“I don’t think you appreciate how much our mum sacrificed for us”, said my sister the other week. And she’s right. Our mum took four years off from her promising career as a senior researcher to raise my sister and I. As is the way, we were too young to remember the exact sacrifices she made, but I know there countless many, and I look around at my life, and thank her for every piece of it. “But dad sacrificed too”, I’d respond. His sacrifice was that we barely saw him. As a respected neuroscientist he flew around the world giving talks, doing interviews, writing books, and doing his own exciting research. He was always ‘going’ and it took its own toll on him, different from my mum’s. He was one of the many hardworking career fathers who put in more hours a week than I could count with ten hands. But he paid the bills, the mortgage, took us on holiday, and kept the lights on; as my mum cared for and raised us, as a team effort. It is only when you see fathers retire that the true scale of this sacrifice is revealed, where so many are left without their work, bereft, and on their own. So many are without close friends. The mums bonded in child raising, our outside of nursery, and remained life long friends to this day. But the dads never got this chance. Their bond was with their work – and that work is finite. It is because of this, that I’ve always asked; amongst the words of “deadbeats”, the oafish and inept fathers I constantly see on TV, the meaningless toilet humour on every dad’s birthday card, or satirical calls for #banfathersday, do we really appreciate them enough? What do you think? ~ [1] [2] American Time Use Survey Harvard Business Review Census Bureau  U.S. Department of Health and Human Services  Images boy Olivia Bauso, Dragon Pan, Gradienta, Paul Volkmer, Szlivia Basso, Peter Gargiluo, and Devon Devine. #dads #dadsofinstagram #fathersrights #dadslife

2023-04-07