Part 31

The moral of all of which is, do not sacrifice yourself to your children; do not impoverish yourself for them, but help than all you can while they are young and while they need it, if you do not wish them to be glad when you are dead and your will is read.

LIII

WHAT PRICE PLEASURE?

Do you ever ask yourself if you are not paying too high a price for many of the things in which you indulge yourself? So far as material things go, most of us are keen enough about seeing that we get our money’s worth. We do not pay a thousand dollars for a string of glass beads. We do not buy a battered flivver at Rolls Royce figures, nor will we stand being charged banquet prices for a corned beef and cabbage dinner.

When it comes to spiritual values, however, we lose all sense of proportion. We become spendthrifts, who throw our priceless treasures away, and we literally sell our birthrights for a mess of pottage. One thinks of this particularly just now when one watches so many young persons making such bad and losing bargains with fate. There are the boys scarcely out of their teens who think it is such a sporting thing, so dashing, and that it shows that they are such men of the world to carry flasks on their hips and drink the vile poison that bootleggers sell. For the sake of the kick they get out of this and for a few minutes’ exhilaration, they are risking not only death itself, but what is far, far worse, blindness and imbecility and every sort of nervous ailment.

Look at the pasty-faced, blear-eyed youths with shaking hands that you see all about you, their minds dulled, their energies paralyzed, their ambitions killed by drink; who are done with life before they have ever begun to live. What a price they have paid for booze! Can any boy look at a drunken sot, dirty, poor, despised, and think that the pleasure that he has got out of drink has paid for what it cost him?

And the girls. The girls who are mad for gaiety, crazy for the admiration of men; the girls who go on drinking parties, who indulge in petting parties, who joy-ride until all hours of the night, who let men kiss and fondle them because that is the price that men demand for taking them out. How cheaply they sell themselves! Many a girl pays with shame and disgrace that follow her to the longest day she lives for a single wild party. They buy their fun high, these girls who exchange for it their self-respect, their modesty, their maidenly innocence and their good names.

The family quarrel. That is a domestic luxury for which we have to pay so dearly that it is never worth the cost. Undoubtedly, when one is feeling cross, and irritable, and disgruntled, there is a certain luxury in letting go all of one’s self-control, and turning one’s temper loose, and stabbing right and left with cruel words that wound like dagger thrusts. Also it salves one’s own conscience to lay the blame for everything that goes wrong on some one else. Therefore, many husbands and wives go on a daily orgy of nerves and temper. They vent their spleen against life on each other. They say to each other all the mean and hateful things that they are too politic to say to strangers.

But the price they pay! It bankrupts them. For they kill each other’s love. They slay each other’s respect. They inevitably come to hate each other and to cherish secret grudges, born of insult and injustice. There is no peace nor tenderness in their homes and their marriages either end in divorce or become long drawn out misery. What a price to pay for the lack of a little self-control!

Extravagance. The price of indulging yourself in your youth in the things that you cannot afford is poverty and dependence in your old age. The woman who cannot resist pretty clothes. The woman who is bitten by the society bug and who tries to keep up with people better off than she is. The man who belongs to lodges, when he can’t pay the rent collector. The man who buys an automobile and a radio on the instalment plan. They will pay, as sure as fate, for gratifying the desire of the moment by long years of bitter dependence. Twenty or thirty years from now they will be down and out, and they will either be in almshouses or the hangers on of relatives, who resent having to take care of Poor Uncle John or Cousin Susan. Or they will be burdens on their children, who are having all they can do to take care of their own families.

The highest priced cars in the world are not the gold-plated, satin-lined jewel boxes made for millionaires. They are the cheap little cars bought by the people who cannot afford them and who have to go into debt for them.

And there is the price the lazy pay for shiftlessness. And the price the mother pays who lets her children roam the streets while she plays bridge or goes to clubs. And the price the sarcastic pay who alienate a friend for the sake of making a witty speech. There are a thousand other little gratifications of a mood or inclination, the desire of a moment, that we pay for with tears, with loneliness, with failure, with our very heart’s blood. What a pity we don’t count the cost of things before we indulge ourselves in them!

LIV

THE IDEAL MOTHER

A woman asks: “What qualities should the ideal mother possess?”

To begin with, a mother should have love, and tenderness, and sympathy, and be willing to sacrifice herself for her children. These are the stock virtues of motherhood, and virtually all mothers possess them. But they alone do not make a woman a good mother. Often they do as much harm as good, for you can ruin a child by blind devotion. You can enfeeble it by too much tenderness. You can make it a selfish egotist and an overbearing brute by making yourself a doormat for it to walk over. So to love, tenderness, sympathy and unselfishness the ideal mother must add other qualities, and the most important of these is the ability to see her job as a whole and to realize that she is responsible for the finished goods that she turns out.

