So other than being addled from an unspeakable habit, a little smelly and a touch on the amazingly obese scale, I was good to go. Ready to star in one of those car commercials where the kids crack wise in the backseat while the dad says something sage and knowing into the rearview. Except I didn’t have a car. And the kids did not legally belong to me. I had never married their mother or established my paternity. I had no insurance, and I had not paid taxes in several years.

Although Anna has always given me abundant credit for doing a good job with our twins, she is quick to remind me that I stole them in the first place. A part of me was convinced she was right. Revisiting the issue with Barbara, I talked about how we managed to persuade Anna to take a drug test when she moved back from Texas, where she had been staying with her mom. We made visitation conditional on a clean result, and she came up positive for cocaine and pot. I remembered this as a clever linchpin in our legal strategy, but Barbara reminded me that Anna had failed that test over and over and that she moved in with a dope dealer when she got to town. How she missed appointments to see the kids, missed court dates, switched lawyers and eventually agreed to a settlement that gave me physical custody of the girls.

History suggests that things turned out as they should have, but Anna’s suggestion that I was not the obvious choice as the twins’ custodial parent found significant traction when I went back and looked at the record. I had won a tallest-midget contest with Anna, nothing more. Each of us had a history of relapse, and mine was far more extensive. The lie that I told myself  that I was made entirely new by my decision to lay off drugs  kept doubt at bay. If I really examined my fitness in all of its dimensions, I would have been paralyzed. It was a fairy tale that kept me alive and allowed me to make it come true. Everything good and true about my life started on the day the twins became mine.

When a woman, any woman, has issues with substances, has kids out of wedlock and ends up struggling as a single parent, she is identified by many names: slut, loser, welfare mom, burden on society. Take those same circumstances and array them over a man, and he becomes a crown prince. See him doing that dad thing and, with a flick of the wrist, the mom thing too! Why is it that the same series of overt acts committed by a male becomes somehow ennobled?

I’m not saying that raising children, especially by yourself, is a trip to Turks and Caicos, but single parenting is as old as reproduction. Families declare themselves in all sorts of versions, and ours happened to be two adorable toddlers stapled to 250 pounds of large, white male. Still, people who knew our circumstance marveled at its idiosyncrasy. And people who knew me before the twins wondered all the more.

I had no idea what I was doing, but children teach you how to care for them. Leave the house without an extra diaper, and they will have some brutal, smelly event at a McDonald’s. Let them wheedle their way into your bed so you can get some rest, and you will be fighting them off every single night of their young lives. Gradually, slowly, the three of us developed a routine at bedtime, with baths, prayers and stories  stuff I had been brought up on or seen on TV.

As we spent more time together, they began to know me, and I came to adore them  madly, deeply, truly. We developed other rituals. When it came time to actually turn out the light, I would sing a song of my own making.