A Life in A Day

Father’s Day can be tricky for people with less-than-easy relationships with their dads.

For me, the struggle begins with choosing a card. I swerve ‘World’s best Dad’ and ‘Dad in a million’ and scour the rows for something altogether more plain. A photo of a classic car. A riverside scene with a deckchair. This year I chose one with an electric guitar and the tagline ‘Dad, you rock!’ We do have a shared love of music, so that was a pretty safe bet.

I celebrated Father’s Day a day early this year. My husband, son and I visited my Dad and his wife at a café near their home, where we had breakfast and split the bill down the middle. Back at my Dad’s house, I gave him his gift of a ‘night in, à la française’ – French cheese, French wine and Waitrose crackers, which he liked. That’s another shared interest for us – we’re both casual Francophiles.

We’re also pretty aligned when it comes to humour and conversation. My Dad can be very charismatic, and he’s well-read. He can fix things. He used to play squash and rugby and enjoyed rowing. He’s been in business. And he’s a Yorkshireman. Above all else, he’s a Yorkshireman. I’m none of those things, but I can navigate my way through conversations with most people, and enjoy finding common ground, so that’s another thing we share.

And yet, our relationship is frequently exhausting, for me at least. It’s like we operate on slightly different wavelengths at all times. My Dad’s charisma can veer into boasts or, dare I say, delusions of grandeur. At 36, I don’t pander to it anymore. So we go through the motions, and my husband and I will debrief after a visit and say ‘that went well’ or ‘that could’ve been better’.

On actual Father’s Day, we visited my husband’s Dad. He’s rather different to mine. He’s one of nine children, and he’s been married to my mother-in-law since the 70s. He retired early and spends a lot of time tending to his beautiful cottage garden. He is unassuming. He supports NCFC, and enjoys going to the ‘pic-a-tures’ or taking day trips on the train with his wife. He and my husband don’t have an awful lot of shared interests, but their relationship is simple. Not always easy, but simple. He doesn’t muscle in on my husband’s achievements, he doesn’t pry, he doesn’t one-up. He listens to us in conversation and actually asks questions. These qualities are simple, but natural. And valuable. Appreciated.

Good fathers, and I mean really good fathers, are fundamentally good men, and I’ll raise my son as best I can with that in mind. As with most things, I can take inspiration from song lyrics to guide me. This time, it’s Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Simple Man:

‘Take your time, don’t live too fast. Troubles will come and they will pass.

Forget your lust for the rich man’s gold, all that you need is in your soul.

Be a simple kind of man. Be something you love and understand.’

Fathers are surely a blessing and the occasional burden to most of us, and those of us who have them in our lives are lucky. I will try my very best to raise my son to be a good man. A good friend and partner. And a good father, in the hope someone will one day pick out him out the perfect card, telling him he’s a Dad in a million. And they’ll be right.