Everyone draws dad. From the end of January, my daughter received a post at the worst school – they will draw her to bring a photo of her father. The portrait was done in pastel color! In an ordinary school, they made some kind of medal for my father for two weeks. For holiday. And write poems.
A few years ago, when my daughter literally went to kindergarten, I could not have imagined that everyone was so freely preparing for the celebration of February 23. At that time, matinees were not held on this occasion, handicrafts and profile portraits of the pope were not made. Today was a bit of a weekly holiday because only our small group did not father a few children. And as it was, there were children with fathers, but everyone understood that the opposite, better without a father than that.
Who did those kids draw? Who did they sing at the festival? Would you give flowers to strangers from the nearest military unit at a matinee?
Until the end of the 2010s, the “father” holiday was ignored in both schools and kindergartens. Due to the lack of the right amount of wards of the same popes, so to speak. Although significantly more than even from my childhood. When I grew up in Tyumen Lesobaze, almost half even had a father or permanent stepfather. I remember the names of girlfriends who were fathers – four girls from my entire childhood environment and a garden of about 600 flats.
I mean the normal dads who don’t drink, don’t drag things out of the house, don’t beat their wives and kids, don’t sleep on the porch drunk, don’t knock on other people’s doors, don’t fight. in the gardens. But in the families of my girlfriends there were more fathers, so to speak, than those who took us on bikes or flooded slides for the winter.
The presence of a good father at home was of course envied. But a little less jealousy fell on those who did not have a father, but only a mother. Unless they drink too and bring new dads every week. My mother and I lived together, my mother did not drink, worked hard, and in return received an apartment in the last house in the whole city with free housing for government employees. But even before the apartment, I was jealous. Yes, we lived in a small studio of 13 square meters. m, but I was lucky because no one was lying around drunk, dads didn’t come to us, no dads were turning a blind eye to my mom, and only street robbers could take the money from us.
This harmony was met with envy in our environment. I knew boys and girls who thought people like me were lucky. The children were sympathetic to the fact that there weren’t enough good fathers for everyone anyway. And they chose to be as lucky as me: to have no fathers.
And I, looking at these girls, learned so firmly that my father was a big test that I regularly threatened my mother to kill herself if she brought “daddy” home. Once, when I came back from school, I found an electrician at home with my mother. I did not see an employee of the housing office without electricity and thought that this was our future father. Then with a cry: “I warned you!” I ran to the window. Because the pope’s appearance in those years and in that environment promised the child more misfortune than protection and prosperity.
Because of this tension with fathers, February 23 was not associated with any father in my childhood. At home, they congratulated all the men who had them. But neither kindergarten nor school dared to connect these two concepts – vacation and father – because many children did not have a father, or what kind of postcards with a round dance, on which the prison set all eyes? Gifts were given to boys at school. Congratulations on Defender of the Fatherland Day. In the absence of defenders in many families, nothing was prepared for any father, but they congratulated Trudovik for the athlete.
Because if Father’s Day had been declared then, everyone would have been surprised at the teacher’s indiscretion because more than half of the children, myself included, had no one to congratulate them on. He would stop, hesitating.
March 8 was, yes, Mother’s Day: gifts, postcards. Fortunately, almost everyone had a mother, rarely orphaned in which class, but still had a grandmother or aunt.
And there was no leave until 2002 on February 23. Because it would be awkward for most of them to celebrate Men’s Day and send everyone home when they don’t have or have a man in their home, and they’re just stamping a congratulatory man’s fist on their forehead on the holiday.
For nearly ten years in big cities, the word “father” has been used in schools and kindergartens on February 23. In the villages, this phenomenon has just arrived. I tell you, four years ago it was impossible to imagine a father’s vacation in a rural garden, but even then normal fathers appeared. A few dads went to our matinees regularly, and they took the kids out of the garden on weekdays. Until recently, even five of these were an incredible indicator for a village. Because everything was the same there: either absence or drinking. Another third option is to work in the city. It is as if there is a father, but as if he does not exist.
