Part 8

The supreme moment of the Ordinary Woman’s life, however, came when she educated her children above herself and lifted them out of her sphere. She did this with deliberation. She knew that in sending her bright boy and talented girl off to college she was opening up to them paths in which she could not follow; she knew that the time would come when they would look upon her with pitying tolerance or contempt, or perhaps—God help her!—be ashamed of her.

But she did not falter in her self-sacrifice. She worked a little harder, she denied herself a little more, to give them the advantages that she never had. In this she was only like millions of other Ordinary Women who are toiling over cooking-stoves, slaving at sewing-machines, pinching and economizing to educate and cultivate their children—digging with their own hands the chasm that will separate them almost as much as death itself would.

Wherefore I say the Ordinary Woman is the real heroine of life.

TEACH THE CHILDREN TO LOVE FATHER

Are you teaching your children to love and admire their father? Do you ceaselessly point out to your children their father’s good qualities? Do you hold their father up as a hero before your children’s eyes? Do you teach your children to appreciate their father? If you do not, you are not giving your husband a fair deal, nor a run for his money. Fatherhood calls for just as many sacrifices as motherhood does. The only coin in which these can be repaid is affection and gratitude, and if he is defrauded of these he is poor indeed.

From the time the first baby is born the average man becomes literally the slave of his family. He sells himself into bondage so that his children may live soft; that they may have advantages that he never had in his youth; that they may enjoy luxuries he never knew. He works overtime and grows prematurely old and bent, that his boys may go to college and belong to smart clubs and have automobiles, and that his daughters may attend fashionable schools, and dress like fashion plates, and go in the right circles.

It is father who stays at home and works through hot summers and cold winters, when the family goes to Europe. It is father who wears the shabbiest clothes. It is father who has the worst room and the smallest closet space in the home. The percentage of money that father spends on himself and in gratifying his own personal tastes and desires is negligible. Virtually all the money he has earned by a lifetime of hard toil has been lavished on his family.

Whether this pays or not, whether all of this labor and anxiety and self-denial have been worthless or not, depends altogether on his children’s attitude toward him. If they love him; if they are grateful to him; if they appreciate what he has done for them, it is the best investment that a man ever made, and it makes him richer than any millionaire. But if his children are indifferent and callous; if they take all that he has done for them as no more than their due, and without even a “thank you”; if they see in him nothing but a shabby little man who hasn’t been particularly successful as a moneymaker, then all his life work goes for nothing. His sacrifices are without reward. He is bankrupt in heart.

Now, the attitude of children toward their father is almost entirely determined by their mother; and whether they look upon him as a superior being to be adored and worshiped, or merely as a cash register that they can punch whenever they want any money, depends altogether upon what she has taught them. There are women who teach their children to hate and fear their father by making him an ogre to them. When the children are bad the little culprits are always threatened with what their father will do to them. The mother thus makes the father the hanging judge who inflicts punishment on the small sinners.

In this way the mother fills the child’s imagination with a picture of its father as of some dread creature who is always lying in wait to chastise him, and who could never have any sympathy or understanding with him, and with whom he could never have any possible companionship.

“I’ll tell your father on you when he comes home,” is the curse that millions of women lay between their children and their husbands, and that seals the children’s hearts forever against the fathers who have given them their very life blood.

There are other women who teach their children to regard their fathers simply as money-making machines that exist solely for their own use and benefit. What the children want they must have at any cost to father, and mother undertakes to nag it out of him. The children see that mother has no consideration for father and they grow up to have none.

She never tells them that they must not even ask for something they desire because business is bad and their father is harassed and worried about money. She never tells them that they must stay at home and let father have a little trip, because he is sick and nerve-worn. She lets them wring the last penny out of him with no more feeling for him than if he were some sort of automatic device worked by her for supplying their desires and needs.

