It’s evening on Father’s Day here and I hope you have had a wonderful one. I hope your family came together and you shared a day where love and laughter permeated the household. I hope your refrigerator is decorated in homemade cards and there are plenty of reasons to be thankful for having home, hearth and family around you.
Special Opportunities
Holidays are fantastic opportunities to emphasize the emotional connections we have with each other. It’s a great time to pass on family values and traditions. For those of us who grew up in homes without fathers, it’s a time to discover what it is like to make the day celebrating dads a part of the fabric of our marriages and our families.
While there is a huge push to celebrate the big holidays like Christmas, Hanukkah and Thanksgiving – it’s the smaller holidays that can help us to build our own particular family traditions. For us, Father’s Day and Mother’s Day are particularly special because we honor each other in our roles that are a part of our marriage.
My husband is a son, a brother, a husband, a friend, a cousin and a grandchild. He is also a father. His role as a father is a special one that adds texture and layers to our marriage. While marriage is about two people, those two people are comprised of multiple layers in the various roles and functions they show to the rest of the world. Our families are comprised of multiple layers of personalities.
Create Your Own Holiday Ritual
Whether Father’s Day is just a card you send, a pie you bake or a gift you give – try to make it a bit more than that. You can use today as a day to strengthen your bonds as a married couple as you honor that aspect of your husband that he may or may not have great confidence in. Not all fathers are the same and no matter how modern the father are, he will never be a mother. Fathers shouldn’t be mothers. Fathers bring their own unique perspective to the table.
Today is a day that you get to not only embrace that perspective, but to show your own respect for it. You can create your own rituals that honor that. For example, if your husband loves to fish and he’s always introducing new outdoor sports to your children – use today as a day to go fishing together or to play ball together. Embrace fully that which he teaches and shares with his children as a father.
I said in an earlier post that my daughter was taking my husband to see a movie as part of the father’s day ritual. Later, we’ll gather around the grill and swap stories, jokes and conversation while he cooks. My daughter also wants to make a chalk drawing of Daddy and she cooking together. As a father, he provides us with the stabilizing force to reach out beyond ourselves and try new things – it’s important to honor that.
What rituals have you created in your family to celebrate father’s day both as a part of your marriage and a part of your family?