Dear Annie: I met my husband eight years ago. When I agreed to marry him, I had a great relationship with his two kids from his previous marriage. At the time we got married, they were 7 and 4 years old.

I started noticing strange behavior from his ex-wife over the last seven years. It started with her calling the girls all the time during our weekends with them. I had to seek counseling because I didn’t really know how to handle it. At the end of the day, my counselor at the time told me to let my husband deal with it. Eventually, I figured maybe his ex-wife suffered from some sort of co-dependency, or had extreme separation anxiety from the children. I thought that maybe if I became friends with her, she would calm down a little bit and know that her children were in good hands.