This Sunday, my father and I will once again share the ignominy of receiving no presents on fathers' day. My father once foolishly claimed that the holiday was an invention of the greeting cards industry and wanted no part of it, so that is why he gets no gifts. The reason I get nothing is because I have no children.

My wife and I spent years trying to multiply. Our failure led to tests and, ultimately, a result. I am infertile in all the ways that it is possible to be infertile: the majority of my tadpoles are deformed, and all the rest are lazy and easily disorientated. Given the chance to swim, they prefer to flop around, or possibly even turn on their stumpy tails and head back upstream. There is no chance that we will have children without medical intervention, and all the intervention we have had, so far, has not worked out.

The news that I was infertile was a shock. I was brought up to believe that form follows function, so it never crossed my mind to doubt the basic utility of my equipment. It looked great, so how could its performance be anything less than awe-inspiring? My wife and I set about doing whatever we could to outwit nature. Maybe one day, we will get lucky and have kids. We are both in our forties so the chances are getting slim but those are the breaks. Why whine?

Why whine, except that whining seems to have become all the rage. An article in the New York Times quotes Mardy S Ireland, a Californian psychoanalyst who has set herself up as an expert in childlessness, as saying: "The person has to go through a process of mourning for what this was going to be in their life and who they were going to be in this life."

Is this nuts? How can you mourn for something that has never existed? The very notion seems an insult to anyone who has ever mourned a real dead child. It speaks of a bizarre sense of entitlement: the idea that "anything I can imagine, I should have!" Worse, it suggests that biology is destiny in a way that makes a mockery of free-will and seems reminiscent of strains of fascism.

But it seems that I am the one who is out of step.

A
comments page dedicated to the New York Times article reveals a world of shameless self-pity. The tone is so protective of the sensibilities of the infertile that anyone who deviates from the mourning line is castigated – even by the journalist/invigilator – as shockingly uncaring. The same tone can be found in a blog dedicated to the "beautiful and barren" who find themselves "infertile in a fertile world", as though this amounted to discrimination.

It doesn't. So please, whatever you do this Fathers' Day, don't think about me.