Father’s Day is coming, and I’ve been thinking about what I’d actually ask for if I could ask for anything honestly — not the grilled dinner, not the card, not the obligatory phone call. The real thing. The thing most fathers I know want but rarely say out loud.
I want to be seen.
Not celebrated. Not honored. Not thanked, exactly. Just seen — as a full person, with an interior life that’s still active and curious and occasionally worth engaging with.
I have two adult children I’m enormously proud of. They’re smart, busy, building good lives, raising their own families. By any reasonable measure we have a good relationship. We enjoy each other’s company. We show up for the important things. And yet there’s a particular kind of distance that settles in between parents and their adult children that nobody really talks about — not because anything is wrong, but because everything is fine. Fine is comfortable. Fine doesn’t require much.
What most of us want isn’t more visits or more phone calls, exactly. It’s more presence in the ones we already have.
I think about my own parents sometimes — how when I was in my twenties and out on my own, playing music, traveling, living my life, I didn’t miss them much. I might even say I didn’t miss them at all. I didn’t write letters. I barely called. I was young and my life was full and that felt completely normal. I say this not to feel guilty about it now, but because I think it is normal — and because understanding that has made me a more patient parent than I might otherwise have been. My children are living their lives. That’s exactly what they’re supposed to be doing. That’s what I raised them to do.
But here’s what I’ve noticed, and I suspect I’m not alone in this: somewhere between the years when your children need you for everything and the years when they’re fully launched and independent, there’s a transition that nobody quite prepares you for. The relationship shifts — appropriately, necessarily — but sometimes it shifts a little too far in the direction of… management. Parents become something to be checked on, maintained, kept comfortable. The conversations get a little shallower. The emails get a little slower. And occasionally — without anyone intending it — you find yourself being talked to like someone who has already been gently retired from the business of having relevant opinions.
That one stings a little, if I’m honest.
I’ve been thinking about things I believed passionately at twenty-five — about justice, about change, about the direction the world was supposed to go. Some of it was right. Some of it didn’t survive contact with reality.
I have the same idealism, ethics and beliefs I had when I was a young long-haired hippie. I marched and protested against the Vietnam War and have always supported equal rights for all, regardless of sex, religion, ethnicity or sexual preference. Of course, that is tempered by experience and what I have learned from living in the real world since then.
Some people do get less forgiving as they age — their opinions are often based upon fear, jealousy or anger. But many of us base our point of view and fundamental beliefs upon years of study and experience. That’s 40–50 years of watching society and culture change and evolve, of learning, studying, listening and growing.
Young people always believe they are smarter and morally superior to the generation that came before them. I know I did! The generation that went to Woodstock thought we were going to change everything. It was the “Age of Aquarius”! We changed some things. Others proved more stubborn than we expected. That’s not defeat — that’s just what fifty years of paying close attention looks like. And I’d like to think that perspective is worth something in a conversation, even if — especially if — it leads somewhere neither of us expected.
I’m not asking for agreement. I’m asking to be disagreed with like someone whose opinion is worth the effort of disagreeing with.
What fathers actually want, I think, is the same thing everyone wants and few people ask for directly: to matter to the people who matter most to them. Not as a parent, exactly — that role is largely complete. Just as a person. Someone with stories that haven’t all been told yet. Someone who still has things to learn and things to offer and things worth saying.
That’s what I want for Father’s Day.
The rest is just cake.