When I was two, my mom and my stepdad made their relationship official. He worked the barges then, and I remember looking at photos of all the gifts he’d bring me back when he was off the boat. By the time I was seven, they married, and I stood in the wedding as a child who didn’t yet have the words to describe what I knew deep down… this man was already a father to me. He is the father of my twin sister’s, but he raised me as much as he raised them. If not more. I sometimes feel like I got the best of our parents, but that’s another story. He was there for everything: my games, my chorus concerts, my basketball practices where he taught me how to perfect my jump shot. He showed up, over and over, in the small everyday ways that add up to a lifetime of love.
That’s why I called him Dad 1.
And I said it to both of their faces. And everyone else’s face. I didn’t care and I still don’t.
My biological dad, the one tied to me by blood but not by presence, became Dad 2. He didn’t take that lightly. Actually he flipped out. I can still remember his anger when I claimed my stepdad as my first dad. But I remember more of his anger than. I do anything else about him. I can also remember darker things: him stalking my mom and stepdad from bar to bar, trying to intimidate but never standing tall when confronted. One night, my stepdad called him out, made him stand, and he folded. He was the barstool coward. He definitely stood up on one and proclaimed he was a “pussy” so he didn’t get beat down.
The contrast between the two couldn’t have been clearer. One earned the title through presence, love, and constancy. The other lost it through absence, fear, and bitterness.
My stepdad passed away three years before my mom, taken by cancer. Our relationship wasn’t perfect but we were working on it. Losing him took that away and when my mom followed though they weren’t together and hadn’t been, the wound split wide open again. But his role in my life is undeniable: he wasn’t a replacement father, he was my father.
That’s why when you see my poem by the title of Dad 1, you know now what it means. It isn’t casual. It’s deliberate. The names weren’t a joke, or a jab. They were a truth I recognized early: fatherhood is about presence, not just blood. 🩸
