Cards for both genders jokingly suggested that parents turn to drink to cope with the stresses of raising kids—though in card-world, dads are always drinking beer, while moms love wine and cocktails, seemingly without exception. (A public health study from 1980 expressed concern that greeting cards regularly suggest that “getting drunk is a natural and desirable concomitant of celebrations and that drunkenness is humorous, enjoyable, and harmless.”)

The fancier, more expensive cards for moms tended to feature rhinestones (a bejeweled dragonfly, in one notable example of Mother’s Day trope synergy), while high-end cards for dads were often given natural textures like leather or twine, or, once, the whole front flap was just a piece of wood. (“A strong father makes a strong family,” it read.)

There were many, many calls for moms to take the holiday to relax for once—by any means necessary. “This Mother’s Day, put out the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign, lock the door, kick your feet up, and enjoy the peace and quiet,” one card read. And on the inside: “ … until they find a way in through the air ducts.”

“It seems to me they’re saying you’ve got this one day where you have the right to have a glass of wine, lock yourself in the bathroom, and not let anybody else in, but it’s only going to be a day,” Alexandra Jaffe says of the cards I showed her. Jaffe is a linguistic anthropologist at California State University, Long Beach, who has studied greeting cards. “Because the other 364 days, no one else in the family is going to do those things for you.”

One card suggested that even on Mother’s Day, harried mothers would find no respite. It ran through a “Mother’s Day Timeline” that started with “Awake at 6:00 a.m. to a kid stampede,” continued through errands and cleaning up kids’ toys, ending with “Fall fast asleep in the small corner of the bed the dog and husband haven’t taken.”

In Auster and Auster-Gussman’s study, they found that relaxing was a more prominent theme in Father’s Day cards. In my sample it seemed prevalent in both. “The difference I saw is when Mom was supposed to relax, it’s because she does so many things for the child,” says Auster, a professor of sociology at Franklin & Marshall College. “It’s never quite clear to me what Dad is supposed to relax from.”

That’s because a lot of Father’s Day cards don’t show dads doing much actual parenting. Dads in cards are also busy, but they’re busy with their hobbies. They’re golfing, they’re grilling, they’re fixing things, they’re camping and fishing and hunting, they’re watching sports, they’re telling corny jokes. They’re also, even if it’s never made explicit, busy with work. At least, they’re often wearing ties.

A lot of these themes fit into the stereotypes of fathers as providers, or as absent and disengaged from their kids, or as people who show love through action but not in words. But there is one persistent theme that remains mysterious: How did farting come to be emblematic of fatherhood? This association makes intuitive sense to me—Father’s Day cards have been referencing farts as long as I can remember—but when I really question why, it seems utterly inscrutable. I asked everyone I spoke to for this story for their theories. Perhaps mothers are expected to be more polite, some said. “Who gets to flout society’s rules of decorum? People with power,” Jaffe said. “That’s an indirect kind of power.” “That” being farting.