A few weeks ago, we celebrated the Goddess-worshiping festival that we call Mother’s Day. It’s more than a day. The build-up, in advertisers touting flowers and jewelry and day-spa packages and special treats for “the Mom in your life” had gone on practically since Easter.
For restaurants, it is the busiest day of the year, a day for expansive and expensive brunch buffets, crowded with families “giving Mom a break from the kitchen” – families who needed to get the reservations weeks in advance. Flowers, a party, gifts, general lionization – it’s almost like a mini-Bridezilla experience, all in worship of Mom, Glorious Mom.
I wouldn’t be surprised if many single moms and divorced moms feel left-out. Without husbands to take them out to brunch, buy them the choice gifts and pay the tab. With children who have so little, after Mommy does what she pleases with the “child-support” payments (from Daddy via “Child Services”), that they can scarcely give more than hugs and perhaps a few flowers rustled out of somebody’s garden.
They have only part of a thug-boyfriend’s attention; after all, she’s not the mother of his kids. And when the children are put to bed (there’s school tomorrow, after all), she is left alone, sitting on the couch that her “ex” paid for, in the house that her “ex” paid for, with nothing for solace but a bottle of wine. Or gin. Or whatever.
The day before Mother’s Day, A Voice for Men published, This Mother’s Day: Daffodils for Dumpsters – a harsh scolding for the millions of women who have abortions rather than become mothers themselves. One of the comments attached to the article went off-topic, but stung me personally:
How about instead of addressing abortion, we address the fact that mothers, even “good” mothers, do fuck-all nothing about men raised without fathers.
So we do the same thing. Hand out ribbons, black ribbons, which say, “what are you doing to make sure a mother doesn’t deny a man access to his children?”
This stung me because I was raised without a father, but it’s not just my own experience that demands my attention to this problem. Mom-only households were rare while I was growing up. “Single-mom
families” and “divorced-mom families” are much more common today. The children from these disabled, dysfunctional families are growing up disabled themselves; subtly, emotionally disabled, in ways that hurt but that don’t show in a physical sense.
There’s an empty place in their hearts, a Daddy-shaped hole that neither Mommy nor her boyfriends can even patch over. There’s an empty space in their learning, too; they don’t learn the value of fathers. They don’t get the lessons that can only be taught subliminally by that role-model in their lives. And they don’t even know what they’re missing – rather I should say that I grew up fatherless with only the haziest idea of what I was missing. But I knew that I had no one to play catch with me. No one to swat me when I messed with his tools, then help me build my Pinewood Derby car. No one to treat me like “his boy.” No one to show me, really show me, that a man has a deserved and necessary place with his children, with his family, in his home. No one to live with me and show me what it is to be a man.
Don’t even try to tell me that isn’t important. I fucking-well know how important it is.
The third Sunday in June is labeled “Father’s Day.” It sounds like a day to celebrate and lionize Father – but if past years are any indication, the
main course will be shaming for the men that “should have done better,” and vituperative scorn for the “Deadbeat Dads” who aren’t with their children.
Many of those “deadbeat dads” don’t even know they have children. Many others have had their children torn from their lives in a brutal divorce.
Some of them languish in prison because they could no longer pay ruinous child-support demands, set when they had a much better job – and before their reputations, and their employability, were ruined by their former wives’ mendacious and malicious charges of “domestic violence” and “child abuse.”
Yeah, there are thugs who don’t care, but they are very much in the
minority, as are the “dads” who are not merely “deadbeat,” but actually dead; leaving, perhaps, some photos, some shiny trinkets, and a flag folded in a triangular display case.
Most fatherless kids, though, are fatherless because their mothers pushed the fathers out of their lives.
I’d like to propose some recognition for these fatherless children, and the men who would have been with them as fathers if their mothers hadn’t kicked them out. Let’s call it “Fatherless Day.”
It should be a day to remind women everywhere that their children need their Daddies, too – and all the time, not just two weekends a month. A day to remind children just how important and precious their fathers are. A time to remind fathers, themselves, that they are worthy of having a major role in their children’s lives.
And a time to remind “Daddy Government,” and its enabling whores in the Main Scream Media, that fathers are important – not just as sperm donors and ATMs, not just for paying the fuckin’ bills, but for the sake of the children.
