Fatherhood and Father's Day

This Father’s Day, my seventh, seemed different than the previous six. I wasn’t enthusiastic about celebrating it. It didn’t feel like a special day. It didn’t feel like it should be a special day.

The idea for a day to celebrate fathers came to life in 1909’s Spokane, Washington. While listening to a Mother’s Day sermon, Sonora Smart Dodd thought of establishing a day to honor her father and fathers like him who stood courageously and selflessly for their family. Sonora’s father, Jackson, was a veteran of the Civil War and widowed father of six.

Sonora approached the Spokane Ministerial Alliance with her day of recognition, and suggested June in honor of her father’s birthday. The Alliance settled on the third Sunday of the month, and on June 19th, 1910, the first Father’s Day was celebrated in Spokane.

Popularity for the day spread throughout the country and was soon observed in communities nationwide. In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson declared the 3rd Sunday of June Father's Day in a signed proclamation, and in 1972 President Richard Nixon established the permanent national observance of Father’s Day.

The months leading up to my first Father’s Day, namely from about March to June of 2001, were afire with questions, self-doubt, worry, and perhaps a primal fear of the unknown. Born in May, my daughter was still a couple months away from introducing herself to the world at the time, and like every soon-to-be father in the world, I had no idea what to expect. And like most honest fathers, I was trapped under the weight of a single question: “Can I really pull this job off?”

I had accepted long ago the possibility that some of the choices I made in life were not the best for my future; I’d misstepped a time or twelve, taken the road most traveled, and countless other metaphorical aphorisms (insert your favorite here). Now I was co-creator of this entirely new person. I couldn’t afford to make bad decisions anymore.

And then J was born.

That single sentence is all I can muster to fully express the universal magnitude of every emotion and thought that hit me in that moment in the hospital. That afternoon I stood a little taller, my shoulders back a little more. And I held the responsibility of the future in my arms.

Last month we celebrated J’s seventh birthday, and in August, we’ll party again, this time for K’s second birthday. Between these two incredibly important days, I was left to wonder why Father’s Day wasn’t shaping up to be a special day in my mind.

My answer took shape Sunday morning, though I recognize I already had the answer back in the vaporous ether of my brain. I spent the day with my wife and children. What we did is unimportant. That little detail is why I wasn’t celebrating the day. My Father’s Day was generally like every other day since J was born. I spent it being a father.

Calling such a day “Father’s Day” implied to me that every other day was different, like every other day I wasn’t being recognized as a dad, or that I wasn’t as appreciated as I was on Sunday.

Everyone who knows me knows I’m not the best father, but I am among the most fortunate. Seven years later I still have the questions, the self-doubt and worry, even that primal fear of the unknown. And every day I’m struck with the same question: “Can I really pull this job off?”

And now, seven years later, I look at my daughter and son and think, “So far, so good.”

“Any fool can have a child. That doesn’t make you a father. It’s the courage to raise a child that makes you a father.”
~Barack Obama, Father's Day 2008