Part 18

A sense of humor is even more necessary to a mother than it is to a wife. The humorless woman takes her children too tragically. They wear her out, and she alienates them from her by her ceaseless nagging because she thinks that every little foolish thing they do is full of direful significance. The mother with a sense of humor knows that youth is as subject to certain follies as it is to the mumps and the measles and the whooping cough, and that it must go through these experiences, as it did through the cycle of infantile diseases, but that they are not fatal if they are carefully watched.

She may not approve of all the manifestations of flapperism and jellybeanitis, but she knows that the remedy for them is laughter and not tears, and so she keeps her young ones in bounds with good-natured ridicule. Nor does she break her heart with dismal forebodings about the terrible fate that is bound to overtake boys and girls who do not dress and act as did their grandparents. She has seen too many silly young people develop into fine men and women to borrow trouble worrying over what is going to become of the race.

In its last analysis, a sense of humor is just the sense of proportion that enables us to see things in their true relation to life. It is the thing that keeps us from making mountains out of molehills, and that gives us the courage to smile instead of cry. Happy the woman who has this gift, and thrice happy the man who gets her for a wife.

XXIV

GRAFTING ON THE OLD FOLKS

It is a curious thing, in a way it is a beautiful thing, and it’s a selfish thing, that children rarely ever think of their parents as human beings. Children think of their fathers and mothers as the source whence all blessings flow or they think of them as an avenging justice. But it seldom occurs to them that their parents are men and women, in addition to being parents; that they have the same preferences and long for the same pleasures as other people, and that they have a few rights that even their children should respect.

Of course, a small child unquestionably takes for granted all that its parents give and do for it. It is merely the order of nature that Mother should appear at its bed with the cup of water for which it cries out in the night; that Mother should clean up the dirt it brings into the house and spend hours over the stove cooking the things it likes to eat; and that Father should work while it plays and go shabby to give it fine clothes.

As they grow up, children continue to demand more and more of their parents. They bleed Father and Mother white for the things they want. They are not intentionally cruel, but they will take the last dollar they can wring out of the family purse without ever once thinking that Father and Mother might like to spend some of the money they earn on themselves and in gratifying their own desires. And, curiously enough, even after they have grown to man’s and woman’s estate, the great majority of people still hold to this point of view about their parents. In regulating their lives, they do not take their parents’ rights into consideration. They do not say, “My father and mother have sacrificed enough for me; they have done enough for me. Now I will stand on my own feet, and be as little a burden as possible to them.”

Of course, the most flagrant illustration of this is found in the loafer sons and daughters who let their old parents work and support them. We all know husky, able-bodied young men who play golf while Father slaves in an office, and strapping big girls who perform on the piano while Mother is performing on the gas range. Apparently, it never crosses the mind of these despicable young people that after they are old enough to support themselves they have no right to sponge upon their parents, and graft their living off them. Still less do they ever think that Mother and Father would like to take things easier as they grow older, and indulge in a few of the luxuries they have had to deny themselves while they were raising and educating their children.

Another illustration of how little children regard the rights of their parents you may see in the nonchalance with which young mothers turn over their children to their own mothers. When Sally wants to go to a bridge luncheon or Maud wants to take a trip, they dump the children down on Mother. When Clarabell wants to go to Europe for the summer, she doesn’t worry at all as to what to do with the children. She leaves them, with a thousand instructions as to diet and clothes, and manners and morals, with Mother. So that in innumerable families Mother becomes nothing but a sort of universal nursemaid.

It would shock these daughters to be told what a mean, selfish thing they do in not standing by and doing their own baby tending as Mother did hers. They, themselves, know what it is to walk the colic—what broken nights mean, how incessant must be the care given little children—how nerve-racking children’s noise is. Yet they foist this burden on Mother without a pang of compunction because they are so used to seeing her doing everything for them.

It never occurs to them that she would like to fold her hands in a little peace and rest; furthermore, that she has earned it by bringing up one family, and her daughters haven’t any right to make her substitute on raising another one.

Then there are the children who lay their matrimonial burdens on their parents. John gets married before he is earning enough to support a family. Susie marries a ne’er-do-well, in spite of all efforts to prevent it. Fanny discovers that the man to whom she is married is not her soul mate, and gets a divorce, and comes back home with two or three children. None of these selfish young people, bent on gratifying their own desires, considers Father’s and Mother’s rights in the matter, yet the parents, in the end, are the real sacrifices.

They can’t let John and his wife and children starve, and so the money that Father and Mother had saved up for their old age goes in pittances to help him along. They can’t shut the door in Fanny’s face when she comes back with her divorce and her half-orphaned children, so Father works harder, and Mother pinches and economizes more to raise and educate this second family that their children have thrown upon them. Surely there is no other thing that children need to realize so much as that their parents have some rights. Perhaps if they understood this, and that after a man and a woman have raised a family of children they have a right to peace and quiet and their own money, there would be fewer parasitic sons and daughters.

