Not so happy Father's Day.

This is one of the times of year I feel unusually awkward and defiant - the run up to Father's Day. On one hand I feel the need to prove that I don't care about it, it's just a day. One the other hand, there is the awkward conversation when someone asks me what I'll be doing for it, do I just blurt out 'my dad's dead?' Do I saw he 'passed on'? That conversation is never going to go well, and that's before I get to the really sticking point, my dad didn't pass on, he chose to kill himself. Not the best subject for polite small talk.
This blog post got me thinking about Father's Day, and fathers, in a slightly more critical sense. My dad was not an especially good father, the very fact he chose to remove himself from my life pretty much shows that, but that's not the only reason. I spent a lot of time being very angry at him, and also trying to prove that I didn't care, I didn't need him anyway. It's only in the last year or so that I've started to admit to myself that I do miss him, we got on very well, all my geeky interests are inherited from him, I used to borrow his 2000AD comics and watch Star Trek with him. If he was still alive we would have a lot to talk about, I'm sure he'd have loved A Song of Ice and Fire for example.
I feel that society expects things to go in a certain way, at least traditionally. I didn't go to my graduation, and one of the reasons was that there would be no family to be there in the photos with me, my mum had had a baby a month before and had no childminder, and of course my dad wouldn't be there. I'm pretty sure I'll never get married, and if I do it won't be a traditional wedding, there's no father to give me away, no father-of-the-bride speech. I hate talking to people about my family, for example boyfriends parents, there's no easy way to answer the 'and what does your father do?' question. The worst thing is that I don't even care about the way things are supposed to be, I know all about the importance of fathers to daughters being to do with how women were either their father's or husband's property.
Perhaps the worst thing is my own fault, the total erasure of my father from my life. Maybe it's just his manner of death, and if he had died in an accident it would have been different, but my mum and brothers and I don't talk about my dad. My older brother looks exactly like him, but it barely gets mentioned, though sometimes I'll look at a picture of my brother and the resemblance is uncanny. I don't know how my brothers feel about Father's Day, or most things, we're not close at all, and haven't been since we were really small. My mum's ex-husband did a pretty good job of being a step-father, in that he pretty much left us to get on with and didn't try to replace our father. I'm quite close to my mum's dad, though he lives in France and I only see him occasionally, I don't think I'd say he was a father-figure either, probably more so for my brothers though.
My mum did a really good job raising us, and I think single mums are amazing, in fact I expect to be one myself, intentionally, but still fell a little like I'm missing out each year. It upsets me when people take their fathers for granted, I know so many people with bad relationships with them, but I don't even have the chance to try and improve my relationship with my father. This August I'll have lived half of my life without my father, one day shouldn't mean much more, but everywhere I look adverts are telling me how funny, caring and loyal my farther is, not so much, and I'm sure I'm not the only one for who those adverts just raise bad feelings.