The following reflection on Fathers’ Day was written by my husband and fellow writer. I thought it contained some pretty important thoughts, and I wanted to share them with you. The picture below isn’t actually my husband or kids, but I thought it was a nice pic for Fathers’ Day. It’s from blog.fachisthers.com
So, here it is, Fathers’ Day again, and twice in the past twenty-four hours I have heard people—well, men actually; specifically fathers—refer to the day in ways that make it sound like the consolation prize/year’s-worth-of-Free-Turtle-Wax version of Mothers’ Day.
Yesterday, driving into Kansas City to visit my own father, a disc jockey asked men to call in and tell her whether Fathers’ Day was a ‘real’ holiday or a made-up holiday. The first man to call in was himself a father who affirmed that it is, indeed, a made-up holiday. His wife, he said, deserves her own holiday, but he certainly doesn’t. When pressed, he said that she puts up with the kids, works outside the home as well as within, generally makes life nice for everyone in the house, and he doesn’t do much of anything.
The disc jockey tried to wheedle him into admitting he does more than he was letting on. “Noooothing?” she asked. “You don’t even take out the traaaash?”
“Oh, I do some things,” he said, “mostly around the house and with the car. I do stuff with the kids when she needs a break.”
“But you have a job, right? You bring home a paycheck.”
“Oh, sure, sure. But she does the real work. What I do is nothing. She’s the one who needs a special day, not me.”
A few hours later, I was talking with a friend on the phone and he mentioned that his wife is upset because she can’t afford to make a big deal out of Fathers’ Day this year. Their family finances have been upset by an unexpected death in the family, a long, drawn-out trip to Arkansas, and lost shifts at the hospital. The checking account is bare. At dinner last night, he said, she broke into tears because he gave her a great Mothers’ Day and she can’t reciprocate. And his response was to put his arms around her and coax a smile out of her by saying, “Sweetheart, Mothers’ Day is a real holiday.”
He wouldn’t dream of not celebrating Mothers’ Day in a big way, he told me. But Fathers’ Day? It’s enough that she would do something if she could. He really doesn’t need anything more than that, because he doesn’t really do anything around the house anyway.
These are not isolated sentiments. My own father and both my grandfathers used to say the same thing: Mothers’ Day is real, Fathers’ Day isn’t. And the sense seemed to be that everyday is Fathers’ Day when you get to go to work, and deal with the kids only a few hours a day, and come home to a cooked meal, and not go through childbirth.
A massively informal poll I conducted with this one friend on the phone, the guy on the radio, and my two brothers, seems to confirm that men see Mothers’ Day as the day they formally thank their wives for 364 days of work (365 if the women have to clean up from their own Mothers’ Day breakfast-in-bed), and Fathers’ Day is the day they feel guilty—perhaps are purposely made to feel guilty, under the guise of being ‘appreciated’—for not doing much of anything. I call this the ‘Fathers’ Day as Giant Stick to Goad Me Into Doing More Around the House’-theory of the holiday.
Sounds like a conspiracy to me. If it’s true. But I don’t think it’s true.
I think what’s going on is that men are trained now, from an early age, to think of their contribution as niggling compared to the contribution made by their wives. This might be an unintended result of the Women’s Movement, I don’t know. I wonder if it’s not the adult male corollary of something I see my children do, when I say to one, “You did a great job on that picture,” and the other will say, “Why don’t you like my picture?” Or I’ll give one a hug and the other will say, “I’m not special.”
The idea seems to be that love (or praise or whatever) is a commodity, and there’s only so much of it to go around. If I give it to one, then there’s not enough left for all the others. I have to remind my children that love and praise and appreciation are not limited. They are drawn from a bottomless well; no one will go thirsty just because someone else’s bucket is full.
Men—being the either/or, black-and-white thinkers that they are—have gone from thinking that theirs is the only contribution in the house that matters, to thinking that their contribution doesn’t matter at all. Now that we celebrate what we used to derisively refer to as ‘women’s work,’ now that we have two-income families and mom is just as likely as dad to work outside the home, there seems to be a sense among men that their contribution doesn’t really matter anymore.
“She does the real work. What I do is nothing. She’s the one who needs a special day, not me. I’m not special.”
With the men I know, that’s not false modesty. They say that because they really believe it. My friend on the phone really believes it; the guy on the radio seems to believe it too.
Perhaps we should take the opportunity this Fathers’ Day to remind our fathers that their contributions, however much they wish to downplay them, are real and vital—that their contribution is not less because others are now doing more.
Fathers’ Day is not a consolation prize. It’s a real holiday, just as real as Mothers’ Day. Men should be helped to see what they do as enabling the family to function, in ways every bit as important as what their wives do.
The well of appreciation is bottomless; there’s plenty enough to go around.
Tags:
brother,
children,
finance,
finances,
income families,
kids,
modesty,
mothers
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