Perhaps, if they realized that parents had rights, more young people would consider how their marriages would react on their parents, and many a disgruntled wife would carry on with a marriage that wasn’t perfectly congenial rather than burden her old parents with her own and her children’s support.

XXV

ARE YOU A GOOD FATHER?

Are you a good father to your daughter, Mr. Man? You smile derisively at my question. A good father to your little girl? You’ll tell the world you are! Why, she is just the very core of your heart, and there hasn’t been a blessed thing that she has wanted since the day she was born that you haven’t given her. Why, you have almost broken your neck trying to get the moon for her when she cried for it. Pretty dresses, fashionable schools, good times, her own car, far more luxuries than you could afford her, you have lavished upon her without stint. You have kept her wrapped in cotton wool, and she has never known there was such a thing as work or responsibility or self-denial in the world. You may have failed in many other directions in doing your full duty, but you can pat yourself on the back and thank God that you have been a good father!

Well, let me tell you that if all you have done for your daughter is just to pamper her and spoil her and make her weak and selfish and self-centered, you have not been a good father. You have been the worst sort of father. You have never looked upon your daughter as anything but a pretty doll to dress up and play with, and dolls cannot take care of themselves in the rough-and-tumble fight of life. Sooner or later they are apt to get broken.

Let me tell you what I consider a good father. A good father is a man who doesn’t look upon his daughter as a toy or a piece of bric-a-brac, but as a human being who has been born with the heavy handicap of the feminine sex upon her. That means that she will always be less strong than a boy, less capable of taking care of herself, in far more danger. Fewer opportunities will be open to her, and many more perils beset her than would a boy. Therefore, she needs more protection. She needs to be better trained to deal with the world. So the good father sees to it that his girl gets the very best education that she will take. Not the flubdub, fluffy ruffles sort, but a solid, practical education that develops whatever gray matter she has got in her pretty little head, that teaches her to think and reason and that gives her a solid foundation on which to rear her house of life.

Then the good father has his daughter taught some profession or trade whereby she can earn a living, and he has her follow this occupation for at least a year. He does this for many reasons. He does it because he knows how easily money is lost, and he wants to know that his daughter has in herself the skill and ability to make her own living if she is ever thrown on her own resources. He does it because he knows the knowledge that she can stand on her own feet and earn her own bread and butter and cake, gives a girl a poise nothing else in the world can give. He does it because the discipline of a business office, the experience in handling money and an insight into the troubles and problems of men are the best preparation any girl can have for matrimony.

A good father chums with his daughter. He begins being confidential with her in her cradle, and this makes it natural that when she grows up she should discuss with him the boys who come to see her, and that father should be able to form her tastes and assiduously guide her in her choice of a husband. Girls know nothing about men. It is impossible that they should, but there is nothing about any young chap that father can’t find out, and if he knew that this youth had a hectic past, or that one drank, or the other one was a trifling ne’er-do-well, it would be the simplest thing possible to prevent many an unhappy marriage by making daughter see a suitor through the sophisticated eyes of a worldly-wise man, instead of the romantic ones of a young girl.

A good father tries to protect his daughter after he is dead. So, when he makes his will he leaves her whatever money he has to bequeath her tied up good and tight in a trust company so that she cannot touch anything but the interest. He knows that every woman who has any money is the foredoomed prey of get-rich-quick sharks and all of her parasitic relatives. He has seen too many women sell their gilt-edge bonds and invest the proceeds in wildcat stock that promised to pay 40 per cent and never paid a penny. He has seen too many women lend their money without security to Deacon Jones, because he prayed so beautifully, or to Uncle John, because they didn’t have the nerve to say “No” to a member of the family.

Above all, a good father leaves his daughter’s money in trust for her, not only to save her money but to save her from friction with her husband. He has seen many a man graft his wife’s fortune deliberately, and he has seen many more good men, who were poor business men, bring their wives to poverty. And he knows that it takes more backbone than the average woman possesses to hold on to her money when the man she loves is continually asking her for it. So father saves her the necessity of any arguments on the subject. Are you doing these things for your daughter, Mr. Man? Are you a good father?

XXVI

THE MORAL MUSCLES OF YOUR CHILDREN

The most overdressed and overindulged children are those whose parents were poor in their youth. The most undisciplined and uncontrolled children are those whose parents were reared in strict and stern households. When you see a little girl playing around in a befrilled lace and embroidered dress and silk stockings, you do not need to be told that at her age her mother wore gingham and went barefooted. When you see a young boy splitting the road open in an imported car you know that when his father was a lad he trudged on foot to the factory with his dinner pail on his arm. When you see ill-mannered young people who smoke and drink and carouse and recognize no law but their own pleasure; who run roughshod over the rights of others; who have no respect for age, and who either patronize their parents or treat them with contempt, you know that they are the offspring of fathers and mothers who were given few privileges when they were young and who were coerced by determined and strong-handed parents into walking the straight and narrow path.

Nothing is more common than to hear people say, “I don’t want my children to be denied things as I was in my childhood”; “I don’t want my children to have to work as I did when I was a child”; “I don’t want my children to be suppressed and tyrannized over as I was when I was young.”