Part 19

Indeed, so common is this feeling that sometimes it seems that the present generation is being brought up by the rule of contraries, and that the only fixed idea that many parents have is to rear their sons and daughters exactly opposite from the way they were reared; to give them everything they didn’t have and to let them do everything they were not permitted to do.

There is something very pathetic in this. It speaks so eloquently of the ungratified cravings of childhood, of the weariness of little hands that never knew any playtime; of the thwarted desires for pleasure at the time of life when one is mad for amusement, and it is easy to understand why parents whose own childhood was stinted and dull should want to lap their children in luxury and give them all the fun they missed. But in trying to save their children the hardships they have gone through, they are also cutting their sons and daughters off from the experiences that make such men and women as they are themselves—the kind of men and women who rise from poverty to fortune and from obscurity to fame. For it is not in the lap of ease that successes are made. It takes struggle and self-denial and discipline to form character.

That is why we have the proverb that it is three generations from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves. The poor man by energy and industry piles up a fortune, but because he has had to work and save in his youth he teaches his children to be idlers and wasters and spenders, and they run through their fortune and their children must go to work again at the bottom of the wheel. Probably the children of the self-made man have naturally just as much ability as he has, but they nearly always amount to nothing, because their foolish father has denied them all the advantages he had when he was young and he has enervated them with indulgences.

People who have been brought up in puritanic homes almost invariably let their children run wild. They put no restraints upon them. They demand nothing of them. They resent the lack of liberty they had in their youth, and so they give their children license. They do not seem to realize that the system at which they rail made good citizens, instead of the hoodlums which they are turning out. They do not reflect that they owe their health and strength to clean living; that because they were made to do things they formed habits of industry; that because they were made to do hard things just because it was a duty to do them they developed the grit which keeps men and women from being quitters; that because they were taught obedience and self-control they became captains of their own souls and masters of their fate, instead of being the playthings of their passions and emotions.

They must know, if they stop to think at all, how much better fitted they were to meet life, how much more secure they were of happiness than are their children, who have never been taught to do anything they do not want to do, or to deny themselves the gratification of any appetite or desire.

For life doesn’t change. The world does not alter and no matter how much we would like to soft-pad existence for our children and stand between them and every hardship and sorrow, we cannot do it. At the last, in one way or another, they must come to grips with fate, and when they do the weak and dissolute will perish. The spendthrifts will come to want. The self-seekers will have their hearts broken.

Of course, it is a great temptation for parents to lavish upon their children everything that money will buy, and it is much easier to give strong-willed youngsters their heads and let them go their own gait than it is to hold them in check, but that way destruction lies for the child. And this is something that parents, who are denying their children the struggle of life that made them what they are, might well reflect upon.

XXVII

THE MOTHER-IN-LAW

Undoubtedly there is no other thing over which so many tears are shed and which is such a potent source of discord and misery as in-laws. Innumerable young women have the happiness of their youth wrecked by their quarrels with their mothers-in-law. Innumerable old women have their last days made bitter to them by the knowledge that they are unwelcome guests in their sons’ houses and that their daughters-in-law hate them. Innumerable men are made miserable by being torn between the two women they love, who fight over them like dogs over a bone. Discussing this subject the other day, a woman who is a mother-in-law said:

“Like everything else, the mother-in-law question is a fifty-fifty proposition, and when they don’t get along together both are to blame. Certainly it isn’t an easy thing for a woman who has run her own house and been at the head of everything to take a back seat in her daughter-in-law’s home. And it isn’t easy to forget that your children are your children and to keep hands off in their affairs and treat them with the formality you would strangers.

“On the other hand, most daughters-in-law meet their mothers-in-law with a chip on their shoulders and are always hunting for trouble. They seem to feel that when a man marries he should forget the mother who bore him and wipe out the memory of all the years of close association that there has been between them. They are even jealous of the slightest attention and consideration that their husbands show their mothers.

