By Joanna Rakoff

During the dark days of 2020, my husband, Keeril, and I consulted with an educational advisor (a perk of Keeril’s job at MIT) to discuss the fates of my three children, then fifteen, eleven, and four. We were three months into that first full pandemic school year and, like many parents, essentially losing our minds. While the kids roamed around the house, we barricaded ourselves in our bedroom, propped Keeril’s phone between us on our unmade bed, and said hello to the advisor, an affable millennial named Chris.

 “Why don’t we begin with the oldest,” he suggested, pausing to check his notes. “Coleman, right?”

“Yes, right,” I began, hesitantly. “He’s a very intellectual kid. A huge reader.”

“Joanna won’t say this and I’m not sure if she completely realizes it,” interjected Keeril, with a small laugh. What? I thought, mildly alarmed. What won’t I say? “But I would say that Coleman is an actual genius. He has a near-photographic memory. He reads materials that even adults find difficult—like policy papers—and he has a grasp of concepts and ideas unusual for a kid his age.”

Chris absorbed this. “Okay,” he said. “That has its own challenges, right? A lot of schools often don’t know what to do with a kid like that.” Propped up against our headboard, Keeril and I turned to look at each other, nodding vigorously. “We’ll figure out a plan for him. But, Keeril, tell me a little bit more. Is he stronger in humanities?”

“Yes,” said Keeril. “His big interest is American history and even in elementary school he was reading big books, like Ron Chernow’s Hamilton biography.”

Okay. Let’s pause here. Because I know what you’re thinking. Don’t all dads consider their sons geniuses?

But here’s the thing: Keeril is not Coleman’s father. He’s his stepfather. They met for the first time when Coleman was eight and my daughter, Pearl, was four. (Our youngest, Izzy, now seven, is our child together.)

Did this meeting with the advisor change Coleman’s life? Perhaps not in any radical way. In the ensuing months, he met weekly with Chris to discuss his schoolwork and whatever was on his mind; and I talked with him regularly, too. These chats did help during that brutal first year of the pandemic. Chris understood Coleman in a way his teachers at the time did not, partially because of Keeril’s initial portrait of him, which led Chris to feel an instant empathy and connection to Coleman, an immediate investment.

I’m telling you all this not just because of the positive outcome of that call, but because that first conversation, with the sun streaming into our garret-like bedroom, led me to a strange and unexpected epiphany: Keeril may merely be Coleman and Pearl’s stepfather. But he’s often a better parent to them than I.

In my household, divorce held the same stigma as intravenous drug use and prostitution. The word, on the rare occasion my parents uttered it, came out as a whisper, accompanied by raised eyebrows and a disapproving head shake.

Growing up in the 1980s, in a town so socially conservative the mere mention of a working mother elicited tsks of pity, I knew not one child of divorce. The newly built, ersatz-Californian ranch houses, with their vast, triangular windows and vaulted ceilings, held only conventional nuclear families, the sort you saw in sitcoms. Elsewhere, the country was in the midst of a divorce epidemic, but if you happened to visit Pomona, New York, you would never know it. 

In my household, divorce held the same stigma as intravenous drug use and prostitution. The word, on the rare occasion my parents uttered it, came out as a whisper, accompanied by raised eyebrows and a disapproving head shake. Accordingly, I thought of stepparents as pure evil. (Do I even need to point out that every fairy tale—in both the Disney movies and storybooks—featured a villainous stepmother?) A few years later, I graduated to afterschool specials and YA novels that portrayed stepfathers as grim, heartless creatures who took pleasure in molesting and beating and starving their wives’ children. The Amityville Horror centers on a stepfather more terrifying than the blood pouring out of the house’s haunted walls. 

As an adult, I learned that these cruel depictions of stepfathers stemmed largely from a widely publicized 1973 paper by British forensic psychiatrist Peter Scott, proposing a theory he called “the Cinderella Effect,” which claimed that stepfathers are more likely to murder or abuse their stepchildren than their biological parents. (This theory, which provided the basis for the controversial field of evolutionary psychology, has now been largely discredited.) Throw in the moral panic of the 1980s, itself a corrective to the vast cultural changes of the 1970s—when women began rejecting both traditional gender roles and unsatisfying (or abusive) marriages—and you’ve got The Stepfather, a popular 1987 horror film, the plot of which should be abundantly clear.

