It's taken ten years for me to face up to the fact that I'm a step-dad.

Ever since Cinderella's dysfunctional family shot into the public eye, I'm afraid that step-parents have had a bad press. And unlike the 'real thing', it seems that the story just keeps on repeating itself.  Feelings of jealousy and resentment abound and no one can quite find their place.

Ten years that I've been playing this supporting role to one of our children and, to be honest, I don't think I've done much to alter the reputation of our breed.  Looking back, in fact, I only seem to be able to remember the days when we sat looking at each other from across the dinner table, as if existing in different worlds.

Of course, I never refer to myself as a 'step-dad'.  That feels far too Dickensian and, unlike poor Cinderella, her 'real' dad still lives just around the corner.  At the same time, though, I have begun to think that this whole business of step-parenting is appropriately summed up in the name.

Let me explain with four simple, connected ideas.

1. Step in parenting

It all starts when we step into the gap left by a parent that's no longer around.  Rarely is it our primary motivation for sitting around the family table.  It just comes with the territory of this new relationship. 

And within a matter of days we find ourselves making the packed lunches, doing the school run, and reading bedtime stories in a language that is not our own.  We want to make this work - so for the love of another, we roll up our sleeves and rush right in.

2. Step back parenting

To the outsider - those who naively observe us in the local supermarket - we'll soon resemble any other 'normal' family as we discuss the merits of still and sparkling water in isle 17.  Truthfully, though, if you had interrupted and interrogated me at any time during the past ten years, I'd have probably said that I was nothing more than an 'extra' in this particular episode of family life.  I'd have taken you to one side and told you in no uncertain terms that I was still waiting for the permanent contract.

What I wouldn't have told you was how difficult I was finding being a 'pretend' dad to a young child whose 'real' dad would regularly knock on the door unannounced.  As she ran into his arms, all I could do was  step back into the shadows and reflect on how fake I felt.

3. One step away parenting

Have you ever tried to build a house of cards. Despite what you see on the tv, it's hard to get beyond three cards.  And rather than being an enjoyable pastime, you tend to spend most of your time picking up the pieces and arranging back them in their proper order.

I don't know about you, but I have a growing feeling that the same is true with step-parenting.  No matter how carefully, how sensitively, we build the relationship, we face an almost impossible construction task. We dream that one day we'll build the Eiffel Tower, but in truth we're only ever one tiny step away from collapse and those dreadful, menacing, show-stopping words. 

You're not my real dad, anyway!

Even if I've been a step parent since forever - at least as far as my children are concerned - the absence of those blood ties appears to be a chronic, destabilising factor in the story of our family that constantly leads us straight back to square one. 

4. Step by step parenting

So how does this story end?  It's clear to me now that the odds are stacked against the likes of us; and, equally, that I'm not going to be voted 'Step-Dad of the Year' any time soon.

And yet I haven't given up hope.  I haven't lost sight of the goal that, when we both look back on the family life we had, we'll consider ourselves fortunate to have shared the same table, been part of the same story, and written our futures together.

And for now, I'll simply focus on being a one-step-at-a-time parent, waiting for my big break.

Whatever you think of him, Alastair Campbell knows a thing or two about the art of communication.

I had the opportunity to meet the man behind the spin last week and was intrigued by what he had to say. 

Communication, he suggests, always begins with a white canvas.  And the job of people in communications is to spend their time throwing dots onto the canvas – day after day, week after week, month after month – until, over time, the dots begin to join up on the page and a recognizable, meaningful picture begins to emerge.

Referring to his time in Blair’s Labour Government, Campbell said that his mission was clear: to throw dots onto the page in such a way that whenever people saw Blair appear on the television or newspaper headlines, the British public would immediately recall the canvas that together he and Blair had spent years painting and see a coherent image of New Labour, New Britain. 

As someone involved in communications, Campbell’s metaphor of the communicator’s role is intriguing.

As someone involved in the business of being a parent, though, it challenged me to the core. 

Travelling home that night, I therefore found myself still asking the same questions, over and over again in my mind:

What are the dots that I am throwing onto the page for my children?  What kind of picture am I painting for them?  What kind of sense are they making out of the hundreds and hundreds of tiny impressions I am making upon them, day after day, week after week, month after month?

And then it dawned on me.  The answer to my soul-searching was actually hidden in the question: ‘the hundreds and hundreds of tiny impressions I am making upon them’. 

The answer had been staring me in the face (literally) all along, if I had only been smart enough to recognize it. 

If I want to know what kind of picture I am painting, I have first to recognize that my children are themselves a living canvas; and that each one of these tiny ‘impressions’ that I make moulds them, shapes them, and sets them upon a path – for good and for bad.

