Babylune

Father’s Day Build Up

by kate baggott on June 8th, 2006

Fathers’ Day is weird when you have a new baby in the house. Do you just send a card and/or present off to your own father or do you also have to make an effort for your own husband?

We have network-wide celebrations with B5 Media. For Mothers’ Day, all of us wrote our entries to honour the brave and selfless women who take on the task of rearing and/or raising children every day. There’s a similar plan in the works to observe Fathers’ Day a week from Sunday (Fathers’ Day is the 18th in the US and Canada). I’ve been thinking about how to mark the event in a blog I write for new mothers recovering from childbirth.

Here in Germany and in most of Eastern Europe, Fathers’ Day was celebrated two weeks ago to coincide with the Feast of the Ascension and/or the Feast Day of Sts. Cyril & Methodius in the Orthodox Church. It being a different day than what I’m used to, I forgot all about the Fathers’ Day part of the observance. And so, my husband had just a card waiting for him when he got home late that evening from seeing the Da Vinci Code with his cousin. I was feeling slightly guilty about forgetting and thought I would make it up to him on the 18th.

Then, last night (or this morning if you want to be technical about it) the baby woke up at 3 am to nurse and again from 4:45 to 6:30.

“I can’t get up, I just can’t,” I told my husband when he tried to wake me up at 8:00 to get our son ready for kindergarten. “You’ll have to do it.”

About 30 seconds later I heard him say, “OK, you can watch some TV while I shave.”

I tried to fight it, but I just knew I’d have to get up the moment I heard the Sesamstrasse theme. My husband knows very well that our three year-old and TV are not a good combination for eating breakfast and getting dressed. It was, I felt, just a case of sleep sabotage.

Am I alone with this kind of treatment? No!

Here’s a quote from an article in the Guardian:

• Europe’s southern fringe is still the home of machismo, with Portuguese men being the least likely to do any housework, according to a study released yesterday.
• At the top of the household layabouts’ ranking, 61% of Portuguese men, 57% of Greek men and 47% of Spanish men told researchers they rarely, or never, used an iron or wielded a dustpan and brush.

Do you think we could just cancel Fathers’ Day in protest?

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