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Two-Step Father

Fathers usually come in two varieties: the home-grown natural father and the add-on step-father. However, when I lived for a short time with a woman and her two children, I discovered a third species of father: the Two-Step Father, the one who without benefit of biology or ceremony finds himself washing tons of laundry and orating bedtime stories.

When I met Eliza, she had many things I liked - and two that I didn't, namely, her two children. I had never had a liking for children. I didn't do a W.C. Fields about it, but children had always struck me as aliens deposited here by some celestial race with an intriguing, but warped, sense of humor. But the children came with the territory, so to speak, and I would either like them, or I would be alone. It didn't take me long to make my choice.

I got them up in the morning, made their breakfasts and lunches, and carted them off to school. And I didn't mind it - really, honestly. And the fact that it didn't really bother me started me thinking about the Two-Step Father. The kids had their own father, whom they visited occasionally in Maine. And while their mother and I liked each other, there was little chance that I would become their step-father. Yet I did what can only be called "fatherly" (or maybe "parental") things: the laundry, dinners and dessert, mounds of dishes, money for their Troll books, sending eight-year old Sarah to her bedroom for a time-out, combing six-year old Michelle's hair in the morning. And they responded as if I were a kind of father to them. When Michelle woke up at 4 a.m. full of a night's bad dream, she would as often come to me as Eliza. I'd sit and talk with her, rub her back and stroke her hair, and, if need be, lay down with her until she fell back asleep. They listened to me (most of the time) when I told them to do something; they brought questions to me and carried away my answers.

Of course, not all went smoothly in Paradise. Kids with ages in the single digits above five could be very frustrating. They had fallen in love with the word "No" and had added the phrases "I don't know," "I don't care," and "So what?" to their growing fund of automatic responses. They were also slobs, practiced very little etiquette, reveled in the various sonics of flatulence, and already appeared to be acquiring the pubescent omniscience usually reserved for seventh and eighth graders.

All this frustrated me a good deal sometimes. I didn't remember how I was at that age, and therefore didn't

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