Father’s Day cards for single mums? In these feminised times, we dads get little enough recognition without sharing our one day!

AN ELDERLY friend reports visiting a local branch of Scribbler to buy a sympathy card for a woman whose husband had just died. After looking at the scores of offerings on display, he turned in dismay to the girl behind the till and asked: ‘Do you sell any cards that don’t have the word f*** on them?’

The assistant furrowed her brow and thought for a long while, before pointing to a bottom shelf in the corner and saying: ‘I think you may find one over there.’

I remembered my friend’s experience this week when I read of another new development in the world of greetings cards, which might also have been calculated to irritate stick-in-the-mud traditionalists like me.

This was the news that Scribbler’s rival, Paperchase, is for the first time selling Father’s Day cards aimed at single mothers — the idea being to protect widows, divorcees and abandoned mums from feeling left out on Sunday week, when dads will supposedly be getting all the attention.

Messages

Designed by 29-year-old Stevie Rowing-Parker, who himself lost his father when he and his brother Tim were very young, they carry messages such as: ‘Who said the best dad in the world can’t be a mum?’; ‘If you do both jobs, you should get both cards’; and ‘Who needs a dad when your mum has balls?’

let’s leave aside the question of how many mums would actually be touched to be informed by their children that they have balls (I have a feeling my own dear mother might have taken it badly if I’d told her any such thing during her long widowhood).

Over to Stevie, who explains: ‘It’s been mum and my brother since I was about five, and for the past four years I’ve been buying Father’s Day cards, crossing out “dad” and writing “mum” terribly.

‘It just made mum so happy. The thing is it’s obviously a pretty rubbish day for them and I just felt why are these amazing mums, who are doing both jobs, feeling rubbish on this day when they should be celebrated as well? It just didn’t make sense to me.’

Now, I have a great deal of sympathy for single mothers — particularly for widows and those deserted by feckless partners. Heaven knows, it’s hard enough bringing up children when there’s a man around to help (though to be honest, I reckon that my presence on the family premises has added, on balance, to my wife’s domestic workload, rather than relieving it).

So if Stevie’s cards have cheered his mum up on her otherwise ‘ rubbish’ Father’s Days, I say good for him. And though I have deep reservations about the people who run Paperchase, I congratulate them on their shrewdness in spotting a highly lucrative and hitherto under-exploited money-spinner.

After all, a report this year by the charity Gingerbread found that a quarter of families with children are now run by lone parents (mostly mothers, of course). That’s a potential market of millions of female recipients of cards on Father’s Day (or male recipients on Mother’s Day — an innovation that may well follow, if it hasn’t been thought of already).

At £2.99 for each of Stevie’s nine to 12-word cards — a sum that would buy you four copies of the Daily Mail, containing some 250,000 words in all, with 39p change — it sounds to me like money for old rope. Indeed, the only thing that puzzles me is why Stevie thinks ‘it just doesn’t really make sense’ for Father’s Day to be seen as a day for fathers. What is it that he finds so hard to comprehend?

Does he have the same trouble understanding the concept of birthdays, Christmas or Easter, as days set aside to celebrate particular people or events? Or is it just that he belongs to a generation, obsessed by inclusivity, that appears to have increasing difficulty in distinguishing between the sexes?

Witness those university campuses where it’s now seen as a hate crime to suggest that people with male sexual organs are necessarily men, or that people with female organs are women. If so, I fear I must plead guilty and join Germaine Greer in her tumbril on the way to the scaffold.

Rebuked

Whatever the truth, I can’t help feeling that in these feminised times, we fathers get little enough recognition as it is without having to share the one day in the year set aside to celebrate us.

Increasingly, we seem to be regarded as the superfluous sex, mocked in TV ads for our domestic incompetence, rebuked for our reluctance to change nappies, and elbowed out of professions such as teaching and medicine.

Today, only one in five teachers is male, with fewer still in primary schools. Disturbingly, women also outnumber men among GPs and trainee doctors — a development that intensifies the crisis in the NHS, since women on average take far more time off work than their male colleagues, with long breaks for childbearing and child-rearing. The fact is that we taxpayers get far more bang for our buck by training men. But then we’re not allowed to mention that these days, since it would mean acknowledging that men and women are biologically different, with the latter equipped to bear babies and instinctively better adapted to childcare.

Mind you, I have one thing in common with Stevie’s mum. like her, though for different reasons, I’ve long thought Father’s Day pretty rubbish — and we never marked it when I was a boy.

This was partly because my own father took a dim view of anything that smacked of sentimentality, but also because I was brought up to believe the occasion was a racket, dreamt up by an American greetings card company in the Twenties.

Celebration

As it turns out, this was something of an urban myth. If I’m to believe Wikipedia – a biggish if, I grant you — Father’s Day has quite as respectable a pedigree as Mother’s Day. It dates back at least to the Middle Ages, when fatherhood was celebrated on the feast day of St Joseph, husband of Christ’s mother. In some countries, apparently, Father’s Day still falls on March 19.

As for Mother’s Day, this is not to be confused with the Christian holiday of Mothering Sunday, on which people of both sexes returned to their ‘mother church’ — the place of their baptism or the local cathedral. No, the modern celebration of motherhood appears to owe rather more than Father’s Day to the enterprise of stationery companies.

Though established by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson as a national holiday in 1914, Mother’s Day only took off in the Twenties, when Hallmark Cards and others began to cash in.

rooted in history though Father’s Day may be, however, I’m not expecting much from our own sons on Sunday week, despite all those years I devoted to bringing home the bacon and putting clothes on their backs.

If past form is any guide, only one of the four — the nice one — will mark the day, probably by sending an animated electronic message downloaded from a fancy app. As for the others, I can’t remember them giving me any cards since they were forced to draw them at primary school.

But I can’t pretend I’ll be hurt. After all, mums tend to care much more about this sort of thing than dads of my generation, which could be another difference between the sexes that it’s safer not to mention.

Of course, it could be that having read this column, my sons may choose to send my wife a Father’s Day card, such as the one that says simply: ‘Dad’s a d**k. Happy Father’s Day, Mum.’

But I mustn’t go putting ideas into the ungrateful blighters’ heads.