There is always a bonus when you pay someone to listen to your problems: you discover nothing is your fault. It was your parents’ fault. Being this Sunday is Father’s Day, that one day of the year we acknowledge and thank our fathers for participating in that drunken wrestle with mom all those years ago, I thought we should talk about Daddies.

I’ve always been a Daddy’s girl; and as a kid, I didn’t think I’d ever find a man I loved as much as my Daddy. (Okay, so that part’s true. See, my therapist is right.) But clearly parental-child relationships are…well…not ideal. We want them to be ideal, but we’re never really happy with the outcome, are we? We want our fathers to spend more time with us, to care about our interests (respect our interests), and hug us more.

We’d also like them to not tell us we look like mutton dressed as lamb when we proudly come out in a new dress and show off. And to stop pushing us to be schoolteachers—and to believe that our writing is wonderful. And for God’s sake, stop telling me Amy’s essay was better than mine! And while we’re on it, where the hell is my hug? Sorry, sorry, having a moment.

So we want more hugs if we weren’t hugged enough; or we want less hugs (and hovering) and stop being so darned overprotected. It’s never exactly what we think is right. Of course you were an unhappy teenager with non-ideal parents: all teenagers are. You’re not a case-study, I assure you.

And that’s if you’re lucky enough to have a Dad. What about those of us whose Daddy died when we were young—and there was no stepfather at all or there was a stepfather, but he wasn’t a Daddy to us? What about Daddies who divorced mom and you only saw them occasionally? Absentee Dads are the biggest blame games we’ve got for explaining why grown women are having trouble trusting men and picking the right man to love.

It seems insane to me to blame your parents for how you are as an adult, because as an adult you know better. You’ve read the articles; you’ve watched Oprah! You’ve been around the block; you probably have some kids and know how hard it is to parent—and you’re only doing the best you can with your handicaps. So were they! Suddenly all the neurotic crap your parents saddled you with seems rather normal. But the fact remains: your parents made you how you are.

Which can make or break you in the Dating and Marriage Line. If you didn’t get enough “male” fatherly attention as a kid, you’re going to be looking for it as soon as possible and usually find it in all the wrong ways. You didn’t get enough hugs? Teenage boys will hug you; hell, I had some twenty-somethings who were dying to hug my hug-deprived self. If you didn’t have constant reassurance that you were beautiful and smart and worthy, the compliments of insincere boys looking to get laid is almost overwhelming. And you end up “thanking them” most inappropriately—and then realize later they didn’t really mean it.

There is the flipside to this: if none of those boys paid you those compliments either, you are then validated universally that you are a troll and you end up having the suicide hotline on speed-dial just so you could get out of bed in the morning. You’re really damned if you do, damned if you don’t. You’re better off if you just have a Daddy who loves you and you know it—but as we discover in our stories every day, love is hard to express, especially for guys. It’s no wonder we’re all in therapy, blaming Dad that we’re unsuccessful in forging relationships with men. After all, even if we seek someone who is the opposite of our fathers, we still find ourselves attached to fallen gods. People who aren’t perfect, who hurt you even when they don’t mean to.

My Dad is not the huggy type, but eventually I learned if I wanted to be told ‘I love you’ and hugged, I had to do it first. He was actually trainable, even at his advanced age. And I learned to recognize the qualities he did have: capable, trustworthy, humble, hard-working, and didn’t live beyond his means. (I didn’t realize how important the last quality was until I met men who were life-debtors! It used to annoy me as a kid because it seemed we never had money for anything. We clearly didn’t have a lot, but at least we did have a pot to piss in and a window to toss it out of.) And he’s funny, even if his self-deprecating humor turns on you. (Though I’ll never find that mutton dressed as lamb amusing.)

Dad even patiently showed me how to drive the stick-shift the other day when I asked; and the last time he tried to teach me, I literally ended up throwing the entire car into a ditch when I shifted from third to reverse! (You’d think he wouldn’t have wanted a repeat performance.) And last Sunday, he took me gooseberry picking, telling me the best spots to find gooseberries—and silently reminding me the importance of the simple things and also that the best things in life are the things you do for yourself and take time to do. (If you picked gooseberries, you’d understand: thorny little buggers!—and not nearly the amount of berries for the quality and quantity of time you’ve invested! No wonder they’re $3 a can in the store!)

So this long-winded tribute made me think of fathers in our fiction. Help me out: how many of your characters are in therapy because of their parents? Do your characters have parents? Or are you like me and tend to kill off the parents at the beginning of the story (in a Harry Potter fashion)? Do you think about how characters’ parents influenced how they behave in the book (think: Stephanie Plum) and do you try to incorporate (probably unconsciously) neuroses based off their childhoods (and lack of perfect parental treatment)? Are there any “Dads” in any novels that come to mind as “great Dads” or notable fathers? (The Dad in the Bridgerton series is dead and his absence does influence the characters. Stephanie Plum’s Dad doesn’t talk, but eats roast beef and grunts. In Desperate Duchesses, Roberta was ashamed of her Dad because he wasn’t…exactly civilized and embarrassed her with his poetry.) And lastly, what will you be doing for Father’s Day? I suspect Dad will be wanting roast beef.