The step-parent phenomenon still fascinates me. Both of my parents remarried a little over a year after their divorce. With these marriages came two new families - large ones at that. When my parents' respective second marriages failed, I was left with a small city's worth of ex-step relatives. It's almost kind of funny - your parents remarry and it's like: Insta-Family! (kind of like Instant Noodles). You're somehow supposed to immediately accept your new family (or families) and they are supposed to do the same.

Neither my brother or I were too fond of our parents' second choices. We called them our Step-Monster and Step-Dick. We were being given orders by two people who knew nothing about us, except that our 'other parent' was a jerk. We were pulled back and forth between many worlds, and were seen as ungrateful and bratty if we refused assimilation. Few tears were shed on my end when my parents' respective second marriages ended. My little brother, on the other hand, wept buckets when my father called to say that he and his second wife were calling it quits. My dad was stunned by my brother's reaction, considering he had never shown anything but disdain for his wife. I totally got it: for my brother, it was yet another change in the family structure, yet another disappointment, yet another change in surroundings and routine. Even an imperfect step-mother is better than another upheaval in the family structure.

My dad's third wife and I get along quite well. I admit I'm often at a loss at how to introduce her. If I say, "This is my Dad and his wife," then it's kind of implying that I don't accept her as a "step-mother." But then again, is step-mother really that flattering a title? To me it often means, "Yeah, my parents' marriage bombed and this is where he ended up afterwards."

I wish I could put a positive spin on step-mothers and step-fathers, but I can't. I'm sure there are many people out there who love, adore, and spend oodles of time with their step-parents, but I can't seem to get over what it really means: that your parents divorced, and most likely it wasn't pretty. Everyone involved automatically becomes a statistic: my parents in the 'high divorce rate' category; me in the 'child of divorce' grouping, which inherently implies that I'm dysfunctional, incapable of being in a healthy relationship, and am most likely to blow up small children with a foreign made sub-machine gun.