Every decision.  Every word.  Every glance.  Every hug.

Think about it for too long, though, and it can drive you mad.   

At least, faced with the day-to-day reality of modern family life, the weight of my ‘impressionist’ view on parental responsibility could easily feel too much to bear – particularly in moments when I know that I have ended up making the wrong impression and perhaps even thrown the odd blot of inappropriateness onto the landscape of their childhood.

If you look closely, though, most paintings are like that.  Art is made by humans and not machines.  Beauty is captured by irregularity as well as form and perspective.  There is even the occasional splatter of paint that, in retrospect, artists will recognize as a plain, old mistake.

But it’s still art.  The painting still makes sense.  It is still beautiful.

Just as our children are the greatest things that any of us will ever produce.

Good teachers enable our children to write a different kind of future.  That’s a fact.

As another school year end, however, I left thinking about the way in which the best teachers have not only gifted my children with an empowering learning experience; but, along the way, have unwittingly taught me a thing or two about how to be a ‘dad’.

Here’s the short story.

1. My children need me.  Our children need us to wake them up in the morning, prepare their clothes, make their sandwiches and get them to school on time; they need us to help them hang up their coat, kiss them goodbye and promise that we’ll see them at the end of the day.
2. My children don’t need me.  It takes a while for some of us to realize, but the entrance to the classroom is marked by an invisible line; a threshold beyond which the genetic claim upon my children changes; a reminder of the fact that ultimately these little ones do not and cannot depend upon me alone, but will enjoy a variety of ‘significant others’ in their lives – each one enriching and bringing themes of hope, love and life to their unfolding story.
3. My children thrive with consistency.  It’s the relentless, daily routines that make a difference, bring security, and make their world predictable.  In the curious land of our infancy, consistency is king and, as parents, we ignore it at our peril.
4. My children enjoy inconsistency.  Bring a tree trunk into the classroom and ask the children to paint it in bright colours; take a trip to the local supermarket and draw a map of the journey; meet a local author in the library and listen to him tell his stories – it is this occasional disruption of the routine, the element of surprise, that fills my children with a sense of awe and wonder.  As a parent, it is good to be reminded to be creative and ‘shake it up’ occasionally for those entrusted to our care.
5. My children are part of a group.  There comes a moment for all of us, when we suddenly realize that our weekends are destined to be spent wrapping presents for 5-year olds and driving our kids to remote locations across town, in search of the house with balloons out front.  It is at this same moment we realize that our children actually have a secret life beyond our reach.  It’s like when I walk across the playground and an older child comes up to my daughter and greets her.  For some reason, I am always taken aback – and somehow left feeling that she’s still too young for that kind of independent socializing.
6. My children stand out from the group.  A class is nothing more than a list of names on a rota.  At least, that is what some teachers would have us believe; except the good ones – who, with every word, make me feel that my child is the most precious, unique, and deserving child they have ever taught.   I continue to be in awe of how they manage to do this with all twenty children in the class.  As a parent of six, I am already finding it a challenge!
7. My children can do nothing.  There’s never enough time for anything these days.  We find ourselves as families rushing from one place to another, desperately trying to fit everything in.  ‘Rest time‘ in the classroom, though, is different.  It speaks of quality rather than quantity – and the importance of balance in our daily routines.  I need to get better at teaching my children that ‘nothing’ is sometimes ‘everything’.
8. My children can do anything.  As we grow into adults, most of us find ourselves locked into certain roles.  Perhaps that’s why I still love the ‘dressing up corner’ of the classroom; reminding me that we can do and be anything.  Children desperately need to believe that and, even more, believe in themselves.  I love it when my little girl comes home and tells me that, when she grows up, she wants to be a chef, a fireman, a cleaner or a hedgehog!
9. My children will forget.  Lost property bins flourish around young children.  It’s just in their nature to forget these various items of clothing from time to time; just as it is part of learning involves forgetting, making mistakes, and failing occasionally.  Some teachers believe that forgetting is bad and that memorization is key.  Great teachers, I have learned, simply help children to re-trace their steps and find their way back to whatever it is they have lost.  Great teaching never, ever involves humiliation or red-faces.  
10. My children will remember.  Perhaps this is the most important lesson of all.  It’s not the big things, nor the expensive things, nor the fancy things that will stay with them into adulthood.  As parents, I know we know that; but it is good to be reminded that what stays with children are the moments we offer them when they can be utterly themselves and know, in that same moment, that they are safe, loved, and truly unique. 

J., M., A., and C. (you know who you are) – you are all wonderful teachers and it has been my privilege to learn this much from you these past months.

Thanks also for making a difference to the future that our children are writing for themselves.

Time to enjoy the summer break.

