Father’s Day a Complicated Holiday
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
Sunday is Father’s Day, a time to celebrate dear old dad.
It’s one of the most challenging days for gift givers because most dads, when asked what gift they might like, play the “I don’t need anything” card.
Research suggests a father’s influence, when it is steady and affectionate, tends to outlast the season of childhood and settle into the architecture of a life. Some studies provide points to a familiar but often underappreciated truth: involved fathers shape not only what children know, but how they move through the world, how they trust, how they risk, and how they recover.
For those of us of a certain age, we are left with memories of our fathers, often remembered in fragments. These fragments are everlasting and sometimes provide shortcut conversations with siblings, a private curriculum.
What is remembered most often is not so much our father’s instruction as it is about the way he calibrated our lives. If you had a good father, and I am blessed to be among that tribe, you might have learned most from how your dad lived in those disguised ordinary, everyday moments and how he related to those around him, especially those in need.
The involved father, according to the research, is also associated with stronger cognitive development, better academic outcomes, greater emotional security, fewer behavioral problems, and healthier social confidence.
A good father also provides something of a buffer as we grow up, running interreference for us in those situations we were yet prepared to tackle.
Dads often operate like anti-virus computer program, always running in the background, and even sometimes unwittingly acting to cause problems that were not there. It’s part of the job.
Many of us who are now left with only memories of our fathers now face the challenges of fatherhood. We are to do several contradictory things at once: to be steady without being rigid, gentle without being vague, protective without becoming a barricade, and present in a world that keeps trying to make presence into a luxury. Not a job description for the timid.
It is one of the few human roles in which love never seems to be quite enough on its own; love must also learn scheduling, patience, fatigue management, diplomacy, and the art of answering the same question 25 times without sounding defeated.
We learn that children are not abstract problems to be solved but moving targets of feelings, appetites, and inventions. A father is expected to be the family’s anchor, though anchors are not usually asked to improvise.
We are asked to offer structure while remaining open to surprise, because the child we are raising is never quite the child we imagined, no matter the age of the child. By the time we begin to understand one stage of their lives, the next has already begun, carrying new needs, new fears, and new forms of mischief.
There are also the emotional challenges of the job. Fathers are often told, explicitly or by implication, to be strong, but strength in fatherhood is less about hardness than about endurance. It means absorbing disappointments without passing them along, surviving your own irritations, and understanding that children remember tone as much or more than instruction. The challenge is that the ordinary tools of adulthood — efficiency, authority, confidence — are only partly useful in a house with children. What works better, most of the time, is humility.
And then there is the quiet terror of responsibility. To be a father is to discover that your habits are more contagious than your opinions. Children do not merely listen to what we say; they study how we live, how we treat other people, how we handle failure, how we apologize, whether we keep our word.
A father is asked to spend his years realizing he is being watched in ways he never expected.
What makes it difficult is that it is so important. There are few tasks in life in which the stakes are so intimate and so invisible. A father can do many things well and still worry that he has missed the one that mattered most. That anxiety, irritating as it is, may be part of the bargain. The attempt to be both ordinary and consequential at the same time is never easy.
Father’s Day is not celebrated in the same way as Mother's Day. Mothers are revered, honored and cherished on their day, and rightly so. Few challenges are greater on this earth than that of being a good mother.
If you attend church, you are likely familiar with the Mother’s Day service which honors, and often bestows gifts, on the mothers. The oldest and youngest mothers are lauded, and the sermon is some version of “Our Mothers: One of God’s Greatest Blessings.”
A few weeks later, on Father’s Day, the sermons often seem to shift in the opposite direction, with a sermon such as “What’s Wrong with Our Fathers.”
But none of this seems to bother most dads, who are already thinking about lunch and what color socks they will be give along with the annual Father’s Day card. Or the call of their grown children no longer living nearby.
It is a day we smile and remember those little scraps of wisdom our fathers taught us at odd moments when they didn’t realize they were teaching us anything and know our kids are doing the same. They won’t remember any Father’s Day sermon but our hope is they will hold in their hearts those scraps from our lives which matter.
