Oops! We Forgot Father's Day

Well, this is a bit embarrassing -- since we are a family magazine -- but the SixSeeds team forgot Father’s Day (at least on our site!).  Ideally, our editorial team plans around holidays, suggests the best ways to celebrate them, and what they mean to family life.  But last week, we must admit, Father’s Day slipped off our radar screen.

As you know, SixSeeds is a “mom and pop” enterprise, and in our defense, our editorial team has been attending to the important matters of being, well, moms and pops.  For example, one of our key contributors was moving her family into a new home, three of us simultaneously were caring for hospitalized fathers, and two were traveling to Africa to pick up their new daughter.  (Welcome, Naomi – more to come on that adoption later!)

Though we were busy tending to family life, we hope our readers agree it’s never too late to celebrate Father’s Day.  We simply want to be – and to spur others to be -- the best parents possible.  And that includes remembering dads.  Most of the time, we try to supply original content, but we were deeply moved by this piece in the New York Times by Nicholas Kristoff. It begins:
 
When I was 12, my father came and spoke to my seventh-grade class. I remember feeling proud, for my rural school was impressed by a visit from a university professor. But I also recall being embarrassed — at my dad’s strong Slavic accent, at his refugee origins, at his “differentness.”

I’m back at my childhood home and reflecting on all this because abruptly I find myself fatherless on Father’s Day. My dad died a few days ago at age 91, after a storybook life  — devoted above all to his only child.

Reporting on poverty and absentee fathers has taught me what a gift fatherhood is: I know I won the lottery of life by having loving, caring parents. There’s another reason I feel indebted to my father, and it has to do with those embarrassing foreign ways: his willingness to leave everything familiar behind in the quest for a new world that would provide opportunity even for a refugee’s children.

My father, an Armenian, was born in a country that no longer exists, Austria-Hungary, in a way of life that no longer exists. The family was in the nobility, living on an estate of thousands of acres — and then came World War II.
 
Please read the whole piece here, which details an amazing and long life.  Among other very touching aspects, the end really got us… He taped a quote of his father onto his dorm room wall, but never told him.  He continues:
 
It felt too awkward. And now it’s too late. Even this column comes a few days too late. So my message for Father’s Day is simple: Celebrate the bequest of fatherhood with something simpler, deeper and truer than an artificial verse on a store-bought card. Speak and hug from your heart and soul — while there is still time.

If any of you didn’t celebrate Father’s Day (or didn’t celebrate it as fully as you would have liked!), please take this gentle nudge from your forgetful friends in the direction of loving your dad this week.  

It’s not too late.