I was surprised at how upset I was to wake up on Tuesday morning and find I no longer existed.

Of course, I hadn’t disappeared altogether, but it was the case that after several happy, trouble-free years, my Facebook profile had quite similarly vanished out of sight.

At first, I was completely oblivious to my fate.  However, when friends began to write to me, asking whether I had ‘un-friended’ them, I became suspicious that something was wrong.

And sure enough, I was nowhere to be seen.

My sister summed up my predicament perfectly: ‘I am beginning to think that you have gone into a crack in the wall, like on Doctor Who, because when I looked for you there was no reference to you anywhere.  It is like you had never existed.’

I googled myself in a search for clues.  The regular suspects – my various namesakes around the globe – seemed unaffected.  The young guy always sitting next to the swimming pool, from who-knows-where; the north of England travelling Evangelist and distant family member who looks uncannily like my late grandfather; and the doppelgänger who never shares any information about himself, apart from a profile picture of a mouse in a pin-striped waistcoat – as far as I could tell, they were all updating and doing fine.

Unlike me.

For the entire day, I was restricted to my offline world; limited to meeting people that I could actually see and, in place of status updates, forced to ask people things like ‘How’s it going?’ or ‘Any news?’.

And I have to say, it all felt more than a little odd to know that there was a world being lived out there that I no longer had any connection to; a story, where I was no longer playing my part.

Of course, I might be overstating the point.  Like it or not, though, some of us are getting pretty used to the fact that we are part of a digital identity revolution; a revolution in which ‘what we say about ourselves’ and ‘what others say about us’ occurs in various online, non transferable silos.

And if you want confirmation of where this is all going, check out the following keynote presentation by Dick Hardt, Founder and CEO of Sxip Identity.

Hardt’s point is simple.  The Internet has come to dominate the way people keep in touch and share information, but it has also fractured digital life - turning people into a piecemeal collection of user names, passwords, and online personas.  The future, by comparison, is one in which we will be able to bring together these pieces of our story once and for all – and, above all, keep control of what is rightfully ours.

Late on Tuesday night, after what had felt like an age, I returned to ‘life’ without warning or notification.  It felt good to be back; good to know that this part of my story had not been permanently deleted by a server technician, somewhere on the other side of the planet. 

It did make me think, however, if one of the existential questions of the Internet age is ‘Who am I on Facebook?’, then we ought also perhaps start asking ourselves, ‘Who am I without Facebook?’

Every book has several stories to tell us. 

If the book in question happens to be a work of fiction or collection of short stories, then I guess that I’m merely re-stating the obvious.  But let’s not forget the tales of a book that are often never written down.

Two , in particular, come to mind: the story of a book’s relationship with its author and the story of a book’s relationship with its readers.

In the week that FRAGMENTS was finally published, it seemed only natural to take a moment and look back on the six years it took to bring this idea into being. 

This particular story began very simply and for a very practical reason – as a letter to my children.  I wanted them to have a permanent record of their own beginnings, for when they were old enough to inquire further about this time of their lives.  As a ‘Eurostar dad’, living between two sets of kids in two countries, permanently travelling between both, I also wanted to set the records straight and capture for them those moments that – to me at least – defined us as a family and shaped our history.

In short, I wrote stories to my children as a kind of love poetry.

Almost from the beginning, however, these stories took on a public form.  Initially shared only tentatively with my closest friends, it took me somewhat by surprise to discover how they quickly stimulated new and interesting conversations about the complex nature of modern family life.  It was as if by telling my own story, some of the people around me felt better placed to discuss the story of their own lives – the joy, the pain, the challenges, and the sorrow. 

I guess, in that sense, storytelling is infectious.

The past six years therefore became both a conversation with my children and a conversation with others.  Together, we became a band of fellow travellers – sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, mothers, and fathers – all trying to ‘make sense’ of modern family life; all trying to weave these complex themes into some kind of meaningful whole.

And all I can say is that it has been my absolute privilege to get to know some truly wonderful people along the way – people who have shared similar experiences, offered new insights, or simply always been there with an encouraging word.

Of course, it didn’t mean that everyone agreed with the stories I was writing. I quickly realized that these tales would always divide opinion.  One person’s favorite therefore became an irrelevance to others.  Some simply disagreed with my perspective and used the story as a platform to state their own point of view.

And that was fine too.  After all, any kind of reaction is always more welcome to an author than no reaction at all!

The story of how this book came into being may be nearing its end and this is my opportunity to thank so many of you for taking part.  Yet, in the week that FRAGMENTS is published, I have this sense that another story is just beginning.

And it will be for you, the readers, to determine precisely how this tale ends.

This book is currently on sale on at Amazon.com.  You can also follow the story on Facebook.