This won’t be a long piece. I have been thinking about it all day and I’ll just make my point and file it.
I think Fathers Day is an incorrect name for an important holiday.
It doesn’t take much to be a father — just a shot of sperm that finds an egg. In fact, far too many of those sperm donors are long gone by the time the babies are born.
So forget the idea of Fathers Day.
We ought to call it Dads Day.
A father can hang around and be a dad, and many of them are truly fine men. But some men were never fathers but devoted their lives to raising children who were fathered by other men.
My own father was little more than a sperm donor.
Wesley Whitcomb was just 21 when I was born in December 1949. He was 24 when he absented himself permanently from my life. I got a physical resemblance, one or two good qualities and most of the bad ones. He would be going on 95 if he were alive, but any searches I’ve done in the last 25 years or so have turned up no trace of him.
He was never my dad anyway.
But the second man who came into my life — in 1956 — didn’t give me DNA, but from then until he died in 2008, he was my dad.
Norman Rappaport was both a father and a dad, taking on Wesley’s two children and fathering three more of his own. He taught me almost everything good I know and stood by me through both good and bad,
I was never a father. I never impregnated either of my wives (or any other women), but I had the chance to be a dad to my second wife’s two children. Pauline and Virgile have been two of the greatest joys of my life.
So for me it isn’t Fathers Day, it’s Dads Day.