Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
Yesterday, Father’s Day, I wasn’t able to call or visit my dad. It’s the ninth one since 2018.
Fathers don’t get much credit these days. Yes, it was Father’s Day again, a celebration that popular tradition says began in Spokane, Washington, in 1910.
Mother’s Day has a much clearer history dating back to Reconstruction after the Civil War, when West Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri, states that sent young men to both the Union and Confederate armies during the Civil War, tried to reconcile. Mothers of soldiers from both sides began having church socials and picnics together in an attempt to unify states trying to heal from the horror of America’s worst war.
Mother’s Day was signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson in 1914; Father’s Day arrived 58 years later with the flick of Richard Nixon’s pen in 1972.
Perhaps it’s the nature of fathers and mothers that sons would seek to honor their mothers but take their fathers for granted.
No dying soldier ever cried, ‘Dad,’ on the battlefield, but ‘Mom’ is a common phrase that haunts the soldier’s comrades witnessing the scene. Perhaps it’s just the dynamic that has always existed between fathers and sons.
Wyoming’s own, the late Chris LeDoux, wrote and performed “Fathers and Sons,” and it is one of his greatest hits. A few phrases from the third verse,
“You’re proud when they walk, scared when they run, that’s how it always has been between fathers and sons. It’s a bridge you can’t cross, it’s a cross you can’t bear, it’s the words you can’t say the things you can’t change, no matter how much you care. So you do all you can then you gotta let go, you’re just part of the flow of the river that runs between fathers and sons.”
That flow LeDoux sang about is life itself, the melding of one generation into the next in a never-ending flow that points to the future but disappears in the midst of the past after a few generations.
You go through your daily life step by step, week by week, year by year, and the decades flow by. You think things will never change, then suddenly one day they do. That familiar, friendly face isn’t there anymore.
You pick up the phone to call him with a problem you know he’s already faced many times, but he can’t answer.
As one school year was about to begin, we had an expert on family relations take an entire day describing the dynamics between families, one August, just before classes began.
She explained the difference between poverty-stricken families, middle-class families, and wealthy families in terms of matriarchal or patriarchal organization. ‘Patri’ and ‘matri’ are Latin terms for father and mother, and are favorites of sociologists, cultural anthropologists, and, occasionally, historians.
The crux of her message was pretty simple. She said, mothers always control families in poverty. The biggest reason is that few families live in poverty if mom and dad are both in the home. Single mothers far outnumber any other category among families living below the poverty line.
Fathers are the heads of most middle-class families, she explained. I remember seeing visions of 1950’s and 60’s sitcoms when Ward Cleaver and Ozzie and Harriet Nelson were model families, a vestige of an America gone by.
The wealthy can swing both ways; the head of the family is determined by who makes or who has inherited the most money.
Pretty simple societal evaluation on the speakers’ part, but she was on to something.
When was the last time you watched TV and saw a father portrayed as anything but a bumbling idiot that just creates problems for the all-knowing, all-powerful wife and mother? It’s an image supported in public K-12 education where men have less influence each passing year as the teaching profession becomes a female-dominated business. Should any of us be surprised that boys have higher dropout rates, lower grades, higher suicide rates, are much more likely to have a criminal record, and now have just a fraction of the college degrees that girls do?
I’m not sure it’s a war on boys, but they are surely casualties of a system that has swung the pendulum of equality so far that it’s created inequality on the opposite side of the issue.
Yes, it all comes back to fathers, grandfathers, sons, grandsons, and the image we have of them. I’ve played all four of the roles in the previous sentence, and each has its joys and challenges.
A few years ago, I would have pelted a minister during a sermon on fathers if I had an apple or an orange. He praised mothers, women in general, then absolutely hammered the role of father. Perhaps he was expressing his own guilt, or maybe he just thought he was playing to the crowd, whatever it was, he was completely wrong.
It is the essence of yin and yang, mother and father. You can’t have one without the other.
I’ve heard comedians joke that you should be more grateful on Father’s Day rather than Mother’s Day since the odds are your mom wasn’t in the mood the day you were conceived.
Fathers should guide, protect, and motivate their children. The best thing they can teach their son about life is to love and respect their wife. In the process, the boy learns how to treat women. Behavior is modeled, dads go to work every day, they don’t have to be sensitive, feminine, or even understanding when Junior screws up, that is mom’s job.
As a teacher, you can often tell when a boy comes from a home with just his mom. They rarely have issues with male teachers, but can be horrible to female instructors. It seems they’re subconsciously blaming all women for the lack of a male role model in their lives. Coaches often assume the role model position, but it’s never the same as having a father at home.
Our society is a mess, a maelstrom of irresponsibility, wrapped in self-esteem that is way too high. A solid two-parent home can alleviate most of these issues. But it takes work.
When mom and dad work together, the family thrives. Being a father is a job you take on the day your child is born, and you never give up.