Bad Mothers and Good Fathers

I just got back from a picnic lunch in the park with a neighbouring mom-friend and her daughter. She brought along a portable craft carrier replete with coloured paper, crayons, glitter and more. “Have you guys made your Father’s Day cards yet?” “Uh. No.” The tradition in our home is to wait until the morning of and then hastily fold a printer sheet in half and scribble on it. But whatever. We’ll try it this way.

So Young C, at the age of three, had his first meaningful experience with glue and glitter and we made a very special card for Dad.  That is good because aside from hammering home how completely I have neglected the visual arts (phone call already placed to local nursery school) it reminded me that Sunday is Father’s Day. And good fathers are the perfect complement to bad mothers. My husband is a good father. My father is a good father and his father before him.

Good fathers are completely different from good mothers. They are not at all — really, not at all — concerned with how other people care for their own kids. They play with their children because it’s fun and not because some expert has prescribed a certain amount of father/child playtime per week. They work inside or outside of the home and never wonder if that might somehow affect the quality of their love. They attach no morality to questions of childbirth and baby feeding and would only ever make things from scratch if they like doing that sort of thing. Good fathers don’t put on performances for the rest of the fathers; they measure their worth with the love and respect of their families.

Also. Fathers are strong. They carry kids for blocks and lift them way up high. They wrestle and tickle and run and catch and throw. Fathers know a lot of stuff. They know baseball stats, or obscure music, or how cars work. They know cool stuff. Fathers keep you safe at night and know that rules are to be broken.

Good fathers don’t even know when they are married to bad mothers. They still think we’re doing an alright job and will back us up. So I’m happy to take a day to celebrate fathers. I may be a bad mother, but I might yet make an alright wife and daughter.