Parenting - On Joining The Older Generation

( Originally Published 1914 )

THE DILEMMA OF THE MODERN PARENT

IT does not come when one might expect it, all at once with the arrival of the first baby; it is too big and vital a thing to be conceived without much mental preparation, but so insidious and unconscious is the preparation that the final result bursts upon one with a dreadful abruptness: " Why, how is this? I am now one of the older generation!"

This clarifying self-knowledge never thrusts all its piercing reality into the hearts of any but fathers and mothers. Unmarried or childless men and women often go buoyantly on to the end of their days in a light-hearted illusion of their own youth. Every bachelor has a trace of the boy about him. No parent is young. The fact of his parenthood writes him down as irrevocably adult.

With the realization of this fact like a great clap of doom in his ears, the self-pitying parent feels a widened sympathy towards all adults. At one stroke the older generation is avenged for the arrogance of his former attitude towards it. He pities it, he understands it, he profoundly sympathizes with it as he sees himself one with it an Ishmael, a tyrant, a pariah, an outsider in the thought of the younger generation. Well he knows from his -own experience that youth is already quoting Shakespeare's too familiar contrast between " crabbed age and youth." Well he remembers Turgenieff's bitter theory that there is no hostility in life like the instinctive hostility between the young and the old. Every poet, every philosopher has dinned in our ears the conviction that this hostility is inevitable. Ever since, as an undergraduate, he began to be wise he has repeated to himself the old aphorisms about the instinctive need of the younger generation to defend itself and its life against the older, about the inevitable opposition of their interests, about " radicals of forty trampling the life out of radicals of twenty now as ever," about the right of the young to live their life in defiance of the tradition-ridden old, about the " instinctive secrecy of the child's heart," and he has thought himself very advanced and en-lightened and knowing. But now, as the little heads around his table begin to grow upward with startling rapidity, he finds that he has been whetting a two-edged sword.

If it were not touching (being a parent myself, I naturally find it pathetic) there would be something inimitably comic in the metamorphosis of the parent suddenly waking to find himself in another generation from the one in which he went to sleep. How hurriedly he turns inside out all his previous convictions; there is something to be said for the older generation's vested interests, after all, he argues ; a certain respect, not to say devotion, should, after all, be paid to the mere fact of parenthood. Old heads do think more clearly than young ones. He recognizes an inherent reasonableness for every claim which in his own youth he put aside with so impatient a hand.

Now, no object can be more fatuous than a human being trying to persuade himself that a universal law will somehow be polite enough not to apply to him. It may be that any attempt on the part of our generation to hope for a deep, endearing, far-reaching relation of love and trust between us and our children after they are grown up is to hope for something which others have not had and is as futile. as a hope that the law of gravitation will not apply in our case. But, as a matter of fact, our generation has produced men who have played strange and un expected tricks with the law of gravitation. They have not in the least annihilated it by their feats in flying, but they have offset its force by utilizing other laws of physics. And they have succeeded because they had the courage to face an old difficulty with new eyes. Why, then, should we sit down hope-less before another old difficulty, simply because it is old? Is there not a chance that by honestly admitting its existence and examining it we may be able to judge it more clearly and perhaps offset its strength by the use of other elements in human nature?

