THIS MOTHER’S DAY, I WANT TO TALK ABOUT FATHERS

It’s not a secret: the memes of the measure of a “good dad” vs. the “bad mom” light up our social media feeds, reinforcing bias we, mothers, are all striving to escape.

Decades of psychological study is devoted to the impact of how we are mothered, the pressure of which is passed on to new mothers in every commercial that’s about to air on TV in the lead up to Mother’s Day. Too soft, too warm, too passive, too authoritarian, not enough boundaries, red dye 40, talk about being drawn and quartered. Trying to “do it right” is an impossibility we’re all taught to continue to strive towards, on social media, online articles and the latest news stories. The running tally of a mother’s responsibility for others, above our own needs, starts before the baby is born. Hell, the more people we push in front of ourselves, the better we’re doing at this “motherhood” thing.

But what about dads? Peer reviewed journals, the best and brightest of scholars in family studies, psychology, and family systems, what is their ONE measure for the impact of fatherhood? Attendance. Are you a present parent in your kid’s life? Yes? Congratulations, you’ve checked THE one and only fatherhood box. Because “research” has tied teen pregnancy, alcohol risk factors, education, and many more to whether or not your dad was a person in your life, without asking any followup questions.

Follow up questions like, What if your dad wasn’t that great? What if he was the person who brought chaos and unrest into your home? Better to have him there, according to researchers, but this Mother’s Day, I want more. I want us to start asking what it means for girls and women to grow up “unfathered,” to have the impact of that man in your life dissected to the same degree we put mothers through.

I know what it looks like to be raised in a home that looks one way on the outside, but feels like a funhouse when the front door closes. From the outside my father was engaged- he drove me to hockey practice, attended school events, and taught me how to build and fix things on my own. The truth is, he was physically, verbally and emotionally abusive, the purveyor of a verbal dressing down on the way home from each hockey game, mocking and belittling school achievements that didn’t “measure up” to his unrelenting expectations, and the person who’s voice I still hear in my head when something doesn’t go perfectly, a “who the fuck do you think you are” for every occasion.

Living with a father who checked that one box, who’s anger sucked the air out of the room, who I learned how to tell what the next few hours of the evening were going be like by the first 3 words out of his mouth after school, who lied and manipulated my brother and I in relationship we didn’t have the choice to leave as children, was only survived by learning to navigate the cognitive dissonance of our “home life” and our “outside” life. Be the dutiful child. Excel in school, sports and everything that can be a reflection on him. Many of the scars are invisible, hide the ones that others might be able to see. His “presence” kept our family off tilt for the first dozen years of my life and a roller coaster for the 27 years after that, until his death in 2023 by suicide. I have lived for almost 40 years with his voice inside my head, it’s the hesitation to submit an article, the wavering on emailing a potential investor for work, and the unattainable checklist I have used to run myself into the ground over and over as a parent. Trying to do better for your children when the impact haunts you each day feels like running on an un-lubricated hamster wheel. My father proclaimed to support raising a strong woman, but the measure for which was how I measured up on a “man’s scale,” as his “oldest son.” If everything boils down to whether or not he was “there,” why do I have to constantly do the work to move beyond his impact?

As a mother myself, it’s not enough to say he showed me how not to parent because the checkbox for motherhood is an ever evolving list of “shoulds.” What it has taught me is the way we show up for our children, has to be intentional. It has to be from a healed place and one that does not allow “those conversations” to go unspoken because there is a specific loneliness of relationships that differ in and out of the home, and the accompanying feeling that no one will understand.

We are clawing apart motherhood, focusing our energy (and follow up questions) on one side of the family tree. It’s an absolute disservice to mothers who do the invisible work of maintaining an emotionally safe and present home for kids, to the same sex couples who are asked “who the mommy and daddy are” and to the fathers who grew up in these homes that looked great on the outside but know differently and don’t want that for their own kids.

Mothers have carried the load for centuries. Have an issue with commitment? Tell me about your relationship with your mother. Have a hard time expressing your feelings? What was it like when you got upset with your mother as a child? It’s the one sided coin I have never understood and the research seems to back it up, and by “back it up” I mean we dissect mother-child relationships while glossing over the nitty gritty of father-child relationships. Decades of psychological study is devoted to the impact of how we are mothered, the pressure of which is passed on to new mothers in every commercial that’s about to air on TV in the lead up to Mother’s Day.

The older I’ve gotten and the more I’ve spoken about my own relationship with my father, the more people I’ve known who have experienced similar upbringings. So this mother’s day, my request isn’t for flowers or breakfast in bed, it’s about having the conversation about the impact, of more than mothers, on how we grow up and move out into the world. Maybe when we start to shift the floodlight from mothers, we’ll find that both impact our lives and not everything is on mom to shoulder alone.

Happy Mother’s Day,

Ashley

Typically I send out newsletters related to content for Dovetail and the AND/BOTH Podcast, but from time to time I’ll also send snippets of writing I’ve been working on.. Thanks for reading!