In doing a little internet research on the origins of Father’s Day, I was fascinated to discover that it was apparently the idea of the daughter of a single dad (widower) who wanted to honor his hard work and dedication to his children. And here I thought it was just a corporate-created Hallmark holiday and boon to the necktie and cologne industries.

You are both mother and father to Sami now, said two different friends to me recently, unbeknownst to each other. I never thought of it that way. Instead I have been fairly obsessed with the shortage of dads around here — mine and Sami’s. Even all my grandpas are dead. (Damn, I have a lot of dead people.) To put it simply, there is no one to send a father’s day card to.

For the first time in my life, there is no man — save for the little 2.5 year-old man-to-be sleeping in the other room. There are no father substitutes. No one to project my father issues onto. In my ex, I found someone to take care of me, and I am grateful to him for everything he did do for me, but his caretaking stunted my growth in some ways. Now I feel like I am picking up where I left off when I married him at the age of 23. I have to be a grown-up again.

I never really knew my own father. My parents were never married, and he was not in the picture much as I grew up, except for visits here and there. We got a bit closer when I became an adult, but I always sort of held him at arm’s length. He suffered from a lot of things: he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, for one, and was severely overmedicated for said disorder, which caused a lot of other problems.

The night that he died, suddenly and unexpectedly, he should have been at my house. My aunt had asked me if I would be open to him staying with us that weekend. I declined, and promised that I would go to visit him early the next week. I was too exhausted, with a new baby, and not much support myself, to take on my dad that weekend. Would he have died if he had stayed at my house? Could I have prevented his death? There is not much point in asking such questions, and yet I do. When I care to, I tell myself the story of being a terrible, selfish daughter who could have saved him if she had just put his needs before hers for once. But tonight, I am too tired to lay such a trip on myself.

Father issues. I still have not worked out all my anger towards my father. Yes, he is dead, almost two years gone, and much of the resentment has dropped away. But there is a nameless rage: the rage of the abandoned child, and that is much harder to release, as some of it is almost pre-verbal. Most of the time, I don’t even know it is there. It comes out in funny ways–mainly in the longing for men to make everything better.

Perhaps it is the thwarted longing that provokes rage. I remember how I used to long for a dad. It wasn’t something that happened all the time, but it was most acute when I spent time with my fathered friends. Yes, I had a wonderful step-grandfather who raised me as his own, but being raised by my grandparents only fueled my sense of myself as a freak. I loved them, but craved a father who was one, not two, generations removed.

Tonight, I sit with this a weird combination of exhilaration, remorse, and sadness. The aching for my ex is still unbelievably painful. I will endure it for as long as I need to, perhaps it will get more intense, perhaps less, and then it will change into something else or fade away entirely. For four months I was starved of him, and I’m perhaps dealing with some kind of a relapse, now that I got another dose of him in the court house.

I watch the ache: it’s like a hollow in my solar plexus, from which a massive steel cable emerges and tries to connect to him, but can’t. I keep trying to mentally pull back that steel cable, but can’t quite seem to sever this longing to merge with my son’s father. I wonder how this Father’s Day is for him. More thoughts that are pointless to think.

It occurs to me that perhaps, by being both mother and father to my son, some of my father issues will resolve themselves. I have no idea how this would happen, but I am open to the possibility. I think I could be a good dad to my son, even though I’m not very butch. I need to find a way to redefine fatherhood so that I fit the bill. No answers on that front, but I’m brainstorming…