How do you celebrate a national holiday for fathers with a guy who shows up a couple of times a week to play video games and sleep with your mother? He’s just a guy. Father’s Day isn’t for guys.

The whole weirdness of fathers is getting weirder. It’s like living in a town where half of the houses are gradually replaced with huts. The people in houses come to be seen as lucky, instead of absolutely normal. “Hey,” say the people in huts, “At least, we don’t live in tents.” “Hey,” say the people in houses. “Huts are adorable!”

In 2007, forty percent of American newborns were born to unmarried mothers. Forty percent. Compare that with 1940, when just under four percent of children were the offspring of unmarried mothers. The numbers reflect the vast wave of Hispanic immigration, but the differences, as everyone knows, are profound across ethnic lines.

The proportion of births among single women in their twenties and thirties has soared. Between 2002 and 2007, the birth rate increased by 13 percent for women aged 20-24 and 34 percent for women aged 30-34, according to a recent report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  Roughly one in five births to women in their thirties was to unmarried mothers in 2007.

A father in the house is like a roof over your head. You can survive without it. It’s not the end of the world if you don’t have it. Okay, maybe it’s a luxury to have a roof. But, it’s a luxury that feels necessary.

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