The Magic 'Stepdad'

After giving my ‘ugliest’ face to the internet via a couple of TikToks, I’m taking a break from my book to share one of its most beautiful highlights - my dad. I guess the world would see him as my stepfather, the first of two to be exact. But for me, he is and had always been, the father who mattered most. He is my earliest reminder that even trauma has silver linings, because the pain that preceded him gifted me with an ability to vividly remember the first time we met. I was three years old.

Before him, my biological father had left me with only one memory of what a father meant for me. That visual is my perspective from the dark back seat of his pick-up truck. As ET rode his bicycle across the large screen of the drive-in theater, I wished for Kent to turn around and look at me. Don’t ask me why, I don’t know. I just remember that longing that was never satisfied. It was difficult for him to look at me, so he didn’t. He was a teenager, and he was white. He was a second generation American, born to a family that - at that time - customarily referred to people like my mother and me, as ‘niggers.’

One lucky break from fate brought Sparky into my life shortly after that night, sometime before Easter in 1983. Without exaggeration, I knew he was my dad at first sight - and he did too. With a larger than life personality to match his heart, the darkness I knew before Sparky faded in his shadow. Although his own heartbreaks and struggles cut his immediate presence in my childhood short, the light he gave me is the only reason I survived the struggles that followed his departure.

Having been a single mother in the past, I sometimes found myself sucked into online battles with red-pillers dismissing step-dads as ‘simps’ - unloved by vampyric children who prized a bloodline above all else. Presumably they reveled in some fantasy that my defensiveness was a matter of proving my own worth as a single mother. As their stunted emotions often lead them to be, they were wrong. I was standing up for my dad - the only loving parent I have ever known, and the first love of my life. As a woman who has weathered many storms and been brought to my knees in humility - I know that any and all redeeming virtues I have, exist because of him. 

One thing some internet bullies are right about is that there are some single mothers who aren’t great at assessing relevant value in men. The highest value in a man for true single mothers (not those equally co-parenting with exes) is his ability to earnestly love and guide her children the same as if he’d sired them himself.  That capacity to love and commit to a family is priceless and worth far more than extra zeros on a bank statement, or a few vertical inches. Single mothers who actively date without realizing this, aren’t putting their kids first. All women should avoid couch casanovas like the plague; but they’re not to be compared to a self-sufficient man who brings the treasures of his heart to children who might not realize how much a father is needed, until they have one.

Mine saved my life, and continues to do so, long after his passing - where he lives on in the smell of citrus trees, the sight of mountains, and all the music he taught me to love.