Part 9

Are you a good father to your daughter, Mr. Man? You smile derisively at my question. A good father to your little girl? You’ll tell the world you are! Why, she is just the very core of your heart, and there hasn’t been a blessed thing that she has wanted since the day she was born that you haven’t given her. Why, you have almost broken your neck trying to get the moon for her when she cried for it. Pretty dresses, fashionable schools, good times, her own car, far more luxuries than you could afford her, you have lavished upon her without stint. You have kept her wrapped in cotton wool, and she has never known there was such a thing as work or responsibility or self-denial in the world. You may have failed in many other directions in doing your full duty, but you can pat yourself on the back and thank God that you have been a good father!

Well, let me tell you that if all you have done for your daughter is just to pamper her and spoil her and make her weak and selfish and self-centered, you have not been a good father. You have been the worst sort of father. You have never looked upon your daughter as anything but a pretty doll to dress up and play with, and dolls cannot take care of themselves in the rough-and-tumble fight of life. Sooner or later they are apt to get broken.

Let me tell you what I consider a good father. A good father is a man who doesn’t look upon his daughter as a toy or a piece of bric-a-brac, but as a human being who has been born with the heavy handicap of the feminine sex upon her. That means that she will always be less strong than a boy, less capable of taking care of herself, in far more danger. Fewer opportunities will be open to her, and many more perils beset her than would a boy. Therefore, she needs more protection. She needs to be better trained to deal with the world. So the good father sees to it that his girl gets the very best education that she will take. Not the flubdub, fluffy ruffles sort, but a solid, practical education that develops whatever gray matter she has got in her pretty little head, that teaches her to think and reason and that gives her a solid foundation on which to rear her house of life.

Then the good father has his daughter taught some profession or trade whereby she can earn a living, and he has her follow this occupation for at least a year. He does this for many reasons. He does it because he knows how easily money is lost, and he wants to know that his daughter has in herself the skill and ability to make her own living if she is ever thrown on her own resources. He does it because he knows the knowledge that she can stand on her own feet and earn her own bread and butter and cake, gives a girl a poise nothing else in the world can give. He does it because the discipline of a business office, the experience in handling money and an insight into the troubles and problems of men are the best preparation any girl can have for matrimony.

A good father chums with his daughter. He begins being confidential with her in her cradle, and this makes it natural that when she grows up she should discuss with him the boys who come to see her, and that father should be able to form her tastes and assiduously guide her in her choice of a husband. Girls know nothing about men. It is impossible that they should, but there is nothing about any young chap that father can’t find out, and if he knew that this youth had a hectic past, or that one drank, or the other one was a trifling ne’er-do-well, it would be the simplest thing possible to prevent many an unhappy marriage by making daughter see a suitor through the sophisticated eyes of a worldly-wise man, instead of the romantic ones of a young girl.

A good father tries to protect his daughter after he is dead. So, when he makes his will he leaves her whatever money he has to bequeath her tied up good and tight in a trust company so that she cannot touch anything but the interest. He knows that every woman who has any money is the foredoomed prey of get-rich-quick sharks and all of her parasitic relatives. He has seen too many women sell their gilt-edge bonds and invest the proceeds in wildcat stock that promised to pay 40 per cent and never paid a penny. He has seen too many women lend their money without security to Deacon Jones, because he prayed so beautifully, or to Uncle John, because they didn’t have the nerve to say “No” to a member of the family.

Above all, a good father leaves his daughter’s money in trust for her, not only to save her money but to save her from friction with her husband. He has seen many a man graft his wife’s fortune deliberately, and he has seen many more good men, who were poor business men, bring their wives to poverty. And he knows that it takes more backbone than the average woman possesses to hold on to her money when the man she loves is continually asking her for it. So father saves her the necessity of any arguments on the subject. Are you doing these things for your daughter, Mr. Man? Are you a good father?

XXVI

THE MORAL MUSCLES OF YOUR CHILDREN

The most overdressed and overindulged children are those whose parents were poor in their youth. The most undisciplined and uncontrolled children are those whose parents were reared in strict and stern households. When you see a little girl playing around in a befrilled lace and embroidered dress and silk stockings, you do not need to be told that at her age her mother wore gingham and went barefooted. When you see a young boy splitting the road open in an imported car you know that when his father was a lad he trudged on foot to the factory with his dinner pail on his arm. When you see ill-mannered young people who smoke and drink and carouse and recognize no law but their own pleasure; who run roughshod over the rights of others; who have no respect for age, and who either patronize their parents or treat them with contempt, you know that they are the offspring of fathers and mothers who were given few privileges when they were young and who were coerced by determined and strong-handed parents into walking the straight and narrow path.

Nothing is more common than to hear people say, “I don’t want my children to be denied things as I was in my childhood”; “I don’t want my children to have to work as I did when I was a child”; “I don’t want my children to be suppressed and tyrannized over as I was when I was young.”

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?

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.