Not many mothers have this vision; or, rather, they shut their eyes and refuse to see that the molding of their children’s characters, the settling of their destinies, is in their own hands. They let a high-tempered child grow up undisciplined and without teaching it any self-control. They let a slothful, lazy one grow up without forming habits of industry. They never teach a self-indulgent, greedy child to curb its appetite. They spoil and pamper their children, and then they say that they “hope” their children will turn out all right!

The ideal mother knows that you form children’s characters in the cradle, and so she does not trust to luck with her youngsters. She begins when they are babies to teach them self-control, and thrift, and industry, and all the principles of right living. The ideal mother must have a backbone. Unfortunately, most mothers permit their hearts to crowd out their spinal column until they have no more backbone than a fishing worm. This is why you hear women say despairingly that they can’t do a thing with their 10-year-old child.

It takes nerve, and grit, and determination, and courage to fight self-willed youngsters, and mother is too soft to do it. So she gives in rather than listen to her baby’s howls of rage or go through the struggle of conquering a disobedient child. And the inevitable result is that her children have a contempt for her as a weakling, and ride roughshod over her, and become the outbreaking young hoodlums who fill our jails and brothels.

The ideal mother is a human being. She doesn’t pose before her children as a plaster saint or an oracle on a pedestal. One of the reasons why children do not confide in their parents is because the average father and mother pretend that they were such models of all the virtues when they were young that their children feel they have nothing in common with them and that they wouldn’t understand how a boy or girl feels who wants to do all sorts of foolish things.

How can a girl tell her mother that a boy kissed her, if mother represents herself as Miss Prunes and Prisms, and says that when she was young girls never skylarked, and never went on joy-rides or to cabarets, or held hands in the movies, but spent a pleasant evening sitting up in the parlor in the presence of their elders discussing improving topics?

It is the human mothers who can sympathize with their children’s desire for good times and help them to them; who will stretch a point to get a girl a new frock or a boy the fraternity pin he craves, who get well enough acquainted with their children to really help them and guard them.

The ideal mother has a sense of proportion. She doesn’t see her ducklings as swans. Her love doesn’t blind her to her children’s faults and blemishes. Rather it sharpens her vision, so that she gets a line on them as they really are. Thereby she is enabled to help them make the most of such gifts as they have. She sees that Tom is brilliant but unstable and lacking in purpose, and she holds him to whatever he undertakes to do until she forms the habit of steadfastness in him. She sees that John is dull but a plodder, and she trains him for some occupation in which quickness of mind is not demanded and in which the prizes go to faithfulness and hard work. She sees that Mary is intelligent but homely, and lacking the charms that allure men, so she gives her some occupation by which she can make a good living for herself and which will fill her life with interest. And this sense of proportion keeps her from making her children ridiculous by bragging about them, and boring every one with whom she comes in contact with endless stories of what wonderful and marvelous creatures they are, and how, wherever they go, they are the cynosure of all eyes and the admiration of all beholders.

Finally, the ideal mother should have a sense of humor that will enable her to laugh instead of cry over many of her children’s peccadilloes and keep her from taking them too seriously. For the thing that ails young people is chiefly youth, and they will get over that if you will give them a little time. Because they are idle, irresponsible, pleasure-loving, dance-mad, girl and boy crazy is no reason for prophesying dismal things about them and wringing your hands in despair. It is a passing phase of life at which we elders may well grin, remembering the time when we also were young and foolish. An old woman who had raised up a remarkable family of sons and daughters once gave me this as her recipe for bringing up children: “Kiss them when they are good. Spank them when they’re bad and teach them to obey you.” That is the whole of the law and the prophets.

HOW TO CATCH A WIFE

“You are always telling girls how to catch husbands,” says a young man. “Why don’t you give us chaps a few tips about how to get wives?”

Well, son, perhaps I unconsciously favor women because I belong to their lodge. Also, it is more difficult for a woman to catch a husband than it is for a man to get a wife, not only because women are more inclined to matrimony than men are, but because a woman’s pursuit of a man has to be stealthy and secret and under cover, with all of her tracks carefully hidden and her purposes veiled, whereas a man can go after a woman openly and aboveboard, with everybody looking on and applauding the chase. Therefore, the woman is more in need of any stray hints that may improve her technique than the man is. Still, far be it from me to withhold from my brothers any information I may have about the short cuts to the feminine heart. So to the really earnest seeker after knowledge on this subject I would say:

First. Study your girl. Catalogue her. Find out to what type she belongs and adapt your tactics to the situation, for all women no more rise to the same line of courtship than all fish bite at the same bait. There are some feminine hearts that can only be taken by assault and battery and others that surrender to patient siege. There are women whose love is for sale to the highest bidder and others who bestow it in pity. There are women who like a business proposition and women who fall only for the romantic wooing. So there you are, and your success will depend upon your ability to psychoanalyze the particular woman and upon the skill with which you suggest to her that you are the great unsatisfied need of her soul.