Part 20

Sometimes the reason that we can’t get along with our own people is because we are so entirely different from them. Often and often children are changelings, and those of our own flesh have no tie of spiritual kinship with us. The father who is a hard-headed, practical business man has nothing in common with the son who is a quivering bunch of nerves and sensibilities; who is a dreamer of dreams, and who counts wealth in terms of beauty, instead of dollars. Mother, who was a beauty and a belle in her day, with scores of lovers sighing at her feet, has looked forward to reliving her triumphs in her daughter. And when daughter grows up to be a big, sturdy young person who wants to go into business and who loathes society, what wonder that they get on each other’s nerves?

When you hear parents speak bitterly of what a disappointment children are, and how ungrateful, it merely means that their children are different from them. John insists on being a doctor or a lawyer instead of going into the hardware business father has been building up for him for twenty years. Mary wants to marry a poor young man, instead of the nice, settled, rich widower mother has picked out for her. Other people find John brilliant and talented. Father calls him a fool to his face because he won’t do father’s way. Other women are sympathetic with Mary’s romance, and her willingness to sacrifice riches for love. It infuriates mother to see her throwing an establishment and pearls and a limousine away, for a sentiment.

Often the reason we cannot get along with our own families is because they are like a mirror in which we see our own faults in all their hideousness. Father’s lack of ambition that has kept him from making anything of his life; mother’s shiftlessness and wastefulness that have kept the family poor; brother’s brutal temper; sister’s sharp tongue that cuts like a two-edge sword—these irritate us, and we find them harder to forgive than we would such defects in other people because we know that we are, ourselves, prone to just these weaknesses.

Besides these fundamental reasons why it is hard to get along with our relatives, there are a thousand minor causes of discord. One of the principal ones is the lack of politeness in the family circle, for most people feel that good manners are like good clothes, and should be worn only for the benefit of company. It is an amazing but true thing that practically the only people who ever say mean, insulting, wounding things to us are those of our own household.

Strangers listen to us with apparent interest, and laugh at our jokes. Our friends compliment our new frocks and cars. If our casual acquaintances do not like our taste or respect our judgment, they keep silent about it. It is our families who stab our vanity to the quick by yawning in our faces, and asking us if we are going to tell that old story over again; who bluntly inform us that our new hat is ten years too young for us, and that there is nothing so ridiculous as old women trying to be flappers; who criticize the way we are raising our children, and tell us the home truths we would rather die than hear.

Still another reason why it is hard to get along with our families is because it is generally held that the mere fact that you love people gives you a perfect right to nag them. We speak of family ties as binding. Binding is right, for in the average home no one can rise up or sit down, eat or fast, go or come, without having to give an account of why he or she did it or didn’t do it, and being advised to do it some other way.

It is for these, and a thousand other reasons, that we find it difficult to get along with our families, and fly to those who do not feel that they have a right to boss, correct, advise or otherwise interfere with us in the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness.

XXIX

OUR LIVES ARE WHAT WE MAKE THEM

You have been in factory towns where more or less benevolent corporations have built rows upon rows of houses, each one as like its neighbor as peas in a pod. But one house would have dirty, grimy, unwashed windows, with old newspapers or rags stuffed in a broken window pane. The yard would be filled with old cans and ashes and refuse, and the place would look like a shack, unfit for human habitation.

The house next door would have bright and shining windows, with clean, freshly starched muslin curtains and a gay red geranium in a pot showing between them. Flowers would be blooming in the yard, and a vine trained over the doorway, and the place would be a home, bright, cheerful and attractive. Yet the two houses were exactly alike. The only difference was in what the people in them made of them.

One cook can take a cheap cut of meat and a handful of vegetables and make of them a ragout, over which an epicure would smack his lips. Another cook will take the same meat and vegetables and make of them a watery stew, with neither flavor nor nutriment to it. It is the same material, but the difference is in the cooks.

That is the way it is all through life. There are a few fortunate individuals who seem to be the darlings of the gods, and with whom Lady Luck walks hand in hand. And there are also a few miserable ones who appear to have been born double-crossed by fate. But the great majority of us get a pretty even deal. We have the same family relationships. We go to the same schools. We have the same chance to work, and the balance is up to us. We are happy or miserable, successful or failures, rich or poor, according to what we make out of our lives. We marry, millions of us. And set up homes. One out of every seven of the marriages ends in divorce. More than three-fourths of the homes are wrecked, not because there is anything especially wrong, not because either husband or wife is an outbreaking criminal, but because they are too ignorant or too selfish to make their marriage a success.

All husbands and wives are cut off the same bolt of humanity. No man is perfect. No woman is an angel. No domestic machine runs along without a jar or a hitch. Every marriage calls for sacrifices, for patience, for forgiveness, endurance, and you get out of it just what you put into it—heaven or hell.

You go to homes that simply irradiate peace and love and good cheer, where there is a happy and contented man, and a smiling and blissful woman: where there are fine children growing up in the right atmosphere. And you go to another home that is a place of torment, where a surly man snarls and snaps, and a disgruntled woman whines and complains, and unruly, uncontrolled children fight like the Kilkenny cats.

Yet both of these families started out with the same equipment. Both couples were in love when they were married. Both had about the same amount of money. Both were called upon to make the same sacrifices. Both had the same chances at happiness. Yet one made a success of marriage, and the other failed.

We talk about opportunity, and when we fail we lay the blame on luck. We say we never had a chance. But the truth is that we are our own luck, that we make our own opportunities.

Did you ever think that every day in the year there are thousands of green country boys going into every big city, seeking their fortunes, and thousands of city boys leaving those same cities because they think that everything is overcrowded and overdone, and that they have no opportunity there? And many of those country boys will find the chance the city boy overlooked, and pick up the fortune he passed by.

The world is full of failures, croaking that there is no money in farming or the mercantile business, and warning young men that they will starve if they become lawyers, or doctors, or actors, or writers, or artists. Yet there are rich farmers with bursting granaries. Everywhere millionaire business men. There are world-famous lawyers and doctors and matinée idols and men who write best sellers.

And the successes are side by side with the failures, working in the same environment, under the same conditions, and the only difference is the difference in the men themselves. It is the difference in the energy, the grit, the determination, the stick-at-iveness, the heart and soul and brains that one man put into his work and the other didn’t. Whether we are happy or not depends upon ourselves, for in reality we all have pretty much the same raw material with which to work.

Sickness, suffering, the death of those we love, disappointment, come to us all. The poorest woman alive and the millionairess bear their children in the same agony, and weep the same tears over little coffins. Money does not buy love, tenderness, nor peace of mind, and just as many hearts ache under silver brocade as under cotton.

But we can hold our souls serene if we will. We can keep from fretting. We can resolutely extract the sweet instead of the bitter out of life. We can dwell on our blessings instead of our miseries, and we can acquire a philosophy that will enable us to laugh instead of weep over the misadventures that befall us.

For our lives are what we make them. It is all up to us.

XXX

HUSBAND LOSERS

Three divorced women were talking together the other day and one of them said:

“When we wives lose our husbands we always accuse some other woman of having stolen them from us; and we cry out that our husbands are cruel ingrates, who have taken the best years of our lives and then thrown us aside like broken toys when we were no longer young and beautiful. And we pose as blameless martyrs who are the pitiful victims of man’s perfidy.

“Of course, it saves our faces to be able to lay all the blame for our wrecked homes on others, and it soothes our hurt vanity to be wept over as a poor, innocent, deserted wife. But in the still watches of the night, when we have it out with our own souls, there are mighty few of us who can shrive our consciences and know that we are blameless.