One factor in the modern world is in our favor, although it must be admitted that a bold leap of the imagination is needed to expect help from it. Society, as it wends its devious way towards its unknown destination, is leaving behind it all admiration for respect and reverence as qualities in and of them-selves desirable, whether based on sound reason or not. Certainly this view is upsetting to our old illusions, but perhaps the roughness is salutary. It may be tumbling us toward the path of escape from our age-old predicament. Whether one finds this abandonment of baseless respect a good or a bad tendency depends upon one's temperament. Its existence cannot be denied. People nowadays make no apologies for asking " to be shown " before they expend any respect. Of course, in the long run, institutions, qualities, persons have always been weighed in a true scale, and have been respected or not according to their inherent worth ; but the process has never been so bare to the eye as at present. The cruel justice of the proceeding has been masked in the past more than it is now by the hard-dying idea that reverence, whether it has any reason for existence or not, is in itself a beautiful quality, There is little of this idea left in the modern world for us parents to snatch up, as parents have done before us, substituting it for the lost illusion of youth. Therefore, before we sink too deeply into the ruts of middle life, we might as well make a virtue of necessity and give up voluntarily the traditional brand of skin-deep " respect" claimed for the mere accident of birth which modern life is ordaining that we shall not have in any case, whether we give it up willingly or not. It may be, if of our own accord we abandon the attempt to wring out affection as an en-forced tribute to the mere physical tie of blood, that we shall be able to obtain another sort of more spontaneous and enduring affection. It may be, if we face the situation honestly, casting aside sentimental cloaks which veil the facts of the case, that we may be able to find some really valid planks of common interests, common ideas to throw across the gulf between the generations as a beginning of the bridge of amity, which, it is to be hoped, will some day unite the two extremes of humanity in the conviction of their real solidarity. Perhaps the poets and philosophers have been wrong about the inevitable hostility of the younger to the older. Even poets and philosophers are not always infallible. Theirs may be an old unhappy superstition, which, like Pilgrim's roaring lions, will prove, if we but advance boldly upon it, to be chained fast and quite harm-less. There may be under its terrifying mask of tragedy nothing more resistant to common sense and ingenuity in readjustment than there is under the equally scowling hypothesis of the inevitable hostility between the sexes. Many modern women are joyfully finding that to be but a make-believe bogie, and from out the noisy hurly-burly and riot of strange actions connected with what is known as the " feminist " movement have quietly extracted the fortifying conviction that there is no such thing as " the sex war." May we not live to see shaken on its foundations that other ugly saying that there is an impassable barrier between the younger and the older, that real confidence is impossible between them? May it not perhaps be proved, as in the case of sex, to be a question of temperament rather than age? Are we, after all, so utopian, if, realizing our perilous situation as adults, we fall with a frightened quickening of all our faculties to a desperate attempt to find a rational way out?

We may feel ourselves very enlightened and advanced as we undertake this scrutiny of a situation to which, we flatter ourselves, nobody else has ever been so keenly alive, but, as a matter of fact, nothing but the hard press of circumstance has driven us to it. We have been forced by observation of actual conditions around us to a realization that an intelligent, modern American is not a Chinaman. He will, as a matter of duty, care for, indulge, and protect, but he will not, he cannot, reverence or respect or even like a parent who is not admirable or likable. But even in the face of this flinty fact we feel a weak-kneed tendency to fall back on the old argument : " After all we have done for the children we have a right to expect a decent return of natural affection and deference for our opinion." That apparently solid argument, buttressed as it is with the actuality of the long years of service we give to our children, with the entire prostration of our lives before theirs in the days of their infancy and early childhood, is shaken to its foundations by their simple reply that they did not ask to be born. That is nearly unanswerable. We can, if we choose, lay their appearance in the world, not to any conscious purpose on our part, but to a manifestation of that formidable " life force," that " élan vital," of which philosophers have been talking so much of late. And yet, shift the responsibility all we please, the practical fact remains that their existence is a result of our actions. Whether we willed it or not, the result is that we are responsible for them, not they for us. Another modern tendency throws its weight into the scale against us also. With the waning of the old belief that life, any sort of life, is the most in-estimable of boons, with the keen sense that life means suffering as well as joy, which is characteristic of a certain twilight aspect of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we are less unthinkingly sure of our right to call human beings into existence, unless we take very good care that existence is well worth while. The sleepless nights and anxious days, the heart sick watchings and vigils, the sacrifices of time and inclination, the million-times repeated acts of care and protection that are so vivid to our minds, appear to modern parents in the light of payments on a debt contracted by them when they brought their children into the world. We look back in unavailing envy upon the simpler complacence of older generations, who regarded the care given to children as a piling up of advance payments to be met by them in their maturity.

Even if we do not concede this in theory, as a matter of fact everybody knows that nothing is more futile than to attempt forcibly to extract deference for one's opinions as a return for benefits conferred. One can, by turning hard the screw of obligation, often squeeze out an appearance of deference, assumed conscientiously by the beneficiary as part payment for a debt, but in the long run the best opinions are the only ones which are respected, no matter whose they happen to be.

