Part 16
In all fairness, we must admit that the display wedding is a feminine vice. No man, probably, ever really yearned to make a public exhibition of himself as he was being led as a lamb to the slaughter. But by the time she is ten years old the average girl has begun planning her wedding and deciding whether she will have a big church affair, with ushers and flower girls and ring-bearers and maids and matrons of honor and bridesmaids and a white satin dress and a real lace veil, and all the other flubdubs, or whether she will be married at home under a floral canopy, with an admiring audience fenced off from her by white ribbons. And to realize this ten-minute splurge she is ready to ruthlessly ruin her family and half kill herself. If she doesn’t get it, she goes through life feeling that she has missed her big moment. It is from this silly, dopey daydream that women should be rescued by law, since few of them have the common sense and good taste to put it aside themselves.
To begin with, it would do away with the disgraceful, barefaced holdups that precede weddings. These are camouflaged under the appropriate name of “showers,” for they cause every friend of an engaged girl to shed salt and bitter tears at the realization of how much they will be mulcted for in silk-stocking showers, and handkerchief showers, and towel showers, and kitchen showers, and all the other showers that go to make up a bridal deluge. It would also prevent that sinking feeling at the pit of the stomach with which we are attacked at sight of a large, thick white envelope in the mail. We know that it means a “stand-and-deliver” present, which somehow always comes just at a time when the rent is overdue, or a doctor bill has to be paid, or we had saved up a little money by pinching economies to buy a new hat or suit.
It isn’t that we are stingy or mean, or that we begrudge a gift to a friend. It is only that we would like to give when we can do so freely, and enjoy the giving, instead of having to give at a time when it is actually dishonest to bestow a present. Why, I have known people who had to put off needed dental work or taking a sick child to the country when three or four wedding presents fell together. The wedding gift was a debt of honor. “They sent us a set of salad forks.” “She gave us a clock when we were married,” and it had to be returned in kind. The abolition of the show wedding would prolong the days of many a poor, old, hard-worked father, whose daughter’s trousseau is the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
It is not because she needs them, or has any use for them, that Sally Ann, who is a poor girl marrying a poor young man, has to have piles of orchid chiffon undergarments, hand-embroidered and belaced and beribboned. It is because they are to be displayed to her catty friends, who will finger them, and appraise them, and criticize them, and then go home wondering how her father is ever going to pay for them. If her lingerie were not Exhibit A at the wedding Sally Ann would go along and provide herself with a reasonable amount of underwear that would stand wear and washing, and not run papa into debt.
But Sally Ann has to have her show wedding. She has to trail up the church aisle in her white satin and her tulle veil, and all the rest of it. And by the time father has paid for the church and the flowers, and the bridesmaid’s presents, and the reception, and the automobiles, he has had to borrow money at the bank and has saddled himself with a debt that bends his back a little more, and puts new lines in his face, and adds to his burden in work and worry, which was already more than he could bear. And it has all been for a few minutes’ flaunting of herself in the face of an audience of people who smiled and nudged each other, and said: “Did you ever see her look so homely? Brides always look their worst.” “Wonder what he ever saw in her to make him pick her out.” “Is that the bridegroom? Looks like a scared rabbit.” “How on earth do you suppose her father will ever pay for this? Everybody knows he can’t afford it,” and so on, and so on. Just what everybody says at a wedding.
Above all, the abolition of the show wedding and the saving of the foolish expenditure it involved would enable many a young couple to set up housekeeping out of debt; and, best of all, they would begin life simply and honestly, and with the admiration and gratitude of all who know them. Getting married is the crucial act in a man’s and woman’s life. It is the most awful and solemn thing they ever do. And why they want to have a thousand curious eyes peering at them when they take the step that is going to plunge them into hell or lift them into heaven passes comprehension. It would not be more incongruous to send out invitations to people to come and watch you die than it is to come and see you married.
Wise that young couple who simply slip around to the parson and make their vows at the altar, with no one but God to look on.
