Forty days to Father’s Day.
We need to tell more diverse stories about fatherhood.
It took me till 2021 to realise it, but there’s not a whole heckuva lot that happens in the five or six weeks between Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. Yes, here in Toronto we have the Victoria Day statutory holiday and the school year wrapping up, but we don’t see the same fanfare for fathers that we see for mothers in early May.
With my eighth Father’s Day just on the horizon, I’ve heard plenty of the issues that many dads have with the days, whether it’s getting gifts that feel last-minute or not being able to see their kids on the day. Father’s Day is not amazing for all.
But it doesn’t have to stay that way.
When the pandemic slowed things down, it gave me the opportunity to break things down and really understand what Casey Palmer, Canadian Dad is actually about. Through the power of search engine optimization and streamlining over two thousand posts from the last twenty years into something a lot more manageable, I went deep down the rabbit hole of what the world thought about its fathers and realised:
We have a lot of work to do.
Forty Days to Father’s Day: Forty diverse stories about fatherhood. It’s LONG overdue.
What fathers needed was a whole lot of change, and just as I learned from the work I do for Black History Month, fatherhood would need more than a post or two in mid-June for a proper facelift, and that’s when it hit me—
Why do one or two posts when you can do forty?
Forty Days to Father’s Day—or FD² for short (but no one’s going to call it that)—is the celebration dads have been looking for, with forty topics to carry us through from May the 12th (three days after Mother’s Day) all the way through to Father’s Day on June 20th, showing the world that fathers are more than the single dimension we so often assign them.
We’re raising kids in an increasingly challenging world. Some dads are fighting for their rights when it feels like they have none. I wanted to cover the full spectrum of what we encounter through the fatherhood experience so the world could understand it’s so much more than the low bar it’s set for us.
And so, without further ado, I’d like to present Forty Days to Father’s Day: A Celebration of Dads and Fatherhood. I hope this series can help educate you on everything that fathers go through so you can be more informed with respect to fatherhood issues.