We have over parents in the past at least the melancholy advantage that this has been mercilessly made plain to us, that we have seen our own generation uncompromisingly repudiate this supposed obligation. As a girl I was struck, although most disagreeably, by hearing a youth of my acquaintance protest doggedly against a familiar confusion of thought on the subject. An appeal was made to him to defer on the choice of a profession to the desire of his mother, notorious in the family for her lack of good judgment. It was pointed out to him that after all the sacrifices his mother had made for him in his babyhood he should feel more respect for her opinion. He answered with an ugly bluntness : " You don't necessarily reverence the character of the man who has loaned you ten dollars, and you don't trust his taste in cigars unless his taste is good. You pay him back his ten dollars. I'll be good to Mother, of course. Why, nobody thinks more of Mother than I do, but blessed if I can see why her washing out my nursing-bottles when I was a kid makes her ideas on the law any more important." I remember that, though I was startled by the uncomely directness of this presentation of the subject, I felt in my heart an assent to its substance. That was when I still belonged to the younger generation.

Since any clarification of a problem is a help towards solving it, we parents ought to be thankful for the plain statement made to us by the modern world, that the feeling of children towards parents is bound by the same laws which govern other human relationships. We have no excuse for not acknowledging to ourselves that while the long and intensely intimate life-in-common of child with parent does often happily produce the great affection which can only be founded on intimate knowledge, it may also, if conditions are not favorable, produce only a mild brand of tepid usage, tinctured by much irritability and friction. We have no right to shut our eyes to the fact that a radical difference of temperament between parent and child, if it is not recognized, admitted, and adjusted as between any two other human beings, results in alienation and irascibility. Is there one of us who has not in his circle of acquaintances (he is fortunate if it is not somewhere within the circle of his blood-kin) an instance of mother and grown-up daughter who are mutually incompatible and who, if they attempt to live together under the ordinary conditions of mother and child, reduce each other to rebellious misery? The plain fact is that they are no longer " parent and child " at all. The relation of " child " to parent is, as its very words would show it, not a lifelong relation at all, but exists only while the child is a child in very truth. With us, as with the animals, the true " parental " relation ceases with the arrival at maturity of the young, and if we have not proved ourselves human beings by taking advantage of the transitory, physical relation to create another, more enduring moral tie, based on spiritual affinity, or, if that is not possible, on mutual respect, we need not be surprised if the relationship is often strained, and is never all that we might wish it. A grown-up son cannot in the nature of things be a " son " to his father in the sense of submitting his will, his judgment, or his responsibility for his own acts to his parent. They are two adult members of the same race who should be closer and dearer to each other than to anyone else, because they have -behind them in common what they can never have in common with any other human being--long years spent together in the most intimate and searching of human relationships. But if those years have not really been lived together, or if the penetrating light of intimate knowledge has shown the parent to be unworthy of respect, then those two human beings have less chance for feeling a deep affection for each other than almost any other two. They have had their chance to learn to know and love each other, and have either let it slip or have found it a vain attempt.

If I were writing for children and not for parents there would be much to say on the other side. In fact, every parent can bear witness that having children of his own floods his imagination with new light as to his relations with his own parents. Viewed from the new angle, there appear many new possibilities for a more generous spontaneity and ingenuity of effort to unite with the older generation, for a more thoroughgoing search for reason-able points of contact with one's elders, a more richly varied and imaginative view of the unity of the family. Ah, yes, now that I am a parent I have a fine new line of notions as to what children should be to their fathers and mothers. But precisely because of the instinctive rallying of parental ideas about this point, it is wholesome and tonic for parents to recall the very real limitations of their position. Those limitations are extreme. Nothing is more evident than that it is idle to call upon the spirit of mere obligation to produce anything more than its usual rather dreary results or more or less material repayment. This is not because the obligation will not be felt by our children. In most cases they will strive anxiously and conscientiously to discharge it. It is because the only coin in their possession will be more or less material. The finer, impalpable values of the spirit are beyond their powers to control, beyond anyone's power to control.

