A Father's Day Card

Truth Thursday

If Mother's Day sticks in my craw as a Hallmark-created holiday, and yet one around which I still build a few societal-imposed expectations, Father's Day always creeps up on me as a non-event. Arriving in the midst of year-end school mayhem, graduations, the start of camp and summer activities, Father's Day always seems a bit like an afterthought. So much so that last year, it didn't even occur to me to write about it.

So I decided to remedy that and approach Father's Day this year with a soupcon of respect and a good, upbeat attitude about the fathers in my life.

That's the easy part.

The hard part is figuring out where to begin.

How about with my own dad. What is it about little girls and their dads?  My father was a high school English teacher, the kind of teacher that students, when they run into him on the street 20, 30 maybe 40 years later, stop to say hello and tell him what an impact he had on their lives. I loved visiting Jamaica High School with him more than anything else in the world. He would sometimes take me to their "Sing" when I was still in elementary school, and I thought it was the most magical place to be, just my dad and me (and all those cool teenagers.)

As I got older, my father took on the mantle of the sage life coach – sending me letters when I was away at camp and then at college that were philosophical and rife with meaning. I loved getting letters from him, and loved that he was so different from the other fathers I knew. He was quiet and intensely intellectual, and I always thought I would model myself on him.

As life would have it, I turned out to be a whole lot less intellectually inclined than I had imagined, and teaching is not my calling. As I grew into adulthood, I wound up being more like my mother – community-oriented and social – but have always maintained a little corner of my heart and my head that echo my father's love of books and deep thinking. In that, I will always be my father's daughter.

My father-in-law. My father-in-law is one of the most deeply passionate and caring people I have ever known. He came into my husband's life as his stepdad at a critical moment in my husband's teenage years, and he has spent the 30+ years that he has been married to my husband's mother offering support, wisdom and unconditional love, and has also been an incredible role model for what it means to be a good man. He is a loving Zayde (Grandpa) and my kids adore seeing him and being with him and they learn from him when we are together. He is also a fine poet, and I feel honored to share our words with each other.

My husband. We live in an age where dads are expected to be full partners in the parenting of their children. When our oldest son was born, my husband applied for and fought with his employer to take a month of paternity leave to learn how to be a dad to our baby, something that was still pretty unusual 16 years ago in our community. He set off a domino effect with our dad friends, some of whom also chose to take extended time off when their babies were born.

While I was a nervous first-time mother and worried that he wouldn't change the diaper correctly or feed the baby the right bottle at the right time, having him home was the best possible transition for me to return to work. It allowed me to go back, comfortable in the knowledge that my baby was being cared for by the only other person in the world who loved him as much as I did. It taught me early on to trust my husband, and to recognize that just because he is doing something differently from me, it doesn't mean it's not right. An important parenting lesson, one that is especially valuable these days as I force him to shoulder the driving lessons for that same baby who is now our teenage son.

Our kids deeply respect and love their dad, despite his corny jokes and his constant desire to sing what they perceive to be ancient musical melodies (circa 1976/K-Tel Music Express-style.) He is a present and daily part of their lives, and I can't imagine raising a family without his support and strong sense of morality and connection.

We have many friends who are fathers – strong and loving men, all of whom fully participate and engage in family life in way that simply wasn't the norm 35 years ago when my father was raising me. In fact, my father wound up being a single father when I was a teenager, a really unusual scenario in that era. It was not a role he chose but one that was forced upon him when my mother moved out. And while there were many difficult moments in that strange and foreign land he found himself staking out, he was always my dad – smart, sensitive, funny and loving, and trying his best because he loved us.

As mothers, we feel a nurturing bond with our children unlike anything we have ever known before. If we are lucky enough to have a partner, and if that partner happens to be a dad, then we are blessed with the gift of a man's point of view in every aspect of raising our children – from tossing them in the air when they're babies (eek!) to allowing them to eat hot dogs for dinner every night when mom is on a business trip (yuck) to learning to accept different ways of looking at the world of our children.

So on this Father's Day, I give thanks for all the dads in my life – the one who raised me, the one who partly raised my husband, and the one who is offering my children important life lessons of strength, smarts, and sensitivity, along with some goofy songs for the ride.

 

 Photo of me and my dad with my daughter about 12 years ago.

 

 

Comments

[who-cares]

Father's day is in fact, regarded by most in society as an obligatory afterthought to mother's day. It shows in the huge differences in retail spending on mother's day gifts as opposed to father's day gifts. And of course the typical woman will ponder what the man has done for her. It's never quite enough, of course, in our female obsessed society.

[Linda Keely]

Thanks so much for sharing, Karen. I loved the piece and the picture!

[Julie Bindeman, Psy-D]

Hi Karen.
The Post had a great op-ed piece about this last week which was similar to what you wrote about. Amazing what changes have occurred in a generation of dads...