Family Days

Sunday was Father's Day.

First of all, these days are not holidays, because there is nothing holy about them save for saying, "Holy shit, it's another one of them damned days again!".  These days really only benefit the card and gift companies.  Let's face it, if you have to set aside a mere 0.36525% of your time to be nice to your mother or father or valentine or administrative professional, you really need to work on that relationship.  These days, as popularly practiced, are not rooted in any kind of spiritual observance.  It's just a money making scheme, and a way to dispensate the profligate tyranny of the mortgage, spouse, 2.3 kids, dog, SUV and picket fence, nuclear family model that society seeks to impose as "normal".  I'm not buying it.

I am not a father 'cause I know I do not want children of my own.  Where is my celebration?  Conversely, how many men that have zero business creating their own offspring get lauded with "#1 Dad" coffee mugs or new neckties or special dinners or other such celebrations?  Honestly, how many of these male persons who get celebrated do you think would not rather be fishing or golfing or shooting dice, instead of playing the family role on Father's Day?  Still, they are looked at as the heroes, and we single guys who have responsibly taken efforts and great care to remain childless are comparitive zeroes.  We are pitied and thought of as having something missing from our lives.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  We know what we want and what we don't and we are disciplined enough to live within those parameters of conduct and consequence.

I don't need a set-aside, scheduled celebration.  I want to be appreciated for me...for who I am as an individual...for the choices I make and don't make...everyday.  I want to find a special woman, a lover, a friend and life-partner.  I want to share my intellignetly selected choices with a gal who makes her own intelligently selected choices that are, at the very least, loosely compatible with mine - maybe not necessarily on the same page, but, at least, in the same library.  I want a woman who can enjoy the value and romance of a 25 year old chick flick shown outdoors in the haze, heat and humidity of a Downtown Baltimore summer night just because it's a different way of doing something familiar. 

Society doesn't see it that way, though.  Society sees us singles as incomplete people in need of prayer or fixing.  Society tells women that a person like me who does not move on from breaking one heart to destroying the spirit of the next lacks life experience and doesn't fully understand what it is to be a man.  Well, if that is society's definition of a man, then maybe it is society and their social mores that I do not understand.

I know what it is to be a gentleman.  I know what it is to show equal care and concern for the woman I want in my life, and for the children I don't.  Maybe - just maybe - it's not me, but society who does not understand.

"Father Figure", George Michael.