Amazing Fathers

Elsewhere, I suggested that recent Harlequin romance novels focusing on fatherhood offer interesting glimpses into the current state of courtship, marriage, and romantic fantasy in our society. Exhibit A was Do You Take This Child? in which Slade Garrett, heretofore a love’em-and-leave’em type, turns into a wonderful guy at the very last moment, proposing marriage to Dr. Shelia Pollack while she is literally in the hospital maternity ward, about to deliver the baby that had been conceived nine months earlier on their “one night of passion.” For Exhibit B, let’s look at Are You My Daddy?

Cody, a “little cowpoke” who is five years old, “didn’t know why Daddy didn’t want to live with them no more.” Joe Rawlins, the nice man at the rodeo: “Where’s your dad?” Cody: “I dunno.” Yet at that very moment, when Joe first meets the boy, Joe “made a decision. Against his will. Against his better judgment. No matter the consequences. He’d watch out for Cody . . .” Moments later, Cody takes a spill and is hurt. His mother, Marty, rushes to him. The doctor at the rodeo fears that Cody might have suffered a concussion. Marty needs to get him quickly to the hospital for X rays.

Joe suddenly appears: “I’ll give you a lift.” His “deep, resonating voice, full of authority, made her turn. A cowboy stood a few feet away on the other side of the medical trailer, leaning against a dark counter, his arms crossed over his wide, sturdy chest. Was this her knight in shining armor, ready to slash through her problems as easily as an army storming a castle? No, he was just a cowboy. A good-looking cowboy to boot! And that meant trouble.” But just then, “before she could speak,” Cody reaches up to Joe, crying “Daddy!” Yes, it turns out that Cody’s “mild concussion” has produced “a mild form of amnesia.” Cody now believes that Joe, the nice man at the rodeo, is his daddy!

What to do? Should Joe make his explanations and leave? Set the boy straight? No. For “some insane reason,” Joe “couldn’t turn his back” on Cody and Marty. He decides to stay with them at the hospital. He mentions that he is leaving tomorrow for a rodeo in Oklahoma. Cody: “When will you be home, Daddy?”  Joe: “Soon, son, soon.” And what does Marty make of this amazing turn of events? “For some reason, one she couldn’t fathom, she wanted to believe Joe was different from her ex. She wanted to believe he would come back. That he had good intentions. That he was dependable. That he had a kind, tender heart.”

Is Marty right to believe in Joe? It was all happening so quickly. Would this “brooding cowboy” with a painful past “promise to stay around forever?” Not to give away the ending, but the answer is yes.

What should we make of this story? Partly, of course, like Do You Take This Child?, it’s the old story of the gallant knight who rescues the lady in distress. But the whole plot is so bizarrely unbelievable. Cody falls asleep, as it were, and wakes up to find . . . a brand new daddy! A mother who bitterly resents her ex-husband and distrusts men in general - “She didn’t want to rely on this man. Or anyone.” - suddenly encourages a perfect stranger to start pretending that he is her husband and the father of her child. But most of all, Joe Rawlins, a drifting rodeo cowboy who is about as steadfast and domestic as, say, Slade Garrett, all of a sudden, and for absolutely no reason, becomes the most nurturing guy in the world, eager to play house, be a tender-hearted companion for life, and raise another man’s son.

These stories appear to be trying, without success, to combine two worlds. In one, men are unreliable, women are independent and resentful, and children don’t have fathers. In the other, men protect women and children. These stories always seem to begin in the first world and, propelled largely by radical and inexplicable changes in male behavior, end up in the second. If only it worked that way in real life. 

Sources: Marie Ferrarella, Do You Take This Child? (New York: Silhouette Books, 1996). Leanna Wilson, Are You My Daddy? (New York: Silhouette Books, 1998), 7, 13, 21, 23, 31, 36-39.

First published Summer 2000.