What’s the difference between bacon and eggs?
On being a stepparent
On November 2, 2024 I published Beyond biology: unmasking the harmful stigma against stepparents. In response to the heat Kamala Harris took for not being a bio-parent to her kids, I busted some of the stigma’s logical fallacies. The ensuing exchanges with many of you — godparents, unties and uncles, grandparents, foster parents — inspired me to share the first piece I ever wrote on the topic (in 2017) while processing my own journey as a non-bio parent.
“Bit by bit, I have come to believe that “step” in stepparenting refers to commitment. It could have been “tap-in” or “brush-by” parenting, but no..! To step, you must shift your balance; transfer your weight.”
Whatever your stripe or origin, if you’re a parent raising children in love, I hope this deeply personal essay lets you feel that my hat goes off to you!
A step that changed everything
First published in Parent Survival Guide Magazine in 2017.
Before I could have realized that I was utterly unprepared for it — and yet that it would change me — my stepparenting journey started in our garage.
Image credit: Nanne Tiggelman via AI
When my then-partner Michelle pulled in with her kids, I saw one face cautiously examining me from the protection of the Jeep while the other peanut slid out and looked me straight in the eye.
“You know what?”
“What?” I answered instinctively, caught up in this kid’s contagious energy that has me whipped to this day.
“I took two baths today! Because I was going to meet you.”
“You did?!”
A moment later, all of us were autumn leaves twirled in joyous sunshine; an impression that continued into the evening as the hours of the girls’ giggles and questioning rang like a thousand tiny, perfectly harmonized bells.
I know I am more fortunate than most because my stepchildren were open to me. More than that: they had been pressuring their mother to date.
“If she isn’t alone when we are not home,” they explained to me one day when I asked how they used to see the whole thing, “She will be happier and laugh more, so we will be happier.”
Blessed self-interest!
They made room for me in their lives. From little things like letting me institute ways so that we don’t waste food to humongous things like listening with their hearts when I had to explain — the night they were livid with their mother because she broke her wrist and cancelled a sleepover — compassion as something they must learn on the journey from selfish babyhood to adulthood.
They started referring to me as their parent long before I got wind of it, but I know for sure when we made it official. I was away on business, walking them on Skype through the streets of Melbourne, when I heard beautiful piano music: an elder gentleman was playing in the city square. Michelle later told me the girls were elated when they heard me ask whether he would play something for my children.
I am sure I speak for parents and stepparents alike when I say that having them in my life makes me the richest, luckiest person alive.
And I suspect I also speak for many when I say that stepparenting is hard.
I had no issue dating somebody with children, even little ones. I didn’t even mind co-parenting between two households’ worth of conflicting views. Or being a mom without ever being ‘the’ mom. I suppose stepparenting had been a possibility I was open to without having much of a clue about it.
When stepparenting was still an abstract concept to me — a notion that rarely filled the space between more relevant thoughts — I assumed that ‘step’ referred to the technical arrangements. I thought that the stepparent was the one a bit removed from the rest.
Silly me.
That’s only true for the “original” family. To them, a stepparent is “extra.” Understandably so: she didn’t choose to have the children. She didn’t pick out their names, decide on where they live, or set the house rules. Heck, she probably doesn’t even get a vote on Friday night dinner.
It is through a myriad of such decisions that parents, swathed in boundless advice, get to shape their families from scratch. The glorious outcome: each family is absolutely unique. Which may explain why only sparse “swathing” is available to stepparents.
When the going gets tough, parents recognize their haphazard fingerprints all over their families and accept that this mess is somehow of their own making. By contrast, a stepparent often gets to make only a singular choice: to give a new romantic relationship a go.
I take that back. Two choices. But I made the other one while utterly oblivious to its existence.
What’s the difference…
I cannot remember where, years ago, I picked up my only “what’s the difference” joke that goes something like this:
“What’s the difference between bacon and eggs?”
“What?!”
“The chicken is involved, but the pig is committed.”
I treated it with snobbery for years.
Then, I found myself stepparenting, the skewed odds stacked further against me by the behavior of my partner’s ex. But in the absence of almost any other guidance, the joke patiently dangled its unlikely wisdom in front of me until I was ready to heed it.
In the early days with my new family, I stayed “independent.” Nothing worse, I told myself, than barging into an established household with my own crap. They have enough going on, including three quite different parents (yes, there was a stepparent in the other household, also) sharing turf well before I ever set foot on it. I would be here for a good time, for occasional gems of insight. An excellent but modest role model. A wholesome vision in watercolor.
I would be a chicken.
If you are smiling, then you already know what had yet to drill its way through my thick scull: kids don’t have much use for chickens. Especially if they — like, sadly, was the case with our girls — are experiencing parental alienation.[1]
Children experiencing such stress run short on coherence and authenticity. They are exhausted just reconciling their experience with the alienating parent’s interpretation of it. For example, our girls had hours — days! — to make presents for the other parents. Heck, I cannot count how many cards, paintings, and other crafts I made in that effort. By contrast, if felt terrible for them if it was one of our birthdays — let alone Mother’s Day or Christmas — because they’d have to scurry to make (or pick, to add to our magnificent collection of rocks!) our gifts after we picked them up. Imagine how stressful for them…
And hear me when I say: if their newest stepparent (me) were but one foot in, they didn’t have spare energy to waste on the other foot.
Bit by bit, I have come to believe that “step” in stepparenting refers to commitment. It could have been “tap-in” or “brush-by” parenting, but no..! To step, you must shift your balance, transfer your weight. Only when you take a step does your world merge with theirs. Once you step, you are no longer where you used to be, all balanced and Zen. Having stepped, you are in the midst of the new thing, your past on the other side of an equally destabilizing ordeal.
The ideal stepparent is 100 measures of selfless love to zero measures of agenda. I am in my fifth year of practice, and it has yet to make good on its promise of “perfect,” but now I am all in.
“Nothing worse, I told myself, than barging into an established household sharing turf well before I ever set foot on it. I would be here for a good time, for occasional gems of insight. An excellent but modest role model. A wholesome vision in watercolor. I would be a chicken.”
Having taken the step, I am getting stabilized in my new spot. Eyes wide open and, oh! Sure, hold the anesthesia. Still a tad late more often than not, but I am taking the shape of a parent.
For example, I hear that many first-time mothers get paranoid that they are putting their babies in harm’s way. While they mostly get over it by the time the baby crawls, I get to lie awake wondering if between middle school activities and countless domestic moments I have caused them irreparable damage. In other words, if I have just screwed them up for life in 26-odd minutes that were left over for me to fill. Then I run a mental spreadsheet and budget for the therapy they will surely need to ever think about me without their palms sweating.
But then there is tonight, when one of my girls fell asleep in my arms while I rubbed her back and retold, at her request, stories from my childhood. And it was plain to me that Chicken wouldn’t have had the privilege of this experience, and I thanked my good fortune for becoming, somewhere along the way, Pig. There was nothing else I’d rather be.
[1] We parented under the toxic cloud of parental alienation. If you’ve ever watched children having to reject one parent to earn the love of the other, you’ve seen it in action. Viewed as a criminal form of domestic violence in some countries (not the US, where we raised our children), parental alienation is an outcome of coercively controlling abuse, where an abusive parent uses the child as a pawn against the other parent, manipulating the child to believe their other parent never loved them, abandoned them, is unsafe, and/or unfit. Note that this is different from estrangement, where the rejected parent actually abused the child. Years ago, I was a founding director of Simply Parent, a non-profit focused of eradicating this form of child and partner abuse.