No matter what we are, our grown-up children, if they are what is known as good children, will have an earnest desire to " be good to us," they will cultivate to its utmost extent their affection for us, they will be (according to their temperaments) more or less tolerantly lenient towards our failings (well known to them by that time), they will, blunted by long association, excuse faults in us which they would hotly resent in others because " that's always been Mother's way,' and almost certainly when we become really old and infirm they will yield to the traditional pleasure of being the stronger and wiser, and cherish us with the same protecting care we showed to them in their babyhood. A survey of the different generations of the families we any of us know gives reasonable proof that this much will be ours if we merely refrain from any too outrageous aggression or exactions. But this prospect is poor comfort for those who have a desire for a deep, en-during, intimate, and far-reaching relationship as a result of the sacrifices and self-abnegations of parenthood. If it is true that our relations with our fellow-creatures make up all the riches of our lives, we have missed a great treasure if we extract from the parental relation nothing more than has been cited above. From what might have been a Golconda we have mined out a few much-alloyed nuggets which will save us from utter privation in our extreme old age, but which shall be of little comfort to us before that time. In most cases the parent is in the prime of his middle life when the children come to maturity. It will be long before he needs to have the relation reversed and be loved as a child is loved, while being really excluded from any genuine share in the life and thought of the family. What relations of any real depth, sweetness, or intimacy may he have with his grown-up children during the score or more years when they are neither one of them a child, but both adults? That is the question which haunts modern parents. What we want from the children is something beyond their power to produce by a conscious effort. They cannot, simply by taking thought, have genuinely common interests with us (if our interests and ideals are really opposed) any more than they can by taking thought add cubits to their stature.

The difficulty is just the old, old one that the emotions cannot be summoned or dismissed at will. In fact, so little are they voluntary that a direct demand for them, made on the ground of duty, usually has the effect of nipping off like a frost whatever buds of promise were in the heart. It is true that affection springs up in response to love, but only if the love is not self-seeking and does not demand affection in return. The strangely constructed human heart is notoriously prone to answer the stand and deliver summons of " I love you, therefore it is your duty to love me " by á precipitate retreat from anything approaching affection. And parents are not exempt from this law.

It seems clear, therefore, that not only is it un-. gracious and dangerous to demand as a right the affection and respect of grown-up children, but that any attempt to force affection and genuine respect as a return for service must defeat its own purpose.

Observation of life about us makes clear another renunciation which is forced upon us, whether we will or not, and which we would do well to accept graciously rather than struggle against sourly. We must abandon being the central figures in our children's lives. If we fight against this fate we run the risk of being practically forbidden any place at all in their lives. If we try to retain too much we run the risk of getting nothing. " Whosoever shall lose his life shall find it." For whom was that written, if not for parents? Unless they renounce voluntarily the old usurer's claim on the younger generation, they shall never receive any of the pure gold of their affection and trust.

But there is an old Adam in our hearts who must be laid low before we can bring ourselves to contemplate calmly giving up a relationship so precious, even in order to be able to attain another, which is not only precious, but immortal; and no old Adam is ever slain without battles and much pain. I felt my own rebellious heart give an assenting throb of yearning when an old Countrywoman, looking down on my baby daughter, said to me with a fierce accent of exhortation : "Take comfort in her now while you can ! From the minute she's weaned she begins to travel off where you can't get at her." And it is true that the nursing mother with her baby at her breast is at the very apogee of her physical mother-hood. Her prestige declines from that moment. Every day after that time weakens the physical tie. The sick sinking of the heart which mingles with the pride of the first moment when the little creeping quadruped stands upright and steps off that is the old Adam to be slain. The brief burst of glory in the baby's early infancy when we are everything to him —God, Providence, Nature we must learn to give that up in willing sacrifices, repeated every day and almost every hour, and accept with no rebellion the plainer truth that we are but human beings with him, subject to the same laws, clad in the same muddy vesture of decay, soberly endeavoring to keep alive within us the same tiny spark of eternal life.

