Fathers Day 2016: It's time for your review

By Felix Carroll

The problem with Father’s Day is that it’s not Mother’s Day.

Mother’s Day we distribute kisses and flowers in a ridiculously over-simplified effort to reciprocate a mother’s unfathomable love. And of course she cherishes the flowers. She cherishes the kisses. Most of all, she cherishes that all her little ingrates are lined up before her in a forced march of overdue affection.

Simply put, mothers have nothing to lose and nothing to prove on Mother’s Day.

Father’s Day, by comparison, feels more like a yearly employee performance review. While not outright armed with clipboards and pencils, your offspring take the opportunity to step back and evaluate you in the silence of their own hearts, wondering:

In what ways have you demonstrated knowledge of all phases of your job and the relationship of your work to that of your marriage and the overall organization? Has your work as a father been accurate, thorough and neat? Have you adhered to attendance policies? In what ways can you improve in the coming year?

In this business of parenting, mothers pull themselves up by the stirrups of their own birthing tables. Fathers inherit a corner office by simply showing up.

"But I love this job! I love this job!" you say to yourself, your feet kicked up on the coffee table. "And look at these kids. They love me, too. Check this out ..."

When they are infants, you jump around like a monkey and scratch at your armpits, and they laugh and laugh and laugh. When they are toddlers, you do that thing with the orange rind in your mouth, and they laugh and laugh and laugh.

“Dad, pretend to bench press a bulldozer,” they say, when they have their fellow kindergarteners over.

On their seventh birthday you wear a birthday hat on your face and peck at the air like a chicken, and they laugh. (Maybe not as much as they would’ve when they were in preschool. But they laugh alright.)

The benefits package is incredible. It’s all accounts receivable at this point.

Through cheap laughs, you pad your resume. As time goes by, you pad it more with more sophisticated investments — macho things like splitting firewood or fixing their bicycles. And as you pad your resume more, you increasingly fear you will be found out as a fraud and your patriarchal portfolio depreciated.

That’s the problem with fatherhood. It’s not motherhood.

By the sheer fact fathers are incapable of giving birth — that the tortuous act of childbearing has been outsourced wholesale to a single gender that isn’t male — fathers are where they are through nepotism alone.

Soon you begin to notice that in serious business matters, the children turn to their mother. Your peek-a-boos and coos are old news. Brand loyalty is at stake. You listen through a cracked bedroom doorway. You cup your ear to the wall. You hear a child’s sob and the soft tones of a mother’s tender love. You suspect some sort of loyalty program is being developed behind your back. They emerge from their meeting. You act busy. They say nothing.

You fear the worst — that a restructuring is at hand. That your wife and children will shuffle you around trying to find a place for you. Maybe put you in charge of transportation. Something like that. But no one says anything.

A skinned elbow, and to whom do they turn? Their mother. A shirt needs buttoning? Their mother. How do they like their toast? Apparently not like that.

You wonder if you need a new marketing strategy. Or maybe every once in a while you need to bang your fist on the table during shareholders meetings with the grandparents.

You start to stew.

You take inventory.

Wait a minute: Wasn’t this whole family enterprise my idea? Wasn’t I the one who got this thing off the ground? Yes, of course I was!

“Kids,” you want to say, “I first laid eyes on your mother across the room at a pizza parlor. Where most men would see high-risk, I saw high-potential. At the conclusion of a two-year probationary period, I got down on one knee and offered her the opportunity for the exclusive distribution of my love.”

You stew some more.

Back in your corner office you close the door behind you. You hear voices in your head. You smell the second-hand pipe smoke of the fathers who came before you, the crusty men in business suits who harrumphed a lot and kept the kids at arms length.

“You are head of the household,” they tell you. “You are the conveyer of moral values. You’re a model of stoicism. You call the shots. Your paternal bond is the only adhesive connecting the human species to the age of the gods. Remember where you came from.”

You know their ideas are bankrupt.

There are other things you know, too.

You know that because you have never pushed a watermelon-sized mortal out of your pelvis, you will remain the household’s most vulnerable demographic.

You know that in the home, human capital is assessed against the love of a mother.

You know that despite the thoughtful homemade Fathers Day cards, you remain on the verge of a written warning.

You know she’s risen to the top of the family corporation because she’s a goody-two shoes.

Business is business.