Last year, I called my father on Father’s Day. He sounded like his old self, but he couldn’t keep up the conversation for long. A few days later, he died in his sleep of congestive heart failure. So this is my first Father’s Day without him.
But I’m not really without him. I can hear his voice and imagine what he’d say. His style of teasing has passed down through the family. Even my daughter does it sometimes.
I’m luckier than some people: I had a father. Hallmark now sells cards in its African-American line marked “for mother on Father’s Day,”notes City Journal’s Heather Mac Donald.
With 70 percent of black children born out of wedlock, with marriage a moribund custom in inner cities, Father’s Day does pose a problem. Hallmark has solved it with aplomb. The light scorn directed at the complaints of “children growing up without a father — without this and without that,†as if fathers were as discretionary as Tivo, is both an inspired way of minimizing the problem and a fair articulation of how fathers are viewed in poor black communities, and by large swathes of the aging feminist establishment as well.
Hallmark doesn’t offer no-father cards for whites or Hispanics, Mac Donald writes. Not yet.
About Joanne
Everytime I think about children who are without fathers, I try to imagine the events in life where these children prevailed. The world has experienced times where fathers were absent and tragically died during times of war. I know it is not quite the same as fathers choosing not to be in their child’s life. However, perhaps it leaves the children, like my own, some consolation.
There are [stop to count] at least a dozen children in my life whose bio dad evaporated. I can not imagine a life bereft of their regard along with the regard of my own children. Better to be childless than to be fertile but clueless.