For many NZ men this is a day they would rather avoid. It is a day they will not hear from their children. Children are born selfish and hopefully learn to grow out of it, so do not see fathers day in the same light as Christmas — they are opportunistic.

Father’s day like mothers day is something that is taught, it is an act of respect towards a parent. Take for example a solo father with a 6 year old child. Without the intervention of maybe a paternal grandmother or an auntie that child may never give any consideration to Fathers Day. Maybe yesterday didn’t coincide with the child’s fortnightly access regime. There will be Fathers who simply need to find something to fill the day on Fathers Day because the last time they heard from their child was over the telephone with mother standing in the background telling the child what to say, filling that child with hatred, rather than any sense of appreciation or value of a father.

There will be fathers who have past through hope, despair, loss, grief, and find fathers day a day of remembrance rather than one of celebration, and even though they have no choice but to shut the door they are out there, they are on sites like this, not because they are looking for insensitive platitudes, but just with a hope that the world might change. They are probably under no illusion that yesterday their children didn’t give a fucking continental about their father, because it simply just wasn’t what they were taught to do.

You may have forgotten the day only a few years back when the children’s commissioner of New Zealand asked for Fathers Day to be changed to a day of recognition of abuse of children. Father’s day is not a day that fathers celebrate their role; they do that the other 364 days a year.

Until our society can sort out it’s screwed up values, Fathers Day will more likely be a day of remembrance, than a day fathers are remembered.