FATHER'S DAY

Which would, more appropriately be Fathers' Day, looms. In our family, this is not a day generally observed as the Mother comes from a strict Jehovah's Witness background and frowns upon the observance of holidays generally and those deemed "artificial" especially. Prior to this union, my father and grandfather enjoyed this holiday, in a middling way, and I tried whenever possible to provide something in the way of at least a card or small gift. One year, I sent my father a bottle of Sam Adams beer, despite postal regulations to the contrary, and it was a present that he appreciated, keeping it for many years.
Conditioned by their mother's anti-holiday sentiment, my four sons don't register the holiday, and until they have fathers-in-law who do enjoy its observance, I don't expect them to change their ways. It's okay, as they are sometimes wont to say, it's okay that they don't. They are good boys, and I know they appreciate, at least in a vague way, the effort that their parents, together and separately, have put into raising them.
If there is anything special about Father's Day, it is that when it rolls around, I give some degree of consideration to my father and my maternal grandfather and their attitudes towards their children, and I try to learn from their missteps as well as from their successes. In my nominally adult life, I have been many things, worn many hats. I've been a boss, an employee, a builder, a mechanic, a writer, an editor, a husband, a son, and so many more things that to try to enumerate them all would lead to a truly long list. But it is the role of Da (Irish for, more or less, "daddy") that I have found most comfortable and most gratifying. There is a widely held belief that the fathers of the baby boomers were generally constrained from considering fathering their major occupation, that slot being reserved for their commercial occupation. By the time we were starting to participate in the creation of the ripple boom, there was supposedly a bit more looseness and freedom in this regard, but you couldn't prove it by counting fathers at the playgrounds I frequented unless "one" was a statistically significant increase.
I didn't care though, whether I was at the forefront of a trend, the tail end or simply a statistical outlier. Being a Da was my chosen occupation, and it is one that I have enjoyed for nearly a quarter century.
My hope is not that my sons will choose to follow in those footsteps, but rather that they will feel the freedom to take that path if that's what they want. Even now, fathering is not widely considered to be a "real" job, despite a growing acknowledgement that mothering is. If my boyos take away only that the care and raising of children is as much the right and responsibility of the male parent as the female, then I'll have done at least a somewhat decent job of raising them.