I found this year’s father’s day to be cold and empty. I went through social media trying to find sweet and cute pictures of fathers and their kids, and I found so few of them. I wondered: Is it because fathers never take responsibility, or is it because kids do not appreciate them?
I found that there are those children who post “HAPPY FATHER’S DAY TO MY MOM.” This has become a norm over the years, or maybe it’s just usual. However, I found it to be very problematic, always has. It felt like it masked mothers to be very incompetent at their responsibility to care for the kids. I know a few of my friends who genuinely meant to appreciate their mother’s effort to carry out responsibilities with a support of a partner. This is quite understandable, but there’s absolutely nothing making your mom a “lesser than” simply because it is father’s day.
Your own insecurities, pain and regrets about the lack of a father aren’t your mom’s – They’re solely yours. They’re yours to deal with. Dragging our mother’s into father’s day, for me, demeans the role they have played in our lives. Parental roles are not gender roles. Parental roles are parental roles.
Our mothers are enough in their motherhood, they do not need to be celebrated for something they are not. We have to celebrate our mothers for who they are, not what we believe they are. We need to stop reminding our parents of the shame they may have endured when their marriages dissolved or when our fathers ran away. We cannot remind them on their “failures”, masking it in the name of trash talking our fathers. If your father does not deserve a celebration on father’s day, then do not celebrate it. There is no need for our mothers to feel incompetent and incomplete simply because we see them as both a mother and a father.
Our mothers are not a replacement of our fathers. They have held it down for too long and it’s best we honour and respect them without an effort of trash talking someone that’s absent.
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