But if we accept the law, which, after all, we cannot resist, at least there is some gain in avoiding the friction inevitable in an attempt to live contrary to it. Furthermore, our very resignation may open our eyes to other compensations. If we admit wholeheartedly that we need never expect in later life the perfect unity of mother and baby, the truth may dawn on us that such a so-called perfection of unity was more apparent than real. It seemed unity be-cause for all practical purposes there was nobody in it but the mother. The baby's individuality did not clash with hers because he had as yet no individuality strong enough to assert itself. The moment he begins to grow into a real human being a hundred divergencies of taste, temperament, and convictions make that old relationship impossible. And yet, if we analyze with sufficient courage the cause for much of the friction between parent and child, we will see that it comes from the unwillingness of parents, even modern parents, to give up that ideal of unity. We would do well to read that scene from the " Pretenders," where Ibsen makes King SkuIe ask the prophetic seer, Jatgeir the Scald, to be a son to him, and cries out: " I must have someone by me who sinks his own will utterly in mine, who believes in me unflinchingly, who will cling close to me in good hap and ill, who lives only to shed light and warmth over my life, and must die if I fall." Jatgeir answers briefly : " Buy yourself a dog, my lord."

We think we are so modern that none of this medievalism still tinges our attitude towards the children. We point (not without exasperation) to the innumerable details of material life in which the new ideas about freedom for the growth of personality have altered the tone of family life, the exuberance and unchecked noise of the younger children, the latch-keys owned by our older boys and girls, the insistence of the younger generation on wearing whatever hideous styles they choose, and on dancing steps quite different from those by which we shocked our elders, the light-minded way in which they choose whatever profession they please without sanction from us. We point back to a highly imaginary portrait of youth three generations ago, with down dropped eyes of meekness and mouth up primmed to ask permission to breathe, and we cry out to our consciences : " Look at the enormous freedom we have given the children ! What more can they expect of us? " And when we have said that we breathe more freely, having managed to confuse the whole point at issue by a plausible, inaccurate phrase. For it is not we parents in general who have given the children this enormous increase of freedom. Every step of that liberty has been forced by changing public opinion out of a groaning, unwilling, and terribly alarmed family organization. Each generation of parents has exacted less subordination of one personality to another merely because they were not able to exact more, and each generation has been firmly convinced that the world was coming to an end because it was impossible to keep up the discipline of the former age. (And be it said in parentheses each generation has seen blessedly less of that terrible rancor between father and son, which furnishes such a well-worn, convenient set of motives for the plots of the older novel-writers:) But for all this change in relation, taking place, in fact, under our noses, we still as a class shut our minds in theory to the forces underlying it ; and we still suffer in most cases the most miserably hurt feelings to note how from out the dimpled, curly-headed toddlers, whose fat hands clutch so hard about our guiding fingers, there emerge gradually a number of greatly differing individualities, entirely separate from ours, who are grown-up human beings, and nobody's children, not even ours.

Everyone has known and many of us have experienced the precious proofs that a beautiful relationship can exist between grown-up " child " and parent ; but nobody, not even the greatest lover of illusion, can claim that if that relation is wholesome and natural, and does not interfere with the vigor of the younger person, it can be based on anything remotely approximating the relation of a child to an adult. We go on calling it the " filial " relationship and thereby confusing it with quite another sort of " filial relationship," which is dependent on the in-equality in actual knowledge and strength of the two individualities involved ; and we insist upon considering it as identical with the connection which began it, quite as the besotted Sir John Cutler darned his stockings with worsted until from silken they had become woolen, although he insisted that they were the same pair. This comparison, upon second thought, is inaccurate, is gloriously inaccurate, for what the congenial and devoted grown-up child and parent have done is to keep mending the inevitable breaks in their physical relationship with the pure silken thread of a growing spiritual affinity until, without realizing it, they have an entire new relationship made of vastly finer and more lasting stuff than that out of which their first was fashioned. And that shining goal, unconsciously reached in some cases by a chance happy combination of agreeing temperaments, is the one which gleams before our eyes as we look for the way out. What we may hope is that if we bend all our faculties to that end, as the relation of physical parent to physical child weak-ens and dies, the relation of spiritual parenthood may slowly emerge.