A Card for Al

Father's Day has never been an easy occasion for me. Raised by my mother and a series of stepfathers, I grew up unsure of my claim on the men in my life. I don't think I was the only one. No fuss was ever made in my house on that day in June. My mother didn't take my sister and me to the store to buy silly ties to be clumsily wrapped in bright paper. Year after year, the macaroni and glitter cards I made obligingly at school went into the garbage before I reached home.

Ignoring the date made things simpler for every member of my family. Divorce -- and remarriage -- might have been booming in the '70s, but even Hallmark left stepfathers out of its annual Father's Day hoopla until the following decade. Too messy, I suppose. Best to stand back. There's a reason they're called stepparents and stepchildren, after all. Everyone looks happier when they regard one another from a safe distance.

You can buy a card "For a Wonderful Stepfather," these days, but I'd wager that for every stepchild who picks one up this June 18, there are a dozen more who won't even think to look for it on the rack. The relationship is too ambiguous, too tenuous to be handled with flowery statements and embossed lettering. As with any modern construct, traditional sentiment doesn't come easy. Stepfatherhood, it seems, will always be messy. Take it from me.

The pride that kills

A new male lion moving in on an established pride will kill, and on occasion eat, the young offspring of the exiled male. (Hardly the stuff that sells Disney lunchboxes.) Hollywood has done good box-office business from stepfathers with similar outlooks on parenthood. Of the numerous wannabe and never-should-have-been fathers who passed through my life, few managed to fare much better.

Dave was the first and worst. Those who followed either had it easier or harder because of him -- I can't say which, you'd have to ask them. Though he entered our family when I was three, I would never come to call him "Daddy," but he was the man of the house and a central figure in my earliest memories. He and my mother hiding the cake on my fourth birthday, me laughing as I ran around the house directed by their clues. Then later that year, tumbling down concrete stairs into the dark basement, Dave looming down at me from the top step and then shutting the door. There would be several more years of dangerously ambivalent fatherhood, a series of small scenes best-forgotten or mentioned only in diaries and law courts.

Then cowboy Tom rode into our lives. He drove a big rig, listened to country music, swept my mother off her feet and swept all three of us out of Dave's house. That "stepfather" was not a role Tom wanted was of little significance. Gentle, soft-spoken Tom. Tom who adored my mother. Tom who said nothing when I pilfered pennies from his rapidly shrinking change jar. Tom who said very little at all. He had his own childhood traumas to quiet. Unprepared for us, he loomed in the shadows of our lives. Who could blame him? We were a house of wounded women, trying desperately not to bump into each other.

What I recall most about Tom are his things: the Willie Nelson record my friends and I played over and over, memorizing every nasal note; the black Stetson on a hook by the door and the size-11 cowboy boots in the front hall closet; the cab of an 18-wheeler parked in front of our rented house, ever-ready to hit the open road for a long haul. I read his potential in these things, tried to arrange them into a full, real man who could be a father to me in time. Truth was, his fear was a gift. It gave me the freedom to be an eight-year-old girl without fears of her own.

And then there were three

The marriage disintegrated within the year, and we were just the three of us for the first time in my short memory. There was, of course, a string of boyfriends. Funny, fidgety George whom I remember, no doubt incorrectly, as a cross between Bob Marley and Jimi Hendrix. An extraordinarily nice and excruciatingly dull lawyer whose name we all forget. The recovering alcoholic, whom, it turned out, wasn't recovering all that well. My sister, older by four years, would ignore one completely, wage full-out war against another. I hid in my basement bedroom in our latest house and found comfort in sitcom families that fought and made up with the aid of laugh tracks.

When I finally came upstairs, I had a new stepfather named Al. He was a skinny, quirky boy of a man, younger than my mother, younger, in fact, than I am right now. Al wanted his own children, but not more than he wanted my mother, who was 32 and done with babies. Perhaps that's why he seemed bent on winning over these two suspicious girls who eyed him cautiously from across the dinner table.

Our first Christmas together, Al gave us enormous bags of candy. A month later, he convinced my mother to let me have the puppy I'd been wanting forever. That first year, Al lived out every cliché of the new stepfather trying to win over the brood, but we came to love him anyway, my sister and I. Because he was a genuinely good guy, this Al. He made us laugh. We made him laugh. And this: he thought we were the best things since sliced bread.

Complete fragments

Growing up, none of my friends had stepfathers (though two had no fathers at all), so my family was, naturally, a curiosity. As a teenager describing Al, I used to say that he was like a really fun uncle or older brother. In time, I realized that was a lie. Al is like a father, as far as I -- the professional stepdaughter -- can know what a father is like. When I stupidly got engaged at 21, it was Al who took me for a beer and gently tried to talk me out of it. It was Al who worried about me travelling to South America by myself at 31. It's Al who still believes I can be a great novelist or singer or prime minister or anything I want. When I do remember to call my parents, it's Al who asks why I don't call more often.

I know first-hand how difficult it is to parent another man's child, but even with all my experience on the other side of that precarious relationship, there are no Dr. Phil shortcuts I can share. Families are a complicated formula, part biology, part economics, part primordial emotion. Why one works and another doesn't is anyone's guess. Ask the lion who has decided, magnanimously, to not consume his new stepchildren.

When it finally worked for me, it took a few years to realize it. But there it was one day: a family -- real, complete and full of love. I'm 34 and a half now, and I think this year it might be time I gave someone a silly tie, wrapped it in bright paper and topped it with a macaroni card.

Jessica Raya has written for Vancouver Magazine, FASHION, Flare and Elle Canada. She is currently at work on her first novel.