Vonny Moyes: A Father's Day reminder that happy families take many forms

My dad died when I was six. In the intervening decades, my memories of him have begun to lose their sharp edges. With each passing year they coalesce, becoming fuzzy and indistinct as more pressing issues occupy my grey matter. I can’t remember his voice. I forget where the tattoos were, without a visual cue. I don’t remember the last thing we said to each other.

When I find myself confronted by the holiday-themed shelves, I’ve often wondered which of these mass-produced expressions of feeling would be most appropriate for a man I’ve not seen in 23 years. I try to imagine what pop-culture imagery would sufficiently distil our relationship to an A6 spot laminated card. Eventually, I’ll buy one – but not for him. I’ll scrub the gendered sentiment with a biro, and then I’ll send it to my mum.

Sure, she has her own day – all frills, flowers and chocolates – but it doesn’t feel enough to acknowledge her singularly, when her parenting has encompassed both roles. The absence of a father has taught me so much about what a mother can be.

As a young woman, catapulted into a life without coordinates, through the cruellest of circumstances, somehow, my mum figured it out. She worked multiple jobs, ran a house, herding three chaotic, oblivious young women from infancy to adulthood on her own. And it was hard. I watched her struggle, and it hurt that I was helpless. I didn’t have the emotional intelligence to appreciate her struggle fully, and I didn’t have the words she needed to hear to make it more bearable. I watched her cry, completely exhausted from the rigours of just getting through each day. But every morning, she got up and did it all over again. Our clothes were always ironed, our meals were always made. We were never late for school. Our hair was always brushed, pleated and bowed. Somehow, with each rise and fall of the sun, she awoke renewed. She found the strength to get out of bed, and tackle life head on.

I watched my mother on the front line, and saw how she sacrificed her own life for ours, and it terrified me. So, I grew up striving for a life that looked like everyone else’s – or at least what I thought everyone else’s looked like – in the way single-parent children often do. I wanted so badly to recreate some of that 2.4 children ideal we buy into from birth. A mummy. A daddy. A large, impossibly clean house with a spacious garden. A new car. A dog. Laura Ashley soft furnishings. Perfectly tended lawns. Sweet peas on the trellis. A husband with a good head of hair and Colgate smile. Comfort in the round, in every little detail.

As most idealistic young women do, and before life taught me otherwise, I believed the secret to this success lied in another person. That the catalyst to a nice life lay in expertly pairing yourself with another human being. Anything that deviated from that linear roadmap of an ordinary existence would be a failure, and consequently an unhappy one.

So I chased that dream furtively, focussed on curating that normality. I met the one, settled down, had children. We had jobs, and a good postcode. We ticked all of those boxes, and still, as precious things are wont to do, it broke anyway. I moved out of my house with the fish pond and pear trees, and breathed in. Reduced to fragments, I had no alternative vision to rebuild my life to. I’d had the things, and then I’d lost the things. In the tradition of my family, like my mother before me, I was a now a single mum. And it pains me now to admit the first thing I felt was shame. The lifestyle had collapsed, and I internalised that breakdown, rejoining society as a second-class, unattached woman. A woman who wore a ring to avoid questions. A woman who felt compelled to explain herself to others. I used to believe that a life that resembled the conventional shape was the ultimate goal. When the life I’d built in that image crumbled at my feet, I felt lost. And then I looked to my mother – the sign-post that had always been there, if only I’d known to look.

On my own, in a small one-bedroomed flat, bottle-feeding twins and comforting a toddler, whilst deciding what to pawn next to pay the bills – that was the first time I saw her fully. And I did not feel ashamed. The veil had been lifted, and I saw what that success did not only come in one flavour. Success came in the macro. Success came in cooking the dinner, changing bums, remembering to take the bins out. It came in getting through one full day without running out the door. It lies in the things no-one can see, and so these little pieces of a meaningful life don’t translate in the rooms of advertising executives. Images of mums who manage to pack lunches and remember non-uniform days don’t sell mortgages or fitted kitchens.

Mum: thank you for showing me how to be my own hero, and that a life can be perfect and fulfilling without depending on anyone else. You’ve taught me that a success is what happens when you dig your heels into your circumstances, and rise to the challenge. It’s the most important lesson I’ve ever learned in my life.