Fathers play a very important role in the lives of their children. They are teaching them a man’s perspective, they create balance by providing the masculine counterpart to the feminine (yin and yang). A father helps a child to be able to manage male relationships in the world. If you have a good and healthy relationship with your father you will have an easier time with men (and vice versa with mother’s). The father is just as important as the mother. This is why it is imperative that the father play a role in the child’s life whether the relationship is continuing or not. It is also the reason why the man and woman need to be more responsible for bringing children into this world in the first place. A child is not a toy but it is the result of unplanned pregnancy.

If you have been a single mother, you know more than anything, what it is like for a child who does not have a father. The longing that is there to know their father. The fantasies that the child creates; imagining what father would be like. The nights where there are tears in their eyes as they try to go to sleep.

If you have been a child without a father, you know what this yearning is like. Wondering what he might be like. Wondering if you look like him. Wishing  your mother wouldn’t talk so negatively about him. Wishing mom and dad could still be together. Thinking it is probably your fault that he left.

If your father was the perpetrator of sexual, emotional and/or physical abuse, you are confused about your feelings for your dad. You want to know what you did wrong to deserve this. You wonder if it was your fault that he traumatized you in such a way. You want to love him but it feels so uncomfortable in so many ways – that you are too embarrassed to share with anyone else. You wonder why your mother allowed these things or why your grandmother did. Most of all, you keep quiet and hold it all inside because no one would believe you anyway. You lie about the welts or bruises and you defend him in other ways to try and keep up appearances.

If your father is the dad and your mother is gone, you wonder why she does not want to be with you as much as dad does. You wonder why she left. You wonder why she says the things about dad when you have seen a different side of him. It is hard to have a relationship with her, when you are with her because she is confusing. You also wonder if you will be like her.

Father’s day, like mother’s day, is not such a wonderful time for all children – big and small. It is hard to go into the Hallmark store and pick out that card that does not sound anything at all like your parent. Very few people really enjoy choosing these cards or having to do their “due diligence” and showing up to say Happy…to a man or woman that has filled you with so much pain. There are good dads and bad dads just as there are good moms and bad moms. For those of us who grew up in troubled homes, looking at this lovely cards causes so much depression and anxiousness. You wonder what it must have been like to grow up with a father (or mother) who “was your best friend,” or who “was always there for you.”

There aren’t any cards to say “Thanks for ruining my life!” or “I wish you would have used birth control.”

Nonetheless, children both adult and minors go to the store every year and choose those cards that walk on eggshells and describe what we wish they might have been like. We cringe when we see their Facebook posts talking about us as if we were that “Happy Family” and showing photos as if they were really there and actually know what happened that day.

What I know is that all children love their parents, good or bad. I know this from working with Children’s Protective Services where even the most heinous crimes the child still took pity on their parent. It is because we are programmed to naturally love our parents just as healthy parents naturally love their children. They are all we have and so we love them because they are our parents. We hate their actions and wish they could have just left us alone or in some cases wish they would have paid attention but ultimately we always love them.

I wish I could get young people to understand that they have to take their lives more seriously and responsibly. I hate hearing people in horrible relationships tell me they are not using birth control. The idea that someone would think of a child as “Whatever happens, happens,” is so selfish and abusive to the human being that will be “The straw the breaks the camels back.” Hearing about generation after generation of absent fathers that refuse to change the family dynamics and seeing their kids grow up to be criminals and continue to make babies.

It is hard to get anyone to listen when we live in a society without values and women are more sexualized in the media than ever before and generally from their own doing. When sex is distributed to children in the film and television sectors via parents who don’t care. When baby clothes look like they are better suited for the character Violet (Brooke Shields) on Pretty Baby than a little innocent toddler who doesn’t even know what they are wearing. When teenagers shop at Victoria’s Secret which was once seen as a store for adult women. And no one is really saying anything about it other than conservative women who people shun because they are “Christian” anyway and what do they know.

It continues to get worse and worse as we focus more on gender identification and Politically Correct nonsense that ignores the reality of what is really going on in our society. As long as people get to act the way they want and do as they wish, how they dress is their business and no one really cares about the children.

I feel sick to my stomach when I see an unwed pregnant woman, especially when she has no money. Equally so when the marriage is doomed for failure and they are hoping to “save” it. Mothers and fathers play games during a divorce or a break-up and are more focused on themselves than they are on the child. It is so rare that you actually hear parents say “We want what is best for the child.”

If all parents could say, at the end of the day was “We want what is best for the child,” it wouldn’t matter that they were ending their relationship because they would still be committed to the child. There would be hope for that child’s future. There would be a chance for the child to go to college and make something of themselves. The child would not grow up to have dysfunctional relationships or take their anger out on society. The child could just be a child and live a somewhat healthy life.

Instead, parents lie about parentage and what happened to CPS and the courts. False accusations about sexual abuse run paramount. Mothers keep their kids away from their dads because they are angry at him for whatever. Fathers disappear or give up their rights to another so they can start over (and in some cases start over again and again). Once children were slaves in factories when their weren’t child labor laws (in America, as this still happens in other parts of the world) and now they are made in factories of parents who pop them out one by one completely oblivious to anything but their own sexual wants and desires. And we talk about racism as if this is really the issue. When all we are doing is hiding being a word so that no one will talk about the other issues of concern that are much more of an impact – long term – in this day and age. Because babies being born out of marriage and in unhealthy marriages that were not considered a priority from the get go come from ALL races, religions, cultures, and from all parts of the world.

When will we take the lives of our children more seriously?