By Mariam Jalloh
Trendsetter Team
The other day, my mother asked me when Father’s Day was.
After a couple beats of silence, we both burst out in laughter. After all, out of the 17 years my father has been a father, we haven’t celebrated a single one.
That’s right.
According to the National Retail Federation, I am in the 25% of Americans who don’t celebrate the annual holiday. Don’t take this the wrong way. I do love and appreciate my father for all that he has provided me, from the roof over my head to the life lessons he’s passed down to me. But my father is a little different from the typical American dad.
First of all, he immigrated to the United States in 1998 from Guinea, a coastal country in West Africa. Back home, there was no such thing as Father’s Day so people seeing the third Sunday in June as a cause for celebration was foreign to him. Instead, my father believed that children should convey their appreciation everyday rather than save it all for a randomly selected day in the summer. In fact, the 56-year-old man thought that it was just a ploy to get people to spend their money instead of forging real relationships with their loved ones. After all, if you really loved your dad wouldn’t you make sure he felt special everyday?
And so despite all the Father’s Day crafts and cards I would bring home to him during my elementary years, Father’s Day continued to be treated just like any other. While I would like to highlight my father in a commemorative way in a similar fashion as my peers, I will simply have to settle for showing him my love in small doses, every day.
I know my experience with the widely celebrated holiday isn’t the most conventional. When others are out having dinner with their dads, we stay at home in front of the TV watching the evening news, just like any other night.
Just the way he likes it.
Mariam Jalloh is a Scripps Howard Foundation Emerging Journalists Intern with Texas Metro News through the University of North Texas.
