This letter is in response to your call for nominations in your April issue. I would like to nominate my husband, Dick, to be named your magazine's Stepfather of the Year.

Dick and I were married four years ago, but your posted rules said that I should share anything in the nominated stepparent's history, not just stuff from this year, so I guess I'll start there.

Now technically, I am a stepmother, since Dick has a daughter by his first marriage. I've never met my stepdaughter, Lolita, however, since somehow Dick's ex got sole custody and the right to keep Dick away from his own now-seventeen-year-old daughter. Dick doesn't like to talk about the divorce, so I don't know what she told the judge in order to get such an unusual constraint on him. Anyway, Dick moved away from their state and then met me.

Well actually, he then met both me AND my daughter, Kitty, who was ten years old at the time. Despite the negative experience he had just had with his own family, Dick did not hesitate to marry me, even though I already had a daughter. It's not like he didn't know right from the start – Kitty was with me the day I met him, at the roller rink where I was chaperoning Kitty's class from St. Catherine's Catholic School for Girls. You see, it was a special day at the rink, and they were hosting all the catholic schoolgirls in the city. I'm not sure what brought Dick to the rink that day, but there he was. He took to me right away, I must say, and didn't seem to mind at all that Kitty was so obviously part of the package.

We got married straightaway, and Dick was such a dear, he insisted we even take Kitty on our honeymoon with us, to Brazil. He didn't seem at all embarrassed in front of either one of us when we found out our hotel had a nude beach. He just calmly stripped down and suggested that we do the same. He is so cosmopolitan! ......(cont)