According to my calendar, Sunday is Father's Day. Sunday is also the day of my beloved former roomie Lyd's wedding to a properly conservadox Jew, which I will not be attending because it requires a plane ticket. I sent her a tasteful gift, though, so I am still within both propriety and personal budget.
Father's Day is a holiday that I was excused from for a very long time. My dad died when I was sixteen, and was at least semi-dead in many senses a good long while before that, so my relationship to the holiday has always been one of sadness and ignorance. Sort of like the legless kid at school was excused from running the mile in P.E., I am the fatherless kid who is excused from any type of acknowledgment of Father's Day.
Since getting married, I now have a living, breathing father-in-law, which throws a big wrench in my comfort zone with the holiday, which does not do anything for me but remind me of all the different ways I was cheated out of having a real father. In the visual culture of an American father's day, one finds cards and gifts with a sporting or necktie motif. One does not usually find cards with teenage girls sobbing next to their decrepit 81-year-old father's hospital bed while a million tubes deliver oxygen and morphine to his withered frame. One could argue that making a semi-conscious decision to father a child who would have to face that kind of loss at an age so young that you can't argue away the cruelty with the excuses of love and maternal desire I've been told my whole life, that I should get a free pass on Father's Day to not have to have any contact with cards and phone calls or hearty brunches.
There are several ways in which I commit the oxymoronic argument that I should never have been born, that my father should have told my mother no, that if she wanted kids she should go find herself a younger man. He obliged her, of course, abandoning me in my teens and passing onto me with a chronic connective tissue disorder that literally left me with a hole where my heart should be.* My mother, a whole other can of beans, sort of doesn't or won't take responsibility for any of this. I can't judge or really know what goes on in her head, but I understand that trying to convince my mother she made a grievous mistake in having me for the above reason is heartless and assuming I truly know her motives is a callous error on my part.
The first thing I learned was that old people die and that my dad was an old person and that he was going to die. It colored every day of my childhood, right up until the day he finally did die. What a dreadful thing to do to a child, and yet it happens all the time. The NYT even runs articles on it and calls it a phenomenon.
Anyway, let this essay be a reminder to Bob that he should not forget to acknowledge Father's Day this weekend and that I will be sneaking out of my duty on this one, because losing my father is still something I deal with daily, even though he has been gone exactly half my life now. For all my conscious knowledge to the contrary, in my mind, fathers are always dead, and this holiday doesn't exist.
*my Marfan Syndrome has never been proven by medical science to be related to my father's age (65) when I was conceived. It is a theory that I've held for quite sometime, and has been backed up in a few articles I've found on the internet.
Posted by Zerd at June 9, 2008 09:22 PMI give you the virtual fist-bump of solidarity. I hate Fathers' Day so much that I've become really good at forgetting when the hell it happens.
Posted by: K at June 9, 2008 11:52 PM