What’s the point of Father’s Day?
Ray Connolly
Things were different when my children were born fifty odd years ago. With our third child I took Plum, my wife, into the hospital one morning and going back in the afternoon I was told that she was in the delivery room.
So soon? I thought. Then, going there, I hung around outside.
‘You’re just in time,’ a young nurse said. ‘It’s a wonderful moment for you and your wife.’
‘I’m sure it is,’ I replied.
‘You should be with her,’ she said. She must have been a very modern nurse because the delivery room had been out of bounds for husbands when our first two children had been born.
‘I think I’ll just wait here until it’s all over, if you don’t mind,’ I said. I’ve never liked anything messy.
She didn’t give in. Pulling back the flap on the door to the delivery room she looked inside, ‘Oh look,’ she said. ‘The baby is just about to…yes… The baby’s coming. See!’
And, stepping away, she held the flap open to let me peer inside.
She was right. A doctor and nurses were surrounding the birthing bed, the mother’s legs were apart with her feet up in the stirrups as someone else waited, like a scrum-half behind a rugby ruck, to take the baby as it emerged.
’Go on Plum…’ I thought. ‘One last push. Go on.’ And then: ‘Yes. YES. Well done, Plum. You’ve done it.’
At which point I heard a voice behind me. ‘What’s going on here?’ a senior nurse asked.
‘Oh, Mr Connolly didn’t want to be present in Delivery so I said he could watch Mrs Connolly from here,’ explained the young nurse.
For a moment there was a puzzled silence. Then the senior nurse said. ‘But that isn’t Mrs Connolly. It’s Mrs Hooper.’
What? Not Plum! I closed the flap on the door. I’d watched the wrong baby being born.
I found Plum a few minutes later sitting up in bed in the maternity ward reading Cosmopolitan. ‘I’ve just watched you have a baby,’ I told her.
And, to be honest, from where I’d been standing, it hadn’t looked like much fun for the mother.
So, when I’m told that Sunday is Father’s Day, all I can think is that apart, from the obvious, men really have nothing much to celebrate. Because it’s mothers who still do virtually all the real work.
No-one has ever sent me a Father’s Day card I’m glad to say. If I got one, I’d feel like a carpetbagger, taking credit for someone else’s labour. But Mother’s Day, I understand that all right, because mothers deserve every good wish they can get.
On Mothering Sunday the pavement outside our local florist shop was blocked with a waist-high drift of flowers. While, queuing further along the road, a squadron of boys on bikes and electric scooters waited to rush floral bunches of ‘thank you for being a wonderful mum’, to the deserving recipients. They will have made a lot of mums very happy, but there won’t be much of a traffic jam outside the florists today. Because we dads really don’t deserve a special day
From the moment every one of us enters the world we are in debt to the woman who bore us. After that she fed us, played our first games with us, bought the clothes we wear, sang songs to us in playgroups, took us to and from school, helped us to read and write and nursed us when we were ill. She was always there when we needed her, while the first word we learn to say sounds like ‘Mama’, which turns into ‘Mummy’ as we learn to talk.
The child’s relationship with his or her a father is usually quite different, and inevitably moe distant. Despite all the contemporary employment provisions for young fathers and working couples these days, and no matter how much modern fathers help around the house, a dad will always be peripheral to the life of a small child. But mums are always there.
Physically a man isn’t built for caring for a baby. His role in parenting only really grows when the child matures. The father can push a pram or ride a bike with a small child sitting in a pillion on the back. But, in truth, it’s nearly always the mum who transports the children around.
Traditionally, only when the boy is old enough to be at his father’s side, when Dad goes off to hunt the wildebeest or bear or whatever does the relationship between a father and son begin to grow.
Until then the mother has been the child’s entire life. And should the child be a daughter her relationship with her mum will be cemented for ever. Look around and see how many daughters are loyal to their mums throughout their mothers’ entire lives.
When I was growing up many jobs were done by family firms – father and son plumbers, builders, farmers, window cleaners and carpenters, many boys would learn their trade from their dads.
But there are many fewer professions today in which skills can be passed down through the generations. You can’t learn much from your dad if he’s a helicopter pilot or a chartered accountant.
I never knew what it was like to have a father. Mine was lost at sea while serving with the Royal Navy in 1944 when I was three years old. So, brought up entirely by women, I never learned what a father’s function should be in the home.
When I would tell this to my sons, they would each retort: ‘Nor did we, Dad. We had two mothers.’
Which, I suppose, bore some truth. I know I still think like a mother, which was evidenced when some years ago our second son (the one whom I thought I’d seen being born) emailed me to say his plane was delayed and he would be arriving at Luton Airport in the middle of the night.
‘Luton Airport?’ I worried. That was at least 50 miles away. How would he get back to London at that time of night? There would be no trains running then, or buses. I’d better go and pick him up in the car.
Which I was about to do before Plum, his mother, stopped me. ‘For heaven’s sake! He’s forty. What if he’s got off with a girl on the plane? The last person he will want to see waiting for him after Passport Control will be his dad.’
Which, I suppose was the moment that I finally began to see my offspring as partners rather than as children. He and I have just written a novel together. It’s called Snakes & Ladders. I let him write the romantic bits.
I do know that most countries in the world, especially those with very paternalistic histories, celebrate a Father’s Day. In some places it’s even a bank holiday.
But in Britain the idea of celebrating fathers didn’t arrive until after World War 2 when shops began selling greeting cards of middle-aged, handsome dads kicking footballs on green lawns to good looking boys.
You may have got one of these cards yourself this morning. And, I’m sure, it will be much appreciated. But look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself: do you think you really deserve to be celebrated on Father’s Day, when it’s mothers who have done all the heavy lifting?
www.rayconnolly.co.uk
