A mother, a father, a baby: a family

THOMPSON E-mail: Click here

© St. Petersburg Times
published February 16, 2002

The week before last at Office Depot I saw Steve LaBrake and Lynne McCarter at one of the photocopy machines. Their baby, not yet two months old, slept in a baby carrier. Lynne was wearing jogging pants and a nice T-shirt. Her red hair was shiny. On the third finger of her left hand she wore what looked like a wedding band.

She never lifted her head up from the machine. If she's like most new mothers, she probably didn't get much sleep the night before, or the night before that. If they're like most parents, they were probably praying that they'd get the copying done before their little son woke up and let out a scream echoing throughout the store.

Steve looked tired, very tired.

I think it was the next day their house, that dream house in South Tampa we've heard so much about, went up for sale.

There is something about seeing the actual people involved in news stories, seeing them not in a news conference or some public hearing but doing something commonplace, something we all do. Like shopping at the supermarket or photocopying at Office Depot.

It humanizes them.

What I saw was a young family. Well, Steve is not so young, but an older daddy in his second family is not unusual in my neighborhood, where they also live, or maybe anywhere.

Of course there are complications here, lots of them.

Like the questionable dealings surrounding the building of their dream house. Like that Steve, fired from heading Tampa's housing department, doesn't have a job. Like that Steve promoted Lynne over and over again, from a clerk to a $55,000 redevelopment counselor while they were having an affair. Like the fact that Steve still has a wife.

Nevertheless, now there is a baby.

And this is a family. A mother with her first child, a father with much older children whom, let us assume, he cares deeply about and with whom he must forge a new relationship that fits in with the reality of his present life.

This is the time in a woman's life when she is most fragile and most likely to be overwhelmed. In one of the conundrums of motherhood, it's also the time when she is most needed in the care of another human being, a helpless little baby. The sleeplessness, the hormonal imbalances, the crushing realization of a lifelong responsibility toward this tiny person who seems to cry an awful lot and there's not much you can do about it -- all of this can make a new mother weepy.

Even in the best of circumstances -- enough money, a legal marriage, good health, a comfortable home -- this is a critical time in a relationship.

This is not the best of circumstances.

The couple owes a ton of money. Steve awaits a divorce trial next month. He is recovering from a quadruple heart bypass. Their new house in on the market.

Lynne is 31 now. She was 25 or so when she took up with Steve, her boss and nearly 20 years her senior. I don't know if she was an innocent babe or just a babe or maybe a little of both, but she's not the first woman who has fallen in love with a married boss. Steve is not the first man to fall in love with a younger woman who worked for him. It happens all the time.

Of course they made some real dumb decisions, but we've all done dumb things and the dumbness tends to run in direct relation to the emotional conflict at hand.

I drove past their house a couple of days ago. It's on an unglamorous block in South Tampa, a huge house in a neighborhood of nice, but much more modest, houses. There is a Smith & Associates For Sale sign in the front yard.

Steve, in shorts, was sweeping the driveway.

- Sandra Thompson is a writer living in Tampa. She can be reached at tampa@sptimes.com. City Life appears on Saturday.

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