Father’s Day: How to properly appreciate your dad today - Greg Bruce

Dads don't want gifts, they want appreciation, writes Greg Bruce. Photo / Getty

OPINION

I used to think Father’s Day was just crass commercialism – exploitation of the human guilt impulse for the benefit of Big Retail – but now I’m a father I understand just how stupid I was.

When I became a parent, my eyes were opened and I saw through the matrix for the first time and understood that Father’s Day was not a creation of Hallmark, but of someone who understood – as did God several years prior – that the burden of constant work can only be endured by knowing it will eventually be met with the reward of rest.

When you become a parent, your world shrinks to the size of your children, putting your life into a tight, tiny orbit around them, its gravity many multiples more powerful than any force humanity has ever known. It presses down on you until your knees are wrecked and your back is bent, and only partially because children are always jumping on it.

Father’s Day is not about gifts; it’s about a release of this pressure; a day of no responsibility. Your back is straightened by the obligatory words of praise and your knees are rejuvenated by the soft embrace of your mattress, or the silky waters of a bath, for as long as you desire either or both. You don’t need to yell at, or even talk to, your children if you don’t want to, and you feel your voice returning to something like normality for the first time since last Father’s Day.

The most important aspect of your recovery, however, is not physical but psychological. It’s the acknowledgement by your children – however grudgingly given; however forced on them by their mother – that you are not a delivery device for their needs, but are in some sense a human being.

It’s the amelioration, however small, by words as simple and boilerplate as “I love you” and “You’re the best”, of the preceding year’s thousands of tiny acts of violence: not just the throwing things at you and hitting you in the nuts, but the “I hate you” and “Mummy’s a way better singer than you” and “Have you got a baby in your tummy?”

Sometimes, every few years if you’re lucky, it’s even more than an amelioration. Two weeks ago today, I was making some lunch when I realised my 8-year-old had been quiet for a suspiciously long time. I found her in the living room, sitting at a little table, writing. She was concentrating so deeply that she didn’t notice me, and I didn’t disturb her, partly because moments of quiet in our home are so rare and precious but mostly because there’s nothing that fills me with more joy than seeing my children absorbed in the act of creation.

Some time later, I again went into the living room and was surprised and delighted to see her still there, still writing. This time she noticed me and quickly hid whatever it was she was writing. Because my kids often do this with their creative works-in-progress, I thought nothing of it, but later that day, she said to me, “Tell the truth: you knew I was making a Father’s Day card, didn’t you?”

I could have cried. Father’s Day was still two weeks away! No gift, no gesture, not even the presumably adorable message she’d written in the card itself, could have moved me more than that thoughtfulness.

This is all we dads need for Father’s Day. Not hilarious cards from Whitcoulls about how old we are and how much we fart, accompanied by a supermarket gift card and note saying “Will you play Hot Wheels with me later?”, but to feel appreciated. Because we know that tomorrow we will wake up and it will be 364 days before we feel it again, and one of those days will be Mother’s Day.