This is what I did when I found out my 18-year-old stepson was going to be a father:

1. Finished the report I was working on, checked it for spelling errors, and emailed it to the head of client development.

2. Had a cup of tea and kvetched with my co-workers, because ugh, can you believe it's only 4:30?

3. Sat at my desk for an hour, staring at my computer and trying my best to look normal.

4. Went home and puked my guts out.

And then I opened up my computer and decided to write you, The Internet, because I need someone to talk to and I'm sick of talking to myself.

So, yes: I'm going to be a step-grandmother. That is, if I have the right to even call myself that. The boy (man!) I'm calling my step-son has never asked me to call him that. I've never asked if I may. In fact, in the going-on-five years I've known about his existance, becoming Facebook friends is the closest I've ever come to meeting him. 

And now I'm feeling the crushing weight of your judgement (I have, after all, been on the internet before. I know it's made up of little besides judgement, pictures of my college roomate's baby, and cats). How on earth can I have a step-son I've never met? What does that mean about me? About his father, the man I started dating in college and have shared my life with for over a decade? What does that mean about our life together, this pretty little lie we've built on the edge of the continent? I wish to God I knew.

I first found out about (let's call him M) five years after I'd first started living with his father. It's funny, but for what was probably the single most traumatic, game changing moment of my adult life, I remember very little about it. I found a letter, not addressed to me, and opened it. I was sure there'd been a mistake, racked my brain for all the girls he'd dated before me at the small liberal arts college we'd both attended. It was a pretty small pool, I was friends of friends at least with all of them. No one had a kid. I took a shower and cried, imagining some poor fatherless toddler, some mother who'd accidently written down my boyfriend's very common name. I'd like to say I was sure it was a mistake, but I was already crying. I knew that something was over.

When (let's call him G) got home that afternoon, I didn't cry, but he did. It was his child, he said. A son, who had been concieved long before we'd ever met, who he hadn't seen since long before we started dating. G cried for the first time I'd ever seen, and I sat down next to him and promised we'd make it work. And then I started to cry again, too.

I'm pretty sure I cried for the next three days straight, calling sick into work and lying curled on top of the bed in our dark, cave-like bedroom. I'd experienced depression before,  been filled for years, in fact, with the self-obsessed meloncholy of a middle-class white girl's protracted adolescence, but nothing in my life had prepared me for this. I was twenty-seven years old, still wore my hair in pigtails, and read Young Adult literature for fun. And then, suddenly, I was complicit in something big and grown up and very, very real.

And this is where I wish things had happened differently: I wish I'd been some sort of hero, that I'd mended the broken father-son relationship, insisted we move back east so that G and his son could build some semblance of a bond.  But I didn't. Instead, I started seeing a therapist, and eventually managed to drag G along, too. We talked at length about our feelings, about responsibility, about family. The real situation receeded into the distance. I started to question: Who was I to say how or if this whole situation should be mended? G had never really been a father. M's mother had remarried years ago. "He doesn't need me," G insisted. "You're imagining everything you think you know about this boy," the therapist chided.

And then I got sick, requiring multiple hospitalizations and surgeries. The company I worked for went under. Somehow, three years passed, and though I trawled MySpace and Facebook for boys M's age in the last town G knew for sure he'd lived in, neither G nor I made any real effort to connect beyond his monthly child-support payment. I thought of M, tried to imagine him, marked his birthday on my calendar and hoped that I'd meet him some day, but I didn't insist that G find him. I didn't insist that M, and no one else, should decide whether he wanted a relationship with his father. I wish more than anything that weren't true, but there it is.

Then one day I found him online, eighteen years old, with G's eyes and atrocious spelling, looking young and tough and impossibly real. I forwarded the page to G. Months passed, and then they were texting, emailing, even talking on the phone. It was everything I'd wanted.

Soon, I was in email contact with M too. It was heartbreaking -- I was so impressed with him, with the way he uses words and the maturity with which he accepted his father back into his life. But there was so much pain there too, in the angry rap lyrics he sent me (written years before) where he'd raged against his absent father, against the wife he imagined he had, against me. He told me about how he'd hoped for a phone call every birthday. How he'd saved, then destroyed the last present G had ever bought him. Every single day, that breaks my heart.

And now this. Now M is going to be a father, himself, with the sweet, pretty girl from all his Facebook photos. We, in our undeserving way, are going to be grandparents. And I want more than anything to do this right.