Happy Fathers' Day, Mum!

Here I go again, Mr Bitter, Mr Cynical, but Mothers' day and Fathers' Day are just myths created by the card industry.

I suppose to lots of parents around the western world these days mean a lot. But for me, it’s all quite meaningless.

My son is working away at the moment he sent me a text saying, ‘Happy Fathers Day!’ which is enough for me. But in truth he texts me every day just to say… stuff really.

This means more to me, as it shows that we have a close relationship and think of each other every day.

He is now a father, and  is away for Harleigh’s first Fathers' Day, but this won't mean a thing to her, as she has just learned to crawl, and is more concerned about what she can find to shove in her mouth to cause her Mother heart problems at the moment. But it does mean a lot to my son Lee and his partner Kim. That just shows what good parents they are; they are making their daughter's life as best they can.

We hear a lot here in Britain about the Fathers for Justice campaigns, where fathers have been refused the rights to see their children. There has to be quite a lot of hate and spite in a person to refuse a child time with their father. That is, of course, unless the fathers are violent or sexual perverts. But dressing up as Spiderman and standing on a building waving a placard doesn’t do anything for your credibility as a reasonable adult, lads.

My father was a good man (see previous blogs) but he was a product of his generation. He worked sometimes eighteen hours a day, and often seven days a week. He had too many kids; he thought having children was the reason for life. By doing this, he denied himself a life. But having said that, he didn’t want for anything, and on the day he died, he died speaking about what a lucky man he had been. So who am I to judge a man's choice of life?

Families are changing all the time, when I was young everyone had a mother and father at home, unless one parent had died prematurely. 

All parents looked unhappy to me, but then it was a day-to-day struggle to keep your heads above water.

Now there are lots of families where three or four children will all have different fathers. But if they are happy, who cares? There is no such thing as a normal family or a normal lifestyle. We all think that our lives are ‘normal’ but we are all so different.

When I see women around the world struggling to raise children in often appalling conditions with little or no help, it chokes me up.

We hear often about the broken society, how feral children run wild on estates which, trust me, is true. I work with a lot of these kids and they have no boundaries. They not only make the lives of others miserable but they also make their own lives miserable. They don’t know a way of breaking the cycle, which is where I try to help.

Having said all this it’s not just because they are from single parent families. It’s because of lazy-arsed parents or parents that have problems themselves.

There are lots of young people brought up by just one parent who are hard working and courteous. They have morals and manners and want to achieve in life. None of this happens by accident, it’s down to the hard work and a hell of a lot of sacrifices by good hard working parents.

I have seen, many times, mothers at football matches with their sons. They obviously don’t like the game but their son does and that’s all that matters to them. Lots of good mothers have had to do the roles that were traditionally done by the fathers. Just bringing a child to adulthood by yourself is hard enough but when you have given them a good loving up bringing as well it is a credit to single parents the world over.

I think that children should have the right to spend time with both their parents where this is possible. And because I’m now ’Babbo’ I think that children also benefit from the relationships they have with Grandparents.

But to all the single Mums out there trying to juggle work, home life and kids' hobbies all by yourself,

Happy Fathers Day, Mum!