Several years passed. Today, if we take classmates, neighbors and summer girlfriends, I can not even tell how many friends of my daughter’s father is not, probably a friend. I still can’t quite feel what it’s like to have a father when I look at my daughter. And it’s hard for me to grasp in my mind that my daughter doesn’t know how this happened – some fathers are gone, she doesn’t know such families.
The fathers looked after the children. Yes, we still have many villains of all kinds and only domestic tyrants, full of complaints of all female-public people. But the changes are obvious: before, there were few intelligent fathers, but now I do not see around me families with small children and fatherless, they were not included in my example.
Either society got stronger and life went on as usual, or there was a paternity fashion but somehow they got more involved than the fathers. Every year I see more and more men taking their kids to clinics, clubs, school. Even when I gave birth seven years ago, you could only meet very young people and grandparents at the playgrounds. Well, it’s clear with grandparents: uncles started drinking less and more lived up to grandparents’ age. But the rise in fatherhood participation among 20-year-olds surprised me at the time.
For pro-feminist young women who are already reluctant to join patriarchal captivity and return with a child on one side, I think competition in the capitals plays a role here. Thus, fathers, who first walked with slings, took their children to the doctors and taught them how to ski, collectively lived in Moscow and St. They appeared in St. Petersburg, then wandered the country and grew old. But in 2015 there were very few such families among thirty-year-olds. For the rest of my life, I will remember how our local therapist decided to ask if my daughter’s mother was still alive, because her husband took her to the boy’s date in her first months.
Several years have passed – even in the country, fathers with children in the clinic do not cause inquisitive glances. Sometimes even fathers started to go to the hospital, but what to do because there is no time for mothers? Previously, if a mother could not take a sick leave and go with her child to the hospital to remove adenoids, then they bitterly waved their hands: they themselves will dry out! Now, even in the district center, I have seen children in the hospital with their fathers, not their mothers.
Yet in the ’90s we were shaken strongly when the main public utilities collapsed. And before that, for 70 years, people also did not live in a greenhouse: not because of Yeltsin, they began to drink and leave their children at the disposal of the Bolsheviks.
It took a hundred years after the revolution before we started to rebuild a normal family. In the sense that fathers appear in these families, and they are doing something. For example, they go to matinees. They take the children to the public and the circus. They can take you to the clinic or cook dinner.
We had hardly seen such men before, but now you will meet a drunkard with a stroller in the village. It’s a pity, of course, that he can’t tear himself away from beer at the same time. But look what a breakthrough we’ve made in 30 years: a beer-drinking man who remembers having a child!
I’m not kidding, I live in the middle of nowhere and I see more and more men staring at their kids even if they want to hit the bottle. For example, I have seen drunken fathers with two children at the same time as the pediatrician. Or in a children’s game. What progress: Used to lie drunk under the threshold, and now they’re taking the kids.
Yes, they drink less. It almost halved in 2008-2021. Alcohol consumption in Russia. And immediately what a stunning result – there was someone at school to congratulate father’s day. They began to drink 43% less – children are already being asked to bring a photo of their beloved father to school. A separate Father’s Day was even introduced, though it hasn’t taken root yet. It’s scary to think what would happen if you cut the alcohol in half.
How this development actually looks on paper, statistically, no one knows. I have not seen any in-depth research aimed at a comprehensive study of fathers’ involvement in raising children. Statistics for single mothers are irrelevant: good benefits for single-parent families led to an increase in fake divorces or intentional childbearing out of wedlock. I’ve come across many instances of people who have fictitious divorce for the sake of interest or put a line on their birth certificate. Therefore, the only source of information we have about the situation of families is the real world around us.
I don’t know how it is with yours, but in mine the subtle taboo of the word “dad” has finally disappeared from the school dictionary. And February 23 actually became the day of the popes. Now fathers are painted in every way just like mothers, and they are presented with medals of honor. For this, it was enough to give the country a few years of a normal, conditionally well-fed life, when the fathers sobered up and gradually began to care for their children.