Before we married, I knew that Keeril would be nothing but kind, generous, patient, and loving with Coleman and Pearl. What I didn’t anticipate was that he would see them in a wholly new and revelatory way.

As their stepfather, Keeril views them with a clarity and objectivity I could never, not ever, attain. Meaning: Keeril can observe Coleman—as he has, for years and years of math problems and debate tournaments and college application essays—and understand, with the rational distance impossible for mothers (or at least this mother), that “He appears to be not just run-of-the-mill smart, but an actual genius.” (Side note: His many years of teaching at MIT have made Keeril something of an authority on geniuses.) He can look at Pearl’s drawings and conclude, “She’s very talented; we should get her serious art lessons.” He does this without hedging, without the fear—endemic to me—that I’m viewing my children through the rose-colored glasses of motherhood.

Over the last decade, with Keeril by my side, I’ve gotten much closer to becoming the mother I’ve always wanted to be.

Perhaps more importantly: Coleman and Pearl can intuit Keeril’s more objective stance and take his observations more seriously than they do mine. When I say, “You were amazing!” after Coleman’s school play, it’s easy for him to respond, “Mama, of course you think I was amazing; you’re my mom.” But when Keeril says so, it holds confidence-boosting power.

He tends to out-parent me in challenging moments as well. For instance, he can remain utterly calm when his stepchild (not naming names here) throws a toddler-style tantrum after a positive Covid test prevents him from seeing friends. That same bit of distance, which doesn’t preclude his love for them, allows him to separate the kids’ emotional states from his own. Whereas, when my kids are in pain, I feel like my heart is being ripped from my body and sometimes—okay, often—don’t do the best job of hiding it. This helps no one. But he’s able to respond with reason, fueled by empathy, and maintain a useful perspective on the depth of their feelings, which he sagely reminds me will pass.

Importantly, Keeril doesn’t see his stepchildren as an extension of himself; he doesn’t blame himself for their flaws and missteps, or pride himself on their talents or achievements. These are pitfalls even the most evolved parents can’t avoid. I certainly can’t, though I’ve spent the last eighteen years trying. That said, over the last decade, with Keeril by my side, I’ve gotten much closer to becoming the mother I’ve always wanted to be. One who treats her children as full individuals, and regards their actions—their failures and accomplishments, their choices, big and small—not as reflections of her own worth as a parent, or a human.

That’s not to say bad stepfathers and stepmothers don’t exist. I’m not making any concessions for those who behave immorally. Like everyone, I’ve known many. But my current social orbit includes any number of stepparents, who adore their stepchildren, who love them as much as their own kids, and treat them with the same respect and generosity. It’s certainly made me think that it might be time for us, as a society, to let go of stereotypes gleaned from centuries-old tales, which, like all social pigeonholes, have never served anyone well.

Not so long ago, the five of us were obligated to attend a tense family dinner—the sort played for comedy in countless movies—at a rather depressing restaurant. Pearl immediately claimed the spot next to Keeril, pulled out a green marker, and began drawing a grid of tic-tac-toe boards across her oversized napkin. The two of them spent the entire meal happily charting Xs and Os, laughing in triumph or dismay. I had been worrying for days about this dinner, fearing that it would cause Pearl unparalleled stress. But sitting across the table from them, as they cracked each other up, I realized that Keeril’s slight distance from the kids allows him yet another advantage: fun, because he’s not constantly, endlessly, eternally worried about their happiness. In situations that I’m paranoid will cause them discomfort or distress, their stepfather can give them what they need in the moment: a friend.

Joanna Rakoff is the author of the international bestselling memoir My Salinger Year and the bestselling novel A Fortunate Age, winner of the Goldberg Prize for Fiction and the Elle Readers’ Prize. Rakoff’s books have been translated into twenty languages, and the film adaptation of My Salinger Year opened in theaters worldwide in 2021 and is now streaming. She has been the recipient of fellowships and residencies from MacDowell, Sewanee, Bread Loaf, Jerome Foundation, Authors’ Guild, PEN, Ragdale Foundation, Art OMI/Ledig House, and Saltonstall; and has taught at Columbia University, Brooklyn College, and Aspen Words. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, O: The Oprah Magazine, Vogue, Elle, Porter, and elsewhere, and her new memoir, The Fifth Passenger, is forthcoming from Little, Brown in 2024.