My stepdaughter likes me more than she likes her mother, and her mother knows it.

I came into this when Maya was seven. She's fourteen now. I have never tried to replace anyone — I was deliberate about that, I read things, I stayed in the background for two full years before I ever enforced a rule.

But I'm the one who taught her to drive a stick in a parking lot. I'm the one she called from a party at eleven-thirty last October. I'm the one she tells things to.

And my wife is a good mother. I need that on the record because I've watched her sit outside Maya's door for an hour trying to find a way in.

The problem is that Maya and her mother are the same person. Same temper, same timing, same way of going quiet. They collide. And I'm the neutral country, and neutrality is very easy to mistake for virtue.

Six weeks ago my wife said, in the kitchen, without any heat in her voice: "It must be nice to be the one she wants."

I said something stupid. I said "she loves you, she just shows it differently," which is the kind of thing you say when you're not going to engage with what someone actually said.

What she actually said was: this hurts.

And here's what I haven't admitted to anyone. I like it. I like being chosen. I was not the favorite in my own family and I grew up around that, and something in me gets fed by this and I did not go looking for that about myself.

Is there a way to step back that isn't abandoning a kid who trusts me? Has anyone done it.