LII
WHEN YOUR CHILDREN ARE GLAD YOU DIE
Parents seem to run to extremes. Of the common, or garden, variety of fathers and mothers there appears to be two types. One is the overindulgent, which lavishes too much money, too many fine clothes, too many motorcars on its offspring, and that brings up its children to be idle and worthless wasters and spenders. The other type of parent is the Spartan one that is as hard as nails, unsympathetic, close-fisted; that denies its children every indulgence, and that holds to the theory that the harder it makes life for the young the better it is for them. Both schools of thought are wrong.
Undoubtedly, parents make a very great mistake when they sacrifice everything to their children and make doormats of themselves for their children to walk on. They weaken their sons and daughters by pampering them too much and by standing between them and the struggle that alone makes muscle of body and soul, and they do their children a cruel injustice by cultivating in them extravagant tastes and habits that perhaps they cannot later on give them the money to gratify. Certainly it is an unedifying spectacle to behold, as we often do, a mother in patched, made-over clothes, while her daughters fare forth in the latest imported Parisian models, or a seedy father riding on the street car while son burns up the road in a speedy sports car and is decked out like Solomon in all his glory.
Also we can but deplore the folly of parents who skimp, and slave, and deny themselves every comfort in order that their daughters can make a splurge in society, and that their sons may loaf through college courses, where they acquire nothing but a college yell and a contempt for their hump-shouldered old dads. We could weep when we see tired old women who are converted into unpaid nursemaids by their married daughters who are always coming in and dumping their babies down on mother when they want to go off on a trip or play bridge. And what tears we have left we could shed over the men whose sons are always getting into trouble and coming back to father for help when they know that they are robbing him of the pittance he has saved up for his old age.
But between doing everything for your children and doing nothing at all for them is a long step, and the parents who do not help their children to get a start in life fail just as much in doing their duty to them as do the foolishly fond parents who kill their children’s initiative by swaddling them in cotton wool. Of course, necessity is a grim teacher. If you chuck a child into the water where it must sink or swim, it is pretty apt to strike out and keep afloat somehow. And it is true that a great many successful men and women are the children of parents who were so poor that they could do nothing for them, and that they fought their way to an education and battled their way to success against all sorts of hardships. But there is a great difference between the parents who cannot help their children and those who will not help their children, between the fathers and mothers who would give their heart’s blood to their children and those who will not give them a few dollars. And while the children may feel all love and reverence for the poor parents who were powerless to assist them, they can but feel bitter resentment toward the parents who stand callously by, watching their struggles without holding out a helping hand.
A large number of parents have an idea that it does young people good to be deprived of pleasures, to be reared to no indulgences, to know hardships. And so even when they have plenty of money they deny their children pretty clothes and the advantages of education and travel, and when they get married they let them scuffle for themselves. They do not give the girl a dowry nor set the boy up in business.
It seems to me that this is a cruel and an inhuman thing to do, and that it serves no purpose but to kill in the child’s breast every particle of affection it had for its father and mother. For it dooms the children to years of struggle and self-sacrifice, pinching economies and anxieties that it might so easily have escaped. And God knows that life is not so easy for any of us that we can afford to have any of the pleasure taken out of it.
It also often shuts the door of opportunity for the child or puts off success for many weary years. The few thousands of dollars that father might have invested in the firm which would have raised Tom from being a clerk to a partner might have carried him on to fortune. If father would have financed the extra course of study in his profession for John, he would have achieved success and begun big money making years before he did. If father had given Mary an allowance big enough to hire servants, she would not have worked herself to death cooking, and washing, and baby tending. But father wouldn’t do it. He held on to every penny and let his children fight it out the best way they could. The daughter of such a man once said to me:
“My father is dead and I have inherited a large fortune, but it has come to me too late to do me any real good. When I was a girl I never had any pretty clothes. I never had a nice home to invite my friends to. I never had any indulgences. I never could even go with the people I was entitled to go with because I did not live in the style they did. I married a poor man and my father never helped us. I wore my youth out in housework that I was not strong enough to do. If he had given me $10,000 when I needed it, it would have done me more good than all that I have inherited does me now.”
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.
LV
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?”