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Father’s Day is awkward for those who either don’t have a father or who are estranged from their father.
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
Greeting card holidays like Father’s Day can be difficult when someone has recently buried a beloved dad. The holiday is painful for those whose dad chose not to be involved, and for those who received from their dad the opposite of love, honor, and respect.
Stats tell us that one in four homes is single parent-led, and those are primarily single moms. That’s a lot of women and kids with an empty place where a dad is designed to be, especially when 50 percent of American kids are expected to live in a single-parent home before age 18. Those numbers signify a large number of women and kids with a vacant spot designed for a dad to occupy.
On Father’s Day, when their pastor asked the fathers to stand, author Dana Grisham’s son burst into tears.
In the foyer, CJ asked, “Why doesn’t Daddy want to see me? Why did he leave us?”
Through her own tears, Dana replied, “CJ, you have a perfect Father in heaven who loves you very much. He will never hurt you, never leave you, never let you down, and wants you to grow up to be just like Him.”
Wiping her son’s tears, Dana knew they needed a way to celebrate this annual day set aside to honor dads. “Every Father’s Day, let’s celebrate the dad you’re someday going to be. You’ll get cards and gifts for maybe 15 years.”
Dana’s first Father’s Day gift to her son was a devotional Bible designed for dads with his name printed on the cover. Inside his Bible, Dana wrote, Beginning this year, Father’s Day will become a day to celebrate you and the father you will become one day. You’ll receive a Father’s Day gift (this Bible being the first), and each year you will list another attribute of God to pass to your children. Son, you’ll not understand the depth of love Christ has for us until you have children of your own. By then, you will have filled these pages with what it means to put love into action.
Celebrate Father’s Day by connecting with those who positively impact your life and the life of others.
Consider remembering the fathers who have children deployed in the military, and those who are unable to celebrate in person because of other factors.
Fatherless daughters frequently have trouble in romantic relationships. Fatherless sons also struggle with relationships because that important example of how men interact with others is missing. Trusting someone, especially a man, in a relationship is hard for those whose core experience is that men leave. The resulting complicated emotional growth and immature relationship intelligence can be especially poignant on Father’s Day.
Father’s Day may be awkward for those who did not have someone to turn to for fatherly protection, solace, strength, and wisdom. If that is the case, Father’s Day may be a good reminder that being protective of ourselves and our children, a leaning to sorrow and insecurity about potentially being abandoned again are natural reactions.
And these natural reactions are reminders that we get to take our hurt to the Lord. “He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds,” says Psalm 147:3.
How does Father’s Day affect you this year?
Welcome the day as an opportunity to look deeply within your own heart. Father’s Day emphasizes what is good about a father’s vital role in our lives. This day in June honors those dads who did the good things, took the high road, loved deeply, and reflected provision and protection.
Father’s Day picks at the scabs over wounds we have band-aided, inviting the wounded to seek connection and healing. We get to do the hard and necessary work to be our best selves. “To know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God,” according to Ephesians 3:19.
What healing and personal growth in relation to your father experience can you celebrate? What hurts and emotional strain remain?
Good and not so good, emotions are indicators of what has happened to our heart. While we cannot control what others do that often has a massive impact on our lives, we can seek hope, help, and healing to be our best selves for own sakes and for those whose lives we impact.
What do your feelings reveal about areas you can acknowledge, feel, unpack, and heal with a counselor, therapist, or mentor?
When Father’s Day feels awkward, Scripture says
A solo mom and mentor who walked the single parent journey before me often sends me a Father’s Day card. A bit tongue-in-cheek, she acknowledges the day and turns it into a tip of the hat for those navigating without a dad who is present in the day-to-day. Moms are moms and we will never be dads. That is not our job. Nor are sons ever to fill in as the man of the house in a dad’s absence. A son’s only role is to be the son.
When a dad is absent, a hole remains in the family fabric. There is no filling the role by any other means. We learn to live with the unfilled space in the same way the pilot of a two-engine aircraft adapts to navigate when an engine is out. Though the design is altered and the experience looks different, despite being awkward, we still fly.
And for single moms who are doing double-duty as two parents, Father’s Day is a somewhat awkward opportunity to acknowledge all you are doing right.
To make Father’s Day less awkward, embrace gratitude.
What has the Lord protected you from? Where has God made a way? Who has God brought that enriched your life? When has the Lord taught you about yourself? What has the Lord taught you about Himself?
Father’s Day is an ideal time to reflect on the Heavenly Father’s love, provision, and protection.
Solo mom of seven, PeggySue Wells is the founder of SingleMomCircle.com. She is a USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of 33 books including The Ten Best Decisions A Single Mom Can Make, Chasing Sunrise, and The Patent. More from PeggySue at PeggySueWells.com.
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