The third Sunday in June is Father’s Day, a field day for purveyors of cards and schmaltzy tat. This year it falls on my son’s sixth birthday which, he explained, is irksome. “I guess this means that people will forget about my birthday?” he asked me. I said that there was nothing to worry about, that most people wouldn’t even notice Father’s Day and being such an inane occasion it couldn’t possibly knock a birthday off its proverbial perch.

“For Mother’s Day,” he said, eyeing me quizzically, “we spent a whole week at school making cards and paper daffodils out of pink, white and purple tissue paper. With glitter. Then we had to write a book of reasons why we love our mummies and draw a picture on every single page.”

“Every page?” The image wasn’t the most comfortable one: 30 children huddled, solemnly chewing their pencils while they tried to think out the rudiments of maternal love. “Mothers like all that,” I said, fudging it a bit, “we dads, we’re made of tougher stuff.”

“So, you won’t be wanting anything on Father’s Day,” he said, visibly cheered, “no card, no lie-in, no breakfast in bed?”

It’s not the bare-faced commercialism of it that gets me; we’ve already done our wading through Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Easter, and come up through the clamour and cellophane just about smiling. Rather, it’s the obligation: the children forced to write it all down in a hand-made book, the requirement to give and receive, and the putting on of some sort of show to illustrate, or to celebrate, that which was never — despite what we may daily inflict upon each other in the name of domestic bliss — in doubt in the first place.

Come on. I mean, most of us love our kids and vice versa, right? We do our best. For the exceptions to this, a day such as Father’s Day surely just hammers the uncomfortable point home. And then, of course, there is this embarrassing new-worldly issue of gratitude. Do we really expect our children to thank us for being their parents?

The origins of Father’s Day lie in Spokane, Washington in 1910, two years after the first Mother’s Day was celebrated in West Virginia, and in the heart of a daughter — Mrs Sonora Smart Dodd — who saw that in her family, due to the untimely death of her mother, it had been her father who had made the sacrifices for the betterment of his six children. Her idea gained plenty of support. One can still appreciate the sentiment at a time when more and more men are finding themselves at home taking over from the nanny or nursery in order to stabilise the family’s resources while the wife continues to work.

Calvin Coolidge, the 30th US President from 1923 to 1929, whose main talent, according to the political commentator Walter Lippmann, was for doing nothing, recommended it to the all-male US Congress as a national holiday in 1924. In his pitch, Coolidge said that the purpose of Father’s Day was to “impress upon fathers the full measure of their obligations”.

There’s an assumption in there that doesn’t sit too comfortably here, but if ever there was a validation for this imposition that would be it — not the argument put forward by Senator Margaret Chase Smith. She suggested to Congress in 1957 (Father’s Day wasn’t officially adopted in the US until 1972 and in the UK until the late 1970s) that if Mothering Sunday was a reality, it was essential to have the fathers’ equivalent as “to single out just one of our two parents and omit the other is the most grievous insult imaginable”.

Au contraire, Marge, you’ve misread the male psyche there. The Senator may have thought that she understood what it means to swap roles with your spouse — she first won a seat to the US House of Representatives in 1940 to fill the vacancy caused by the death of her husband. But a father in a mother’s role will never be the real deal: there are instincts that only mothers possess.

Mothers can tell, for example, if a child is running a fever just by glancing at him, and mothers can hear their own child waking up in the night while the house is full of revellers. I suspect, also, that the innate need to go the extra, extra mile for your offspring is maternal. So maybe Mothering Sunday is valid for just that reason. It matters not whether it was conceived as a special day for the Holy Mother, or for an ancient Goddess, or that it was the one Sunday in the year when all attended their “Mother Church”.

As for fathers, and speaking for the ones based at home with the children, we do our best, we bungle a bit, we read the list of chores and rewrite our own. We clean up the crumbs and knee pads and guitars from the kitchen table just in time, and, given half the chance, we’d more than likely go the extra mile if that was what was needed.

In the meantime, however, every time we look at our offspring’s faces and hear their chirping pleas for this and that and get up in the night and hunker down on the floor with the obsessive compulsive toddler and his puzzle, and go the library and go to the park and bundle the child and the kit in and out of the car, we are reminded of our obligations. We must have the patience of saints, the wit of magicians, the courage of a bear.

The reward for all this, of course, is seeing our children grown, happy, healthy, independent beings. We don’t need the mess of breakfast in bed. Who, ever, actually found eating stuffed up against a pillow with an awkwardly balanced tray preferable to eating at a proper table anyway? Without wanting to sound like a miserable bastard, we really don’t need a card or the DIY equivalent of a bouquet.