As everyone knows, stepparents are mediocre figures who can only hope to be, at the very best, second rate child care assistants. You must be naïve if you think a stepparent can have authority and deranged to believe that they don’t have to put up with verbal abuse (and sometimes physical) from their stepchildren, all for the sake of keeping the peace with their partners.

Oh, and of course stepparents are usually also below standard people because they are so unattractive and undateable that the only people who will take them on are those who have wasted their first chance at happiness and are just pleased at the opportunity to play house with someone else again.

I have heard however, there are some people out there who will begrudgingly accept that you are allowed have a pair of balls (male or female) and have some kind of instinctive notion of what self-respect is and being a parental figure is about.

When I started a relationship with Katie it was clear from the offset that this was a family package on offer (well not ‘on offer’, as in a selection of families on display in a department store window). It was also clear for both of us that if I hadn’t been able to relate to Ben, our relationship would not have worked out, and rightfully so. I cannot imagine being married happily to a woman whose offspring not only detested me, but was allowed to effectively bully me – a situation I have surprisingly seen often in stepfamilies. What I hadn’t catered for was that Ben would become my boy.

I was never expecting that kind of emotional connection and there was inevitably at least one moment that I resented Ben’s biological father because he could say he was his ‘real’ father and I was not. But the truth is that his biological father only loves the idea of being a father, not the practicality of it. As far as he is concerned he is a fully functioning parent by merit of the fact that he is technically a father and to just top up his brimming ego, makes the occasional effort to see his son when it suits him (and providing there isn’t anything else on offer for his Saturday)..

But nowadays I absolutely don’t care that Ben is not my biological son. I am prepared to go even further and proclaim I am proud that I am not his real father.

This inability to rest on genetic laurels makes how I relate to him all the more genuine, because it is stripped of narcissism. I can’t look at Ben and say to myself, ‘isn’t he a wonderful little me?’ and settle for that as the basis for our relationship. I have to be more altruistic about how we get on. I have to see him for what he is, not for how he magnifies my own ego.

But more than this… this all works the other way too. Ben loves me for the way I treat him, because I play with him, spend time with him, teach him things and set boundaries, not because he has a sense of duty that he should or because he has always been told that children love their fathers. There is not that pressure on him about how he should relate to me. If he relates to me it is because I have put time and effort into us, not because he is told to do so.

And that is why ultimately, I am relieved not to be his father, but am honoured to be his dad.

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Excerpt from: http://wearestepfamilies.com/ would love feedback and comments if you have any! Also need articles by stepmothers urgently.