Whose day is it, anyway?

By Igane the Sane

It is a great honour to be a father. Oh, to be a leader of the most basic level of government; a provider, a protector, a source of hope. 

It’s a responsibility I take very seriously.

 So why am I not exuberant whenever I encounter the phrase, Happy Father’s Day? Why does it bother me that it is usually shouted or screamed, or printed in large friendly characters on bubbly golden backgrounds, like a cereal ad?

These questions may never occur to the old workmate who only uses my contact to fill a list of Father’s Day meme recipients once every year. I must, therefore, react to her message, not with a clever monologue but with a carefully selected emoji from the emoji board. 

Just one.

🤩

Positive. Happy. Friendly.

Deep inside though,  I seeth. I want to seek and deploy an emoji with daggers, catapults, and cannonballs. Not to my correspondent but to a few lazy overindulged individuals in their bespoke suits who one day, while lounging in deep comfortable leather armchairs in a dimly lit and smoky room of a gentleman’s club, decided, nay agreed to set aside a random day every year to celebrate all the fathers of the world. All of them, including deadbeats. 

Who died and made them God?

Why can’t fathers, mothers, aunties, cousins, friends, foes, and deadbeats be happy every day of the year if they so choose, without anyone’s permission?

My Millennial daughter interrupts my rant: she sends in a video of her daughter, her over-achieving, hyperactive, hyperintelligent three year old daughter. In the video, she’s painting furiously with a little brush.

“What are you doing?,” asks her awfully young grandmother off screen.

“I’m making a Father’s card,” is the nonchalant response. “You can help.”

“For whom are you making the card?,” asks the mother of my daughter aka Another Mummy.

“I will give it to the father.”

“Who is the father?”

“Lloyd. I’ll give it to Lloyd.”

So you’ll give it to Lloyd?

“Yes, he is the father of my mum. You don’t know?” 

She stops painting and looks up quizzically. “Another Mummy, if you don’t want to do something with me, you must do exercises with me.” She stands up. “Come… “ 

Clip ends as she runs off, pulling her Another Mummy in a bully’s grip. Warm tears of an emotion I can’t put a finger on fill up my eyes. Unable to stop them, I let them roll down my grandfatherly cheeks.

Just why she doesn’t see us as  grandparents, I have no idea. To her, I’m just her mum’s father and one of her favourite persons along with Another Mummy: we are on first-name terms. 

I seek out my emoji board and it doesn’t disappoint. I react:

❤️

Back to my rant I go, determined to make a point, but not so fast. 

In chimes a text from my GenZ daughter.  

“I know you’re a happy father everyday,” it says, stealing my rant, “but happy Father’s Day all the same.

“Thank you for being a great example of a man and human being in my life, Lloyd. You're the most amazing father in existence. I love you to bits.” 

I kid you not. This is an actual text from my real GenZ daughter. 

Teary eyed and confused I react with another emoji.

❤️

Still, I must rant. I rant against the idea, the audacity of a few people picking a day for a father’s happiness for commercial purposes. 

“Buy your father an expensive belt’” reads the headline of a 70s ad featuring a brown leather belt coiled around a bottle of Chivas Regal, a most expensive whisky.

At first, they targeted sons, but realizing the potential of a working woman, they planted a seed and it germinated. It bloomed into the Women’s Lib and the affirmative action movements of the 80s.

“We just wanted women to start paying taxes,” one of the scheming old men would say later. “… and to buy stuff for their husbands and fathers on Fathers Day,” they forgot to add. 

But ever since, they have really hyped up Father’s Day, just to guilt more women and young adults into spending more on their husbands and fathers. 

And seeing how their ruse has succeeded they must laughing all the way to the clubhouse.

I’m convinced that every other “Human’s Day,” be it Mother’s Day, Farmer’s Day, and the latest, Widow’s Day, has a target audience that’s calculated to spend a lot of money on products made by companies owned collectively or individually by the aforementioned little group of old men who meet in dimly lit gentlemen’s club lounges and sip Chivas Regal.

Don’t let them fool you. Resist.

As for me and my republik, we choose to be happy every day, with or without their permission.