Like many little girls, I read my fair share of fairy tales and romances as a child. I admitted that I thought that one day I would grow up and marry my own Prince Charming. I just had no idea that it would come with enough luggage to fill a 747 plane on its own.

It turns out that in my own fairy tale, I was cast as the wicked stepmother and not the princess I always thought I would be. I was thirty-one years old when I met my prince and at that moment I realized that the older you get, the more complicated dating becomes. Forget meeting happy-go-lucky young guys who are having fun and being spontaneous and welcome back to reality where your date needs at least twenty-four hours notice to find a suitable babysitter and another two hours to gently set the kids up with another “No, Daddy and mom are not getting back together,” he speaks. If you can’t find a babysitter, be prepared to date not only the guy but his kids as well. (You wouldn’t believe the awkward moments that can lead to.)

When I met my husband, I had been excited by the idea of ​​inheriting a ready-made family. He had always wanted five children and since he came with three, I assumed that meant he only had to have a couple more. His three girls were quite sweet and cute when we went out. Little did I know that even kids understand the “everyone is on their best behavior during dates” rule. To this day I still wonder if he paid them to be so adorable.

Within two and a half months of my married life I became a full-time working mother. Going to the gym after work was no longer a given, but something to be done between cooking dinner and taking the kids to karate class. While I’d always loved cooking the question “What’s for dinner?” she began to fill me with dread. My clean house went from being an organizational pinnacle to a natural disaster literally in one day.

Getting married after being single for so long was hard, but not nearly as hard as having three kids in one day. (There’s a good reason nature makes parenthood easy for us, usually one child at a time.) The drastic switch between my single life and full-time parenthood left me feeling not only evil but also a little crazy. As a bonus, he had no idea how to raise little girls. All my life I have spent surrounded by men and taking care of small children. While little boys can be destructive, I prefer that to the constant crying and resentment that girls seem to experience. Unlike kids, they don’t punch each other and get over it. Instead, they look for subtle and interesting ways to torture each other.

On one particularly bad day last summer, each of them cried within thirty minutes for no reason at all. I was sure I would have to join the Witness Protection program just to get away from it all.

The dynamic between daughters and their fathers is also considerably more complicated than that between fathers and sons. Little girls often consider their fathers “heroes” and view any woman who stands between them and “daddy” as competition. Having grown up without a mother, it was quite a shock to suddenly be seen as “competition”. For the first six weeks of being a full-time mom, or hell as I like to call it, I was tortured daily by the eldest of my husband’s three daughters.

Every day there is some new weird behavior meant to hurt my feelings in one way or another. Whether it was physically trying to get between me and her father or wondering if she really was a natural blonde (in front of the company of course), there seemed to be no way to put a stop to her behavior. She stopped wanting to play with the neighborhood children and if her father was away for a few hours, she would literally jump on him the moment he walked in the door. Betting his right on his father seemed to be the only thing that mattered to him.

Meanwhile, my new husband, who is not the least bit perceptive, insisted there was nothing wrong with his behavior. Frankly, men love the attention and even if it’s a little out of place, they still feed off of it. So he was just trying to make things better. One Sunday, our little princess kicked out her friends so she could be with her “daddy” and I lost my mind. I completely forgot that she was not only an adult but also a parent. For a full hour I proceeded to scold her and her father. I scolded him for caring more about her computer games than hers and her children for treating her father like a boyfriend and misbehaving. I’m not proud of what I did, but she broke the ice. For the first time, all my feelings were on the table and neither of us could deny that there was a problem. A day later I told my stepdaughter that it was completely her choice what kind of relationship we were going to have.

I’d like to think that day was a turning point, but I can’t be sure by any means. All I can say is that I didn’t get divorced (as I repeatedly contemplated during that time), but rather used advice from friends and advice from books that helped me work on the relationship and myself.

Let’s face it: no woman wants to be the wicked stepmother that the stories make us out to be. So if you’re like me and want a happy family, here are the best tips on how to improve your relationship with your stepchildren.

Step one:

Love them as your own.

My stylist gave me this very wise advice on my wedding day. Love doesn’t have to be about biological ties. Whether you like children or not, if you are married to one of their parents, then, in fact, they are partly yours now. Would you stop loving your biological children when they are having bad days? No, you would just accept the fact that you love them but you don’t always like them. If she makes the effort to love her stepchildren with the same conditional love she would for her own children, her stepchildren will sense it and, in turn, be more receptive to her influence.

Second step:

Communicate respectfully at all times.

Do not scream. do not use Do not break things. Yes, I have done all three and I can say from experience that if you want to be spoken to with respect, you must respect first. Don’t expect to receive what you don’t give and if you find yourself in a moment where all you want to do is one of those things, take a break and fix the problem later. It is better to deal with problems by thinking clearly instead of looking at things in anger.

Step three:

Be patient.

Becoming a parent overnight doesn’t exactly help you develop patience like parents who give birth to a child and then spend every day with it. Stepparents have to work very hard to develop patience and not fall into the “it’s not your child, why even try?” There will be days when the last thing you want to do is be patient when they yell at you or leave their dirty socks in the hallway or maybe even ruin one of your favorite shirts. Still, if you’re patient, it will pay off as you develop a better relationship with your new children.

Step four:

Forgive, forgive and then forgive some more.

Kids will say really hateful things. More than once I received dirty looks and a couple of times “You’re so stupid” came out of the middle of the princess’s mouth. The little princesses also said things like “You have rotten teeth and you have lice.” I can honestly say that things were so bad and tense at certain points that I didn’t come home until I found out the kids were in bed. I forgive children for times when they hurt my feelings like I would my biological children and they forgive me for times when my inner “evil stepmom” shines through. Forgiveness is a key ingredient in building any lasting relationship.

step five:

Change your attitude.

I’ve gotten to the point with my husband’s daughters that I really feel like they’re mine. I stopped reacting to them and became proactive in making our relationship what I thought it should be. With her eldest I made an effort to talk to her and encouraged her father to have “real” conversations with her. Over time (and with a lot of patience), her attitude toward me changed. I went from being a competition to someone she can talk to and go to when she needs something. I don’t think we would have the good relationship we do now if I hadn’t been willing to change first. Look for ways you can improve her behavior and lead by example. Children are much more likely to imitate what they see than what they are told to do.