My seven-year-old daughter falls into a typical pretty-mirror-image-of-the-absent-father cliche. Brought up by her mother's family, she bears an unmistakable resemblance to her father _ large, deep-set eyes, full lips, and skinny limbs that betray her daily calorie intake, let alone the trace of developing rock star cheekbones.
But unlike the family drama cliche where the mother bemoans her long-departed love in the look of the living child _ who in turn asks about her absent old man with those teary doe eyes and little, heart-wrenching innocent voice _ my daughter is no drama queen when it comes to this fatherly matter.
The little Missy, for a start, has earned a kind of reputation among my friends as a nonchalant kid with zero self-pity thanks to a number of lines she has delivered regarding her father (or the lack thereof) that would make her a queen of family black comedies. I remember it was a month ago when my niece said to my daughter: "My mum said you're the poorest child because your parents intentionally made you an orphan." (Don't ask me where on Earth this juvenile bitchiness came from!)
My daughter, out of sheer nonchalance, stop her munching and turned to her cousin saying: "Look, the thing is I'm not even an orphan because my father is not yet dead. It's just that he's nowhere to be seen." Then she resumed her dinner in front of Cartoon Network as if it was just another good eat-in day.
Also last week, as Father's Day was approaching, my daughter was proudly telling me that she comforted her classmate at school today. The classmate in question, she said, was breaking down during a Father's Day activity at school because she doesn't have a father. At this point in the story I couldn't help asking: "But you don't even have a father, either."
My little Miss, looking at me with those eyes that seemed to say "what a stupid remark you made, mummy", answered: "Yeah, but you know I never care about that." She then continued to boast about her so-called classroom heroism.
I take family like I take everything else _ function over form and the end over the means. As long as it functions, it doesn't matter what form it takes. However, we're still living in a society when at times, form comes before function, especially the conventional form of a family with two parents and one or more children.
I wouldn't deny that it's true children growing up in single-parent families have certain predicaments and face a lot more challenges, but it's not to do with the "form" itself _ not because a single-parent family is a "broken" or "incomplete" family. Being a single-parent family means there's one parent working twice or thrice as much to make ends meet _ striving single-handedly to feed at least two mouths and acting as both mother and father. It's not the form per se, but the immense responsibility the remaining parent has to shoulder that leaves all single parents with both stress and exhaustion that in turn could affect a child's emotional disposition.
That's when I think, as the online society is bitterly bitching about whether or not schools should drop Mother's Day and Father's Day activities in order to not hurt the feelings of children from single-parent families while academics and the like grumble about rising divorce rates and all that jazz, there are much more practical measures to be done for single-parent families than these sentimental initiatives.
My daughter doesn't hold a grudge against her long-lost father or feel inadequate not having one by her side because we _ my family and dearest friends _ make sure she has all she needs, let alone those fancy excesses from spoiling gay fashion aunties. But in reality, there are thousands of single mothers and single fathers out there who are battling the daily stress of juggling work and parental duty _ the duty of both a mother and a father.
And well, what have the authorities ever done to help them? I mean, you can blame it on divorce and try to find a way to campaign for no divorce or to brainstorm another thousand sessions to find a way to "reduce the divorce rate" in order to "prevent broken families". However, in the real world, single parents are struggling with all their might to keep together the remnants of what was once called "a complete family".
It's good that society cares about prevention, but perhaps we'd better start taking care of existing problems as well. When divorce and single parenting are unavoidable, what can the authorities do to ensure that when a family is literally broken or incomplete, it doesn't mean that said family is broken and incomplete emotionally, financially and functionally?
And if that's achieved, you wouldn't even need to care how those children from single-parent families will feel during National Father's Day like today. If society can ensure security for single parents in order to allow them to perform both roles as father and mother with efficiency, their children would surely learn to gratefully appreciate their single father, as well as single mother who performs also the role of a father, without any lingering feeling for the missing one.
Just like my kid said: "I never care about that!"
Samila Wenin is deputy editor of Life.