When you’ve been an absent dad for most – or sometimes all – of your life, some days hurt more than others.
The most painful of course are Christmas Day, New Year’s Day even, birthdays, Easter Day, school open days, family days. Those are the days we just learn to turn the lights off.
We have a few beers too many, slump in our dingy flat on a couch that stinks of the dog and flick on a dystopian zombie movie.
On these days we are truly the walking dead. Dead eyes. Dead minds.
But we get over it, don’t we. Well, many of us do.
I deliberately didn’t mention Father’s Day in the list above though. And that’s because Father’s Day is a bit different.
Some people say that it doesn’t really exist, it’s a commercial expedient and only came about as a misguided punch in the air for Men’s Rights … Men’s Rights? Do we have any? Do you know in the UK we don’t even have a Minister for Men!
Father’s Day is a forgotten day, just like the people it is supposed to represent.
In fact though, the concept of it came from the simple love of a daughter for her dad,
Sonora Smart Dodd from Spokane, Washington, at the beginning of the last century.
Father’s Day is a lonesome day. It gives you the blues.
And sometimes you punish yourself by telling yourself you deserve to be lonesome. You were a bad dad, you didn’t care, you tried to get out of paying 30pc maintenance, you were a drunk, a drug addict, a thug, a liar, a cheat, an out-of-work womaniser, a wife-batterer, a bully. An evil person!
And some of us are all of those things!
But not all of us.
Most of us are nice middle-class, or working class, blokes with a steady, not too well-paid job driving a parcel van or working in a factory with a leaky second-hand Ford Focus to get us around, maybe an on-off girlfriend who works in an insurance office or at the Co-op.
But you never hear that description coming out of an angry exe’s mouth, or bandied around the hallowed halls of the world’s secretive family courts do you?
No, you don’t.
Very few people actually ever say, hang on this bloke was just the victim of a failed love affair, marriage, relationship and was a victim just like his exe and the children.
We all got hurt and most of us, men, women and children will pay for the break-up emotionally for the rest of our lives.
I have a good relationship with all my children now and we are in touch regularly even though I live in Eastern Europe, one child lives in Yorkshire, another in Shropshire and another in Australia of all places.
Father’s Day is on a Sunday so no postal delivery. I’ll check the post box today (Saturday) but …
And tomorrow (Sunday) I’ll check my phone for messages. They do arrive on occasions, funny ones, memes, grotesque smiling faces, a few X’s on the bottom representing kisses.
X marks the spot of love.
That thumb-typed message makes you feel good for while, you forget there has been no card, not six pack of beer and not even a phone call.
So, dads, let’s all realise we are actually NOT alone – that we are exactly half of the process of love that brought our children in to the world and we love them as much as we hope they love us.
