Happy Father’s Day
June 16, 2024
Dad’s Coming! Winslow Homer (1873)
THIS 2010 piece, “Are Fathers Necessary?,” published just around Father’s Day in The Atlantic almost 15 years ago, sadly could have been written yesterday:
The quality of parenting … is what really matters, not gender. But the real challenge to our notion of the “essential” father might well be the lesbian mom. On average, lesbian parents spend more time with their children than fathers do. They rate disputes with their children as less frequent than do hetero couples, and describe co-parenting more compatibly and with greater satisfaction. Their kids perceive their parents to be more available and dependable than do the children of heteros. They also discuss more emotional issues with their parents. They have fewer behavioral problems, and show more interest in and try harder at school.
Got it, Dad? We don’t need you.
The most important institution — fatherhood — is the least celebrated. The deference and respect due to fathers is so often attacked most people don’t notice it. The government even conspires to keep fathers out of their homes.
Can you imagine what it’s like to know your father spent 15 minutes conceiving you in a loveless act and then handed over his contribution to a medical technician? It hurts. Losing a father through death hurts, but losing a father through cold deliberation and medical innovation must hurt even more.
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. It mattered that his father was gone:
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 gravestone 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.
Dickens goes on to portray many types of fathers: the cruel stepfather, the indebted and reckless father, the overly protective father, the devoted father. Finally, David Copperfield, fatherless boy, 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 constantly producing new deviations. This tendency to spiritualize the sexes, to make sex a product of mind and emotion only, is based on an ancient hatred of the body and the composite nature of the human being.
What about those children with “two Dads” or “two Moms?”
They will someday tell the world they only have one of each. Greeting cards and corporate retailers can’t change nature or suppress their pain.
Happy Father’s Day to all fathers, both good and bad, both appreciated and under-appreciated. You are essential, whatever the world says.