“They seem to forget that if it wasn’t for these much-resented mothers-in-law they wouldn’t have any husbands at all, and that the better husbands they have the more they owe to their mothers-in-law.

“For if a man is tender, and kind, and generous, and considerate to his wife, it is because his mother has taught him to be chivalrous to women. She has trained him to be a good husband just as she has trained him to be a good citizen, and he honors and respects his wife because he so greatly honors and respects his mother.

“You never saw a bad son who was a good husband. You never hear of a man who abused and cursed his mother, and regarded her as only a slave to wait upon him, who didn’t treat his wife the same way. And so we mothers who raise up clean, straight sons, who enter into marriage with high ideals and a determination to cherish their wives and make them happy, have done the girls who get them such a service as they could not repay if they were down on their knees before us the balance of their days.

“But if any daughter-in-law has ever lifted her voice in thanks to her mother-in-law for teaching her son to be unselfish, or to be generous with money, or to pay her the little attentions that women love, I have never heard of it.

“And there is another queer thing about daughters-in-law. They seem to think that marriage should obliterate a man’s past and break all the ties of his life.

“He and his mother may have been the closest of companions; he may have asked her advice on every subject and talked over all of his plans with her, but woe be unto all concerned if he tries that after he takes a wife.

“Ninety-nine times out of a hundred the wife grows green-eyed and considers it rank treachery to her, and for the sake of peace mother and son have to forego the little talks that were such a joy to them both or else do this stealthily and hold a stolen rendezvous.

“Yet it does look as if any woman who wasn’t a moron would have sense enough to see that any man who could forget his mother and all he owed to her would be such a disloyal creature that he would forget his wife when some younger and fairer woman came along.

“Of course, the chief charge that our daughters-in-law have against us is that we are always meddling in their affairs. Perhaps we do, but aren’t our children’s affairs our affairs too? Hasn’t the mother who has raised her son to manhood and who has made him strong and capable of earning a fine salary a right to say something when she sees his hard-earned money being wasted, his home neglected and his health ruined by bad cooking?

“If a mother saw her own daughter treating her husband that way, she would rebuke her and show her where she was making a fatal mistake, and the daughter would not resent it. Why can’t a daughter-in-law take the same advice and profit by it, instead of flying at the throat of the mother-in-law and considering herself a martyr to mother-in-lawism?

“Of course, there are exceptions to all rules. I know daughters-in-law who are real daughters to their husbands’ mothers. I even know daughters-in-law who have borne with angelic patience cranky women who could not even get along with their own daughters. And I know mothers-in-law whose presence is like a benediction in a house and others who are firebrands wherever they go. So perhaps there is no way to settle the question so long as we are all human and not female saints. But God pity the mother who is obliged to live with her children, no matter how kind they may be! She is always the fifth wheel, and feels it. Perhaps those savages who kill off all the old people haven’t such a bad plan of disposing of the question, after all.”

XXVIII

WHY OUR FAMILIES RILE US

A woman wants to know why it is that we find it harder to get along with our families than we do with other people, and why our own blood-and-kin rile us more than anybody else on earth. Probably the main reason why we find it so difficult to live in peace and harmony with those who are really near and dear to us is because we are too much alike. We have inherited the same traits of character, and when these come in collision there is a resounding crash, and the noise of wrecked tempers and exploding wrath.

Father, an iron-willed, tyrannical gentleman, who has ruled his little world like a despot, cannot get along with John, who is of the same fiber, and equally determined to have his own way and do as he pleases. Father and John may have a very sincere affection for each other and admire each other’s good qualities, but they can never be together an hour without getting into a fight over something.

Mother is a born manager, one of the ladies who honestly believe, with the famous Frenchman, that she could have saved the Almighty from making some mortifying mistakes if she had been consulted at the creation. Mary is mother’s own daughter in her perfect belief that she knows exactly how to run the universe. What wonder, then, that they clash over every gown and hat that is bought; over every man that comes to see Mary; over everywhere that Mary goes?