Father’s Day
June 17, 2018
I WENT into Target the other day to look for a new thermal lunch-bag for my husband when I noticed a big rack with Father’s Day cards. I stopped to look at them — most of them were $6! — and noticed one that was for “two Dads,” obviously a card for a “gay” couple. Would anyone buy this card? I wondered. Very possibly.
It is heart-breaking to think about it. It’s heart-breaking for any child to be forced to live a lie. One father is all we get. Some may seem like fathers to us. But we only have one. Nothing else is possible.
That’s the beauty of fatherhood. Nothing — not death, not divorce, not abandonment, not a cultural revolution against fatherhood — can change this fact. And nothing can entirely sever the tie between a father and his child. That tie is biological and spiritual. People who haven’t seen or spoken to their fathers for years still think of them and are affected by them. Fatherhood used to be cultural too but that is very much breaking down. An enormous, heavily-funded state apparatus is directed to keeping fathers out of their homes. But no tyranny can ultimately succeed at this project however many families it cruelly and coldly destroys. Fathers will always live in their children’s hearts and cannot ever be entirely exiled from them. Even a bad father lives on.
In Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, the protagonist is a young boy born without a father. The trajectory of his life is established from the beginning by his fatherlessness.
I was born at Blunderstone, in Suffolk, or ‘there by’, as they say in Scotland. I was a posthumous child. My father’s eyes had closed upon the light of this world six months, when mine opened on it. There is something strange to me, even now, in the reflection that he never saw me; and something stranger yet in the shadowy remembrance that I have of my first childish associations with his white grave–stone in the churchyard, and of the indefinable compassion I used to feel for it lying out alone there in the dark night, when our little parlour was warm and bright with fire and candle, and the doors of our house were—almost cruelly, it seemed to me sometimes—bolted and locked against it.
The book goes on to give what seem to be living examples of every kind of father: the cruel stepfather, the indebted and reckless father, the overly protective father, the devoted father. And it ends in great happiness. David Copperfield becomes a father himself. Could Dickens have imagined a world with “two Dads?” He might not have been able to imagine it, but he could understand it. The human scene, he knew, was varied and constantly produces new eccentricities.
What about those children with “two Dads?”
Stay tuned. They will someday tell the world they only have one. Greeting cards and big, corporate retailers cannot change nature.
Happy Father’s Day to all fathers, both good and bad, both appreciated and under-appreciated. Never doubt that you are loved and have a permanent place in the hearts of your children.
— Comments —
Mrs. T. writes:
“Fathers will always live in their children’s hearts and cannot ever be entirely exiled from them. Even a bad father lives on.”
My husband has never known his father. Around 14 years ago my should-have-been father-in-law wandered into my husband’s place of employment. To this day we don’t know if it was on purpose or simply by chance. My husband, without ever having laid eyes on his father, instantly knew who he was. I am not sure how my husband knew so definitively, but he did. Even an absent father leaves his mark. Perhaps even more so in some cases.
