It takes a strong man to accept somebody else’s children and step up to the plate another man left on the table.
~Ray Johnson
“Are you out of your mind, Imogene? He has three kids! He’s in the Army Reserve and could be called up. He has a lousy civil-service job! His mother is part of the package. And he has no money! Are you crazy?” As my red-faced aunt stormed out of the house, she turned to me with one last parting shot.
“Your mother,” she snarled, “is out of her mind! It’s as easy to fall in love with a rich man as with a poor one.”
Aunt Dorothy was Daddy’s older sister, and the only relative of his we had. I knew she missed Daddy as much as we did. Daddy died when he was forty-five, after a lifelong battle with juvenile-onset diabetes. When he died, I was eight, and my little brother was four. Because Daddy had been sick for so long and couldn’t always work, we had very little money. We did have a large, three-story ramshackle house and a car, but that was about it. Mommy was working full-time, but not earning very much.
On the afternoon Aunt Dorothy marched out of the house, I had more things to worry about than whether or not my mother was crazy.
Mommy had told me that Bob Mitchell was going to be my stepfather.
“I know it’s only a little over a year since your father died. I’ll always love him, and no one can take his place,” she explained. “I hope you will learn to love Bob, too.”
I already liked him, his three sons, and his mother, who had been taking care of his boys since his wife died. She would be living with us, too.
My problem? What could I possibly call Bob Mitchell now that he was going to be my stepfather? I couldn’t call him Mr. Mitchell after he and Mommy got married. Mommy suggested that I call him Uncle Bob during their engagement, but I knew that he wasn’t my uncle so that would be a lie. I couldn’t call him “Daddy,” the term I always used for my own father. “Dad” was too close to Daddy.
While I was trying to come up with a name, I didn’t call Bob Mitchell anything, which was awkward. I made things worse when I refused to get in the car with him. I was walking home from the beach, and Bob Mitchell stopped and offered me a ride.
“I’m sorry. I can’t get in the car with you. Mommy says I can’t get in cars with strangers.”
When I got home, I could hear them talking in the kitchen.
“Imogene, we’re getting married in a few weeks, and she still thinks I’m a stranger!”
Bob Mitchell sounded very unhappy. I knew I had to start calling him something besides “Mr. Mitchell” and came up with a plan. I would call him “Pop.”
I had called Daddy “Pop” just once. Daddy was a stickler for proper grammar. When I called him “Pop,” he glared at me with disapproval. “Pop,” he said, “is soda, like Coca-Cola. Do not call me Pop. I am not a bottle of soda.” He snapped his newspaper open in front of his face and left me standing there, blushing. I could feel the chill all the way across the room.
I decided I’d slip in “Pop” when I got the chance and see what Bob Mitchell did. I was at the end of my possibilities. If Bob Mitchell objected to being addressed as if he were a bottle of soda, I’d find out soon enough.
The next time Bob Mitchell came over, I said, “Hi, Pop,” and waited for the explosion. His blue eyes filled with tears of happiness. He grabbed me and gave me a big hug.
“Imogene,” he called to Mommy, “she called me Pop!”
If only all of the “step” problems were so easily solved.
No one had asked the kids their opinion about anything because we were just “the kids.” Each one of us had lost a parent. The advice: Get over it. Pop’s boys were moved from the home where they’d grown up and from the schools they’d attended to live in our house, miles away. My younger brother and I felt as if the Mitchells were invading our house. The advice: Get used to it.
On the morning of Mommy and Pop’s wedding, I woke up to the sound of loud bangs. I heard Beau and Bill, Pop’s teenage boys who would become my stepbrothers in a few hours, laughing like crazy. They were dropping lit cherry bombs into soup cans and throwing them out of the upstairs windows.
Mommy and Pop said their vows: “For better or worse, until death do us part,” they pledged. They were so brave. They had no idea of the “worse” they were getting into.
Many explosions followed as the parents did their best to squeeze two families, two sets of furniture, and one grandmother inside a house that suddenly seemed too small. My worries about what to call my new stepfather were trivial compared to the tornado that was about to hit our home because the kids didn’t “get over it” and we didn’t “get used to it.”
Each one of us had a hard time finding a place in the new living arrangement. We were jigsaw pieces that didn’t fit, and some of us didn’t want to fit. There was screaming and yelling, slamming of doors, and some physical fighting. I was the only girl and stayed out of the brawls, but I did my share of crying and yelling. I spent hours hiding out on a nearby beach, telling all my sorrows to my dog and wishing Daddy could come back.
Eventually, Pop’s older boys graduated from high school, and only the three younger kids were left at home. Family life fell into a routine, and the fighting slowed to minor skirmishes.
Then, after years of marriage, much to everyone’s surprise, including theirs, Mom and Pop had their own baby, a boy. “It’s too good to be true,” wrote stepbrother Bill, who was away in the Marines.
We had become a family. We had a brother in common, who belonged to all of us. We had lived through the “worse” and started in on the “better.” Not the perfect. But definitely the better.
Throughout Mom and Pop’s marriage, Pop walked the tightrope between making me feel like a “step” and taking Daddy’s place. As Mom hoped, I grew to love Pop. After several years, I realized that, without thinking about it, I was calling him Dad.
When my husband and I had our first child, a girl, we named her Roberta, in honor of the man who had raised me and loved me as if I were his own. Mom and Dad were married for over twenty years until his death. She followed him a few years later.
Some people aren’t as blessed as I am. I had not one, but two, wonderful dads.
~Josephine A. Fitzpatrick
