What I Think About Father's Day

Today in Latvia, for the fifth consecutive year, Father's Day is being celebrated, thereby honouring the role of the father in the family and society. "The goal of Father's Day is to promote the idea that a man as a father should feel satisfied and proud of his family and children," states not some person well-loved or well-known by society and a father of a large family, but rather an impersonal announcement from the Ministry of Welfare.

The family is that small cell in which traditions, values and a sense of national belonging accumulate and are formed. The family is at the same time also a place and environment where all its members can draw on support, receive advice, rejoice at celebrations and share life's more sorrowful moments together.

Talking about the family has always been a sensitive subject. Both because Western values have disrupted the traditional understanding of the roles of mother and father (the concepts of mother and father are being replaced by "parents", thereby allowing for the possibility that parents may also be of the same sex), and because what happens within a family is rarely brought into the open, and the absence of one of its members at a deeply emotional level imparts a deficient direction of development.

According to statistical data, 35.1% of children in Latvia grow up in single-parent families. In families where children may, perhaps, have never even seen their father. By emphasising the role of one family member, the role of another family member is not diminished, but in cases where the role of a family member who for some reason is no longer part of the family is highlighted, an emotional ordeal is created for the remaining family members, especially children.

It seems that the originators of Father's Day look at the reasons why a father might not be in the family in an overly infantile and short-sighted manner. This father may have found another family, be living with another woman, have survived the follies of youth, and the existing family has become too small a space - the woman or man having developed spiritually in different directions and having arrived at the realisation that they have little in common - or quite simply the father may have passed away prematurely. In any case, the environment in which the "father" felt well has been shattered, and it is hard to imagine mechanisms that would compel the father to return to the family. Of course, from emotional estrangement to the decision to leave the family, time passes. It is a time during which one may hope that both will be perceptive enough to begin saving the family from splitting apart in time. Under the condition that both understand the seriousness of the problem, acknowledge it and are prepared to address it.

But in reality, "Father's Day" events invite strong, intact families, emphasising the entirely natural family symbiosis, rather than drawing attention to the problem of family separation. In effect, families that have not the slightest idea what it means for a mother to raise children alone, or what it means for a child to grow up in a single-parent family. As a result, it turns out to be a kind of mockery of those families who have been less fortunate in this life.

Imagine a drawing class in primary school. The teacher announces that today they will draw their daddy. Some immediately reach for brushes and colours, but a third of them, deep in thought, stare out the window, because they don't know what to draw or how to get out of this situation...

Worth mentioning is a comment on the diena.lv website:

In Soviet times, every Sunday was a professional holiday - milkmaid's day, spinner's day, blacksmith's day... But production disappeared, times change, and it has become fashionable to mark degrees of kinship. Only don't stop at what's been achieved! Forgotten grandparents, brothers, sisters, half-brothers, sons-in-law, cousins, godmothers... let each Sunday have its own!