I Was Gonna Chill

Father's Day has come and gone, and I really didn't plan on saying anything about the day.


Not because I have a bad relationship with my pops, nope me and the old fella are fine. It's not because I think fathers are fairly unimportant, I actually think they are equally important as women, if not slightly more important.

Nope, I wasn't going to say anything because I figured there wasn't much to be said. Sunday was a day to celebrate fathers, it seems like a fairly simple issue.

Only, things are rarely simple these days, no matter what it seems like on the surface.

Imagine my surprise when I saw that many people didn't see Sunday as just a time to appreciate their fathers, but also a time to castigate those men who are failing at their fatherly duties. I don't mean the folks who wrote heartfelt blogs about how the Dad's absence hurt them, I understand those folks. I mean the scores of people who decided to promote backhanded compliments at best to the fathers "who give a damn" through Facebook and other social media sites.

It was almost as if people felt they would have been doing a disservice to the world to write "Happy Father's Day," and instead felt compelled to let the world know their pleasantries only applied to certain fathers, not everybody with working sperm.

I found that strange.

I'm not the only one. Several other folks on the Internets found it weird that well-wishes for fathers came with caveats. I don't think there were the same sort of messages sent out to the ladies on Mother's Day, but if I'm wrong, somebody please correct me in the comments. And look, I understand that the absence of fathers, particularly black fathers, is a touchy and sensitive subject for folks which often creates hard feelings. But, the bottom line is that there are 364 days to lament all the men doing a bad job at being fathers, why would folks decide to do that on Father's Day?

Is it just me, or is that a little off?

I think it speaks to the strange relationship we as Americans, particularly black Americans, have with fathers. We acknowledge their importance, we understand they fulfill a need, but honestly, we don't really appreciate them as much as we do mothers, no matter what we say. And I'll admit that I'm guilty of the same attitude when it comes to my dad.

Things have only gotten worse as it's become easier and easier to blast dads due to the rapidly rising out-of-wedlock birth rate among black women, and the subsequent absence of the men who helped cause those births.

I haven't swallowed the meme that most black men don't care for the mothers of their children or even their children, but I do realize that many people today find marriage optional when it comes to raising babies. In fact, I wrote about it here.

The thing is, while I readily admit that many men are failing at the job of being fathers, isn't it obvious that many women are doing the same? If you consider the fact that being a good mother begins with selecting the man that you allow to impregnate you, the failure is quite massive. Combine that with the women who may be present in body, but absent in love, affection and dedication, and the problem becomes even worse.

Women are being asked to raise children alone and that's a very, VERY difficult job, but as the late John Wooden was found of saying "Never mistake activity for achievement". Bottom line, women have it rough, but quite a few of them are simply failing.

Yet, those failures don't require us to link caveats to our praises on Mother's Day. Instead, we focus on the positives, and we celebrate motherhood in all of its aspects. We don't take a day set aside for appreciation and use it as a time to denigrate. If we can do that for mommies, why can't we do it for daddies?

Daddies need love too.






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