I don't celebrate it.
My mother married my father in 1952, on her 21st birthday. She wore a dress that looked like a stiff lace lampshade, and he wore his snappy Air Force uniform. She's wearing flats, and she's still a trace taller than he is.
I asked her many years later why she'd married him. She said that all her friends were getting married, she wanted to be a mother, and he was there.
The story I heard was that I was born in 1955, and they were divorced in 1957 because he was an unfaithful liar. She had custody of the minor child, me, and moved back home to Delaware.
I've gathered part of what might be the real story from relatives and her friends, especially since she died in 2004. He was a liar. He doesn't know the truth. Facts, fiction, it's all the same to him. He can read a book and believe, and proclaim, that he was the hero. At my wedding, he told my husband's uncle that he was a combat pilot in WWII. He was born in 1930.
The real story: he started me on my brain-injury career when he picked me up by one foot and threw me towards my crib. I hit the wall instead. In 1956, they didn't even believe babies felt pain; I don't know if I received any medical treatment.
He figured out that I was afraid of his electric shaver and one day when my mother was out he tied it around my neck. She came home to me in whatever state a baby gets into when it's past hysterics.
That night she called her mother, and cried, and didn't know what to do. My grandmother said "Come home". She said no. The next morning my grandfather and my dear Uncle Tommy were on their way to Pittsburgh to bring her home, and they did. She blamed me all her life for the material things (her records, her pictures) that didn't fit into the car.
I've seen him five times in my life. Every time I spent every hour with my insides knotted with fear and I didn't know why. Once he made a sudden movement towards me and I nearly knocked the dinner table over scrambling away. Everyone laughed. Great care was always taken to not let me know that Something Had Happened, but all that did was make me more sure that something had.
My mother remarried when I was 10, a man who offered her membership in one of the many schismatic sects of the Jehovah's Witnesses that promises you'll never go to hell. That, and financial security, meant a lot to her.
Her new husband was on his third marriage. His first wife died under very suspicious circumstances. He had never had children. He was in his late forties; I was a precocious, smartass ten-year-old with highly developed defenses. He collected guns, and had them everywhere, including against my head. My mother was always in the kitchen. Always.
So my mother lived happily with him for 38 years, demanded that I always treat him civilly, and then she got cancer. He caught pneumonia at the same time, and went to the hospital, and the racist filth that poured out of him all the time got noticed and reported and he went off to the state mental hospital, where they diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia, and he came out ten months later heavily medicated, and legally unable to own guns. He did not want to care for a cancer patient. He moved to an assisted living place, got a girlfriend, went to court and got his driver's license back, went to court and got his concealed carry license back, and my mother, knowing that his hatred for me had grown and fulminated, gave him a Glock for Christmas.
And she died. He died three months later.
My father is still alive. I found that out on a Sunday when I did a quick search - I wanted to know where he was - and found him in five seconds. He's on the Megan's Law site for the state where he lives, which is too damn close. He's a Tier 3 offender, lifetime reporting. I can see his picture, find out what cars he drives. I found out that whatever he did was to someone younger than 12.
And there's no one left to ask. My mother's family is all dead. I don't remember. All I have is my fear, and my lifetime feeling that fathers are people who want to hurt you or kill you. I'm nearly 60. I don't know if there will ever be any relief.