Other women teach their children to despise their fathers by always criticizing them and calling attention to their faults. They are forever telling the children that their fathers are lacking in enterprise, that they are poor business men, that they are too easy and let people take advantage of them, that they are high-tempered and hard to get along with, that they have this and that weakness, until the child’s mind is thoroughly poisoned with the idea that his father amounts to nothing and his opinions are not to be respected.

Very few women ever deliberately set themselves to teach their children to love and appreciate their fathers. Very few women ever try to make their children see their fathers as heroes who, for their sakes, are fighting the battle of life as bravely and gallantly as any knight of old. Very few women teach their children to show any gratitude to the fathers who have sacrificed so much for them. Why so many women fail in this important duty is partly through carelessness and a lack of thought, but mostly because of an unconscious mother jealousy. They want to be first with their children and monopolize their love. But it is a cruel thing to the child, and to the father. It robs them both of so much joy in each other that they miss.

STRIKE A BALANCE WITH MATRIMONY

I get hundreds upon hundreds of letters from disgruntled wives bemoaning their fates. They tell me that they are sick and weary of the monotony of domestic drudgery; that they have few amusements; that their husbands are indifferent to them and never pay them any compliments or show them any affection; that their husbands find fault with them for their every mistake, but never give them one word of praise for all the good work they do.

And these women have brooded over the hardships of their lot until they have grown morbid and they see the world as one great gob of gloom, with themselves as the blackest spot in it.

Without doubt, marriage is a cruel and a bitter disappointment to nine-tenths of those who enter into the holy estate. Especially is it disillusioning to women because they build such impossible hopes upon it, and go into it with such a blind faith that they are going to find it an earthly paradise.

It is incredible, but it is true, that despite her lifelong knowledge of the daily life her mother has led and her observation of the domestic strife in the households of her married friends and neighbors, every girl honestly believes that her own matrimonial venture will be a perpetual picnic, and that the man she marries will remain the perfect lover.

Of course, it doesn’t happen, and when the woman finds out that her own marriage brings her more kicks than ha’pence; when she realizes that she must share the common lot; when she has to bend her back to the hard and dreary labor of making a family comfortable, for which she gets neither the glad hand nor a pay envelope, and when she has to put up with a man who seems to have cornered the whole visible supply of pure cussedness, why, it gets upon her nerves, and she feels like flunking it.

So she beats upon her breast and cries out that this is not the marriage of which she dreamed. This sordid existence is not what she married for.

Of course, it isn’t. But it is marriage as it is. None of us realize our ideals. Our dreams never come true. And even when we get what we want, it is so warped and twisted that it is no longer the object of our desires, and we have paid for it more than it is worth. That is life.

To these unhappy wives I would offer this bit of homely counsel:

Sit down, sisters, and have a real heart-to-heart session with your own souls. Put out of your mind firmly and for all time the idiotic idea that there is any lot of perfect peace and happiness, any road you might have traveled that is not strewn with tacks. Worry and anxiety and sickness and sorrow and disappointment and loneliness are the portion alike of the highest and the lowest, and you cannot escape the human lot. It is life.

Then take a calm and dispassionate survey of your own situation. You will find your work tiresome and monotonous. So does every other person in the world find his or hers. The thing we do for our daily bread is bound to become a grind. Do you think for a moment that the banker doesn’t get sick and weary of grappling with credits and loans; that the author doesn’t have to flog himself to his desk; that the actor doesn’t weary of the lines he has said over thousands of times; that the film star is not nauseated with grease paint?

Every one thrills to his task at first as you did to your new pots and pans and bridal furniture. But the novelty wears off, and then comes the long, grim stretch of carrying on, because it is your job to which you have set your hand and which you mean to make a good job just because it is yours. That is life.

You complain that your husband takes your good work as a matter of course, but he howls loud and long over your mistakes. That is what happens to all workers. If you were a stenographer and spelled one word wrong; if you were a saleswoman and made one error in your calculations, your boss would pass over the thousands of words you had spelled correctly and the hundreds of good sales you had made, to call you down for your blunder.