What a young man from New York taught me about love, belonging, and family.
When I first met my ex-husband, one of the first things he told me was that he had a son.
I surprised myself by responding with a confidence that had long been eroded by relationships past.
“If your son doesn’t like me, this will never work.”
At the time, it felt like an obvious thing to say.
Children notice things adults spend years learning how to overlook. They pay attention. They are often better judges of character than we give them credit for. If his son didn’t like me, I assumed there was probably something worth knowing.
A few months later, it was time to meet him.
It was April 2021.
New York was emerging from the long shadow of the pandemic. Restaurants were reopening. People were venturing back into public life. The trees had started to bloom. Spring was arriving as it always does, indifferent to whatever chaos humans have managed to create.
COVID was still very much with us.
Everyone was masked.
Everyone was carrying some version of caution.
I left our friend’s apartment and walked to the train alone to meet his son.
I remember standing outside the subway station waiting for him.
Nervous.
Because I wanted him to like me.
After losing so much of my own family, I had become attentive to belonging. To the people who arrive unexpectedly and begin, piece by piece, to make a home inside your life.
I already understood that loving his father would mean making room for him too.
Standing outside that subway station, I carried a silent hope that I might be at the beginning of something that felt like family.
Then he appeared.
First his head emerging from the subway stairs, then the rest of him.
I smiled immediately.
He looked so much like his father.
Lighter-skinned, but carrying the same lanky frame. The same long limbs. The same slightly awkward elegance of someone who seemed perpetually in motion. There was a little bop in his step as he walked toward me. The kind of rhythm I had already come to recognise in his father, and in so many Jamaican men. A gait that somehow communicated confidence and the certainty that wherever they were headed, they would arrive in their own time.
Physically, they were unmistakably related.
Temperamentally, they were entirely different people.
For more than a year, all of us had been navigating the world through distance. Through necessary barriers. Through a shared understanding that closeness carried risk.
One of my first memories of Kylan is of him reaching me, pulling down his mask, and smiling.
And there he was.
Warm. Open. Entirely himself.
What struck me almost immediately was his willingness to engage. His genuine interest in another person. He asked questions. He listened carefully to the answers. Within minutes, I felt less like someone being introduced and more like someone being welcomed.
Years later, I understand that this is one of Kylan’s gifts. He makes people feel seen.
We started talking as we walked back toward the apartment.
The conversation moved with the ease of people who had somehow skipped the formalities and arrived directly at familiarity.
Five years later, I struggle to remember what my life felt like before Kylan was part of it.
Which is remarkable when you consider how little of his story I was present for.
I wasn’t there for the years that shaped him. The first days of school. The illnesses. The friendships. The triumphs and disappointments of childhood. I know those years through photographs, family stories and memories carried by other people.
His mother raised him into the person he is today, and she did an extraordinary job.
Because Kylan is one of the few genuinely good people I have known.
Goodness is a word we do not use often enough.
We reserve our admiration for intelligence, ambition, charisma and success, as though character is somehow less impressive than achievement. Yet the people who leave the deepest mark on our lives are often those who have developed the discipline of doing the right thing repeatedly, especially when there is nothing to gain from it.
That is Kylan.
He pays attention.
He notices things.
He forms opinions thoughtfully and holds them lightly.
He has an unusual ability to see people’s flaws without allowing those flaws to become the entirety of who they are. There is generosity in the way he regards other people. Space. Patience. Curiosity.
As I’ve gotten older, I have realised how much of adult life is shaped by our inability to encounter people as they are. We carry old wounds into new relationships. We mistake previous disappointments for wisdom. We decide who people are before they have had the opportunity to show us.
Kylan has always resisted that impulse.
He gives people room.
Room to be complicated.
Room to change.
Room to reveal themselves over time.
He loves people in a way that feels more courageous than he probably gives himself credit for. Not because he lacks discernment, but because he refuses to let cynicism become a substitute for wisdom.
I learn from him constantly.
About observation. About attention. About extending grace without abandoning discernment.
About the difference between seeing people clearly and judging them harshly.
About how much becomes possible when another human being feels genuinely known.
Over the last five years, I have watched him become an extraordinary writer. I have watched him find his voice and grow into it. I have watched him graduate from university, navigate grief, pursue ambitions, survive disappointments and continue to discover who he is.
I have listened to him speak publicly and felt that particular mixture of pride and disbelief that accompanies witnessing someone you love become fully themselves.
Along the way, we built a life of surfing lessons and virtual reality games, Long conversations in new restaurants.
Prepping dinner together, while listening stories about heartbreak, ambitions and frustrations.
Laughing at family stories that have become so embellished over time they now exist somewhere between memory and mythology.
Watching him get fitted for his first custom suit
These are the moments that become woven into the fabric of your life so completely that you can no longer remember where the thread began.
People occasionally ask me what it is like being a stepmother.
The truth is that I rarely spend much time thinking about the title.
I think about Kylan.
I think about the privilege of watching someone become.
I think about the strange and beautiful ways family forms.
Family has always felt expansive to me. Large enough to accommodate biology, friendship, circumstance, choice and love all at once. Large enough to hold the people who arrive through birth and the people who arrive through other routes entirely.
Love is unconcerned with categories.
It settles where it settles.
It grows where it is nurtured.
And over time, another person’s happiness becomes connected to your own. Their losses hurt. Their successes matter. Their wellbeing becomes something you carry alongside your own.
When my marriage ended, more than a few people suggested that distance would be sensible. I understood why.
But some relationships eventually exist beyond the circumstances that introduced them.
By the time you realise how much someone means to you, the relationship has already taken root.
Kylan is one of my people.
That remains true.
I am not his mother.
I was not there for his first breath, his first words, his first day of school, or the countless moments that shaped the boy he once was.
What I have been privileged to witness is the young man he has become.
And what a privilege that has been.
A spring afternoon in New York brought a young man up a subway staircase and into my life.
Five years later, I am still grateful that he smiled, pulled down his mask, and welcomed me in.
