Family is complicated on the best of days. But when you exponentially complicate things by multiplying two families together to create a blended one, and mix in a healthy dose of financial issues, you're asking for trouble. Rewriting the family dynamic, right in the middle of a kid's childhood, can feel like changing the entire course of a story right in the middle of it. As if the writer got severe writer's block and jammed two entirely different stories together, and kept the main character names the same. Sort of like Steven King did when he was writing "The Stand."

Telling your parents the truth is hard at any level and at any stage in life. Loss and loneliness can definitely push us toward making quick decisions, toward security that we otherwise don't have in our lives. This mother might have been doing her best with two young children in the midst of grief, but she still needs to own her mistakes and accept that her actions had severe impacts on her children's lives.