Part 11

Being obliged to live with disagreeable and antagonistic people is the greatest affliction that can possibly befall us. Nothing compensates for it. Not tho we dwell in a palace, with every meal a banquet, and have everything that money can buy us. Better it is to dwell on a housetop, or in a lodging house, and eat at a quick lunch place, and have peace, than abide in splendor with those who irritate the very soul out of us.

Nor are we consoled by the fact that the very people who are so impossible to live with love us well enough to die for us.

We know well enough that it is mother’s affection for us, and her anxiety about us, that makes her nag us incessantly, and hand out advice to us until we are ready to scream. In their philosophical moments men and women realize that even their in-laws knock them for their own good.

But it is the result, and not the theory, with which we are concerned, and as you listen to the wail of those who cry out against uncongenial marriages, and the moans of anguish of the in-laws who dwell under the same roof, and listen to the sounds of fratricidal strife, when everybody could be so happy if they didn’t have to live with each other, you wonder that so few people have the wisdom and the courage to apply the one sure cure for their misery. That is to separate. Apart they would be happy. They would even love each other. They would get a perspective on each other’s good qualities. But living together they merely get on each other’s nerves, and hate each other.

The old idea that blood is thicker than water, and that just because you happen to be born in a certain relationship to a group of individuals makes you automatically love them, and desire their society, hasn’t a word of truth in it. It is not even true in the relationship between parents and children.

As long as their children are young and helpless, most mothers have an animal fondness for them. But when they are older, it very often happens that a mother cannot get along in peace with her children. She does not understand them. She has nothing in common with them, and she is glad enough when they are grown and leave home.

No theory has been more mischievous than the old convention that people who were of the same family had to keep on living together, no matter how much they rubbed each other the wrong way, nor how unpleasant this enforced companionship was. There is no sense in doing it. No rhyme nor reason for it. Because Aunt Jane is Aunt Jane is no reason why you should take her into your home and be bored the balance of your life by her reminiscences, nor is there any reason why you should have your temper continually rasped by antagonistic sisters and brothers when there are plenty of agreeable strangers in the world.

Try the absence cure on your domestic troubles. Get up and leave an unpleasant home. You have no idea how much better you will love a lot of your relatives when you put about a thousand miles between you and them.

THE DEADLY RIVAL

It would be interesting to know how many estranged husbands and wives began drifting apart with the advent of the first baby. Children are popularly supposed to be the tie that binds a man and woman indissolubly together in body and spirit in marriage. Often this is true, and in their love and hopes and ambitions for their children a husband and wife literally do become “two souls with but a single thought, two hearts that beat as one.” Also very often for the sake of their children men and women endure a marriage that they have come to loathe and hate, and are bound together like prisoners whose balls and chains clank at every movement they make.

Unhappily, children’s hands do not always draw husbands and wives closer together. They just as often push them apart, and when this happens it is oftener the woman’s fault than the man’s. Few men prefer their children above their wives, but for the great majority of women their husbands exist only as their children’s father and as purveyors to their children.

The first baby definitely and for all time puts the husband’s nose out of joint. Up to that time, husband has been king of the domestic realm. His wife has put on her prettiest clothes and adorned herself for him. She has been chum and playmate. She has exerted herself to amuse and entertain him. She has looked out for his comfort, has seen that he had the best of everything, and he has reveled in the bliss of having the center of the stage and the spotlight turned always upon him. Then arrives the baby, and from having been the worshiped head of the house, husband finds that he is nothing, with no one so poor as to do him reverence.

Wife no longer cares what sort of a figure she cuts in his eyes, or whether he admires her or not. She looks sloppy around the house because the baby pulls at her clothes and musses her chiffons. When husband wants to go out at night she refuses because she can’t leave the baby, and if he drags her along anyway, she interrupts the most thrilling part of a play to ask him if he thinks the nurse has forgotten to give the baby his bottle.

There are no more chatty evenings at home, because she is off worshiping before the baby’s shrine. She quits reading anything but baby books, and her conversation gets to be about as stimulating as sterilized milk. She is too busy with the baby to show her husband any of the little attentions that men so love, or to see even that he has the things he likes to eat.

There are thousands of homes which are run exclusively for the children. There is never any food on the table except just the simple things that children can eat. There is never any conversation except about the children. The wife never manifests the slightest interest in her husband, or shows him any affection. All of the tenderness, the caresses, the sympathy and understanding is lavished on the children. It is the children’s likes and dislikes and prejudices that are remembered and catered to.

There are many wives who begrudge every cent that a husband spends on himself because they want the money to throw away on the children. They will nag their husbands into giving up smoking so that they can buy the baby a real lace cap. There are wives who literally work their husbands to death that their daughters may go off to finishing schools, and their boys have the latest model sports automobile.

Now the average man loves his children, but he has not this crazy, obsessing passion for them that their mother has. When the first baby comes he is proud of it and fond of it, and he wants it to have every proper care and attention, but he doesn’t want to spend hours sitting by its crib, gloating over it and marveling at how naturally it breathes. He wants to go about the ordinary affairs of life as he did before the baby was born, and he wants his wife’s companionship.

But she will seldom go with him, and when she does, she is no fun because she doesn’t enter into the spirit of anything. She has left her whole interest in life behind in the nursery. Nor is she an entertaining companion at home any more. And it gets on his nerves being told to “sh-h-h-h-sh” every time he shuts the door, for fear he will wake the baby.

He even discovers that his wife is relieved when he goes out without her, and leaves her undisturbed to her infant adoration. And so the rift is first made between them. Each starts on a life in which the other has no part, and that takes them farther away from each other as the years go by.

If the true co-respondent were ever named in many a divorce case, it would be the first baby. There are always plenty of women a man can find who will play with him while his wife is busy in the nursery; who will listen to him and flatter him, while his wife is telling the baby he is the most boofulest thing in the world. While mama is holding the baby’s hand, some vamp is generally holding papa’s. It is a great thing to be a good mother, but it is equally as great a thing to be a good wife. And it is a bad thing to do either one at the expense of the other. Often children are better off for a little wholesome neglect, but a husband never is.

Remember that, ladies, and don’t make your baby your husband’s deadly rival.

XII

LEARN A TRADE, GIRLS

These few lines are addressed to the thousands of girls who have finished school and who are now standing, as the poet puts it, “where the brook and river meet” wondering “where do we go from here?”

I want to urge you, girls, with all the earnestness of which I am capable, to psychoanalyze yourselves and try to find out what talents and aptitudes nature bestowed upon you, and then to go to some school where you can develop your gift and fit yourself to be self-supporting.

I give this advice to the rich girl no less than to the poor girl, for in these days of shifting fortunes we have the new poor as well as the new rich, and no woman knows how soon she may be called upon to earn her own bread and butter or starve. If she has been taught how to do this, losing her money is merely an inconvenience to her; but if she does not know how to earn a dollar, it is a tragedy.

No women in the world are so pitiful as those who have, as the saying goes, “seen better days” and, with their money gone, are suddenly flung out into the world to make their own living, with no trade, no profession, no skill in any line, no knowledge of how to make a penny. They can only eke out an existence by doing the most ill-paid work, or else they become parasites, or are forced by hunger, and shabbiness, and need into the sad sisterhood of the streets.

Don’t risk such a fate befalling you. Prepare yourself in time against it. Have that within yourself which will not be affected by the fall in stocks or the depreciation of real estate. Many things may rob you of your fortune, but you cannot lose your trained brain and skilful hand. They will be a resource that you can always fall back upon in any emergency.