Maternity No Longer A Position For Life

( Originally Published 1914 )

WHEN WE ARE GRANDMOTHERS

As nearly everyone has remarked, this business of being a mother is a queer one, and in many respects quite unlike any other, but the queerest part of it often escapes mention in all the talk about maternity. I mean the fact of the inevitable impermanence of the business; the fact that, breathlessly absorbing as it is while it lasts, a mother is sure to find herself dismissed from the job at the very time when, as it seems to her, she has just learned how best to carry it on ; the fact that overwhelmingly busy as she is for a time, she finds that in middle life, in the prime of her powers, she is banished to the dismal ranks of the army of the unemployed.

Fanciful writers compare us mothers sometimes to gardeners, tending, training, and sheltering young plants, first in the hot-house conditions necessary to babyhood, then little by little " hardening them off " as the gardener's phrase runs, till, sturdy bushes or stately trees in full maturity, they stand out under the open sky, taking the weather as it comes, bearing fruit and flowers of their own, living witnesses to the skill and patience of the gardener. That is all very well as a figure of speech; but suppose the gardener denied the privilege of beginning the next season with another crop of young plants, and condemned never again to exercise his profession. Would he not join the modern mother of a grown-up family in her painful bewilderment at Fate?

Or, in another literary comparison, authors, wishing to turn a pretty phrase, say that a mother is like the captain of a ship, struggling to steer a straight course through reefs and shoals and mighty deeps, and at last bringing the precious cargo through the tempests and languors of adolescence safely into the port of maturity. Again all very well, but suppose the captain forbidden to undertake another voyage, and condemned to languish idly in a windless port all the rest of his days. Would he not feel, in common with many a middleaged mother, a distressing emptiness in his life? I think his heart would fail him as he discharged his passengers, wished them Godspeed and wistfully watched them step off with self-confident strides into the far country of their own lives. I think he would succumb to the temptation the mother knows so well, to cry reproachfully after the retreating forms, " After all I have done for you, how can you leave me alone?" I think he would feel the same wild impulse which the mother of grown-up children feels swelling her heart, to run desperately after the much-loved young travelers and to try vainly with cumbering affection to go along with them on a journey which is none of hers.

Ah, happy gardener, who may turn and turn again to his work as long as his strength lasts and the seasons follow each other! Ah, thrice blessed captain, who as long as he has wit and courage may feel himself a necessary part of the work of the world ! Ah, mother sore-beset by the strange ending to the great adventure of maternity !

But we are told by wise men and philosophers that nothing can befall us which we have not brought upon ourselves. Let us consider, therefore, through what dullness of wit we mothers are responsible for this apparently unavoidable period of painful maladjustment. In the first place, we have been caught napping by changed economic conditions which have almost transformed our lives before we bestirred our-selves to recognize them. This is not one of the world-old problems of womankind. To a consider-able extent it is really something new under the sun. A hundred years ago it, did not press upon women of middle age as it does now. For one thing, mothers then had as a rule many more children than they have now those were the days when a woman could say, " Yes, all of my children have had the measles now except my four little girls." This made her much older when the nest was empty than are her great-grandchildren of to-day, older in years and much older than her years in physical wear and tear. Her life differed from ours in another more important feature. She was allowed, indeed in most cases was required, to begin over again with the new generation. Her numerous daughters were apt to marry very young, and finding themselves at an early age, with no maturity of character and no experience of life, suddenly immersed in the troubled waters of matrimony and maternity, they reached out eager hands for the strength and wisdom of their mothers. " Grandma's house " was rarely without at least one of the grandchildren sojourning in that hospitable haven while his own family weathered out some domestic storm. If none of the grandchildren were there, it was apt to be because grandma her-self had put on her bonnet and sallied forth in response to a cry of distress from some one of the various homes where she was " consulting expert."

It all sounds very simple and livable, and we may be pardoned for the sigh of regret with which we look back on those homely conditions, viewing them, as people always do the past, through the golden haze of sentimental retrospect. But we may not be pardoned if we attempt to persuade ourselves that those conditions still exist, and that we have a right to look forward to being that variety of grand-mother. The fact is nowadays that not only may we not hope to be that variety of grandmother, but that quite possibly we may not be grandmothers at all. Our daughters do not look forward to matrimony with the fixity of intention of our grandmothers. It may very easily happen that they will prefer some other form of service to the blessed old way of family life, so dear to us. In any case we will almost certainly not become grandmothers until after our children have had several years of independent life and have achieved a maturity of character and an experience of affairs which make them able and eager to cope themselves with their own domestic problems. The grandchildren will almost certainly not be so numerous that their mother can-not care for them, and they will no sooner be out of their babyhood than the modern, highly organized school system will snatch them not only out of grand-motherly, but even out of motherly arms.

The last resort of our grandmothers is also denied us, that of housekeeping as a profession. If we are honest with ourselves, we know that this is not nowadays an occupation sufficient to fill out the life of an active woman in her prime. There are no great operations of brewing, spinning, weaving, pork-curing, soap-making, and the like to give grandma the illusion that she is as busy as she once was. Like all her contemporaries she buys ready-made what used to be manufactured in the home. Any woman who is accustomed to run her house as an accompaniment to the care of children will find it sorry work to try to make it the sole occupation of her life.

Do you ask why it is necessary to set down all these well-known facts about modern domestic life? It is necessary because, although we know them perfectly well, we persist in living our lives in entire disregard of them. A young mother, struggling with a five-year-old and a two-year-old, and another one expected, finds it impossible to believe that the children, her children, will grow up and leave her. Indeed, she seems to herself to have no time for so idle a thing as speculation about her own future, so jealously do the children demand every ounce of her care and thought. But, no matter how distracting the hurly-burly of the present, she blames herself if she does not provide her little ones with food and physical surroundings which will make their maturity happy and vigorous. And yet she is preparing for that same maturity of theirs the saddest. of shadows a conscientious human being can know, the sight of a human life which has been atrophied and withered that they might live.

If now, when the children are small, we are mothers and nothing else, we are making ourselves into narrow, stiff-jointed personalities which will paralyze their young energies just when they are about to enter upon the cares and burdens of their own lives. We may abstain from openly reproaching them for the crime of growing up, but if we do not take care now, while it is yet time, we shall come to be for our children nothing but the listless and depressing symbol of that reproach. How many families of grown-up children are there where the never-solved question is, " What shall we do with mother to make her happy?" And how often in family councils does one hear, " But mother must not be left alone ! "

Just what does this last familiar apothegm mean? We would regard as criminally foolish any woman who so tied up and neglected a part of her body as to make herself into an invalid and a care on her family ; but we regard with sentimental sympathy the woman who, from a mistaken sense of duty, ties up and neglects whole sections of her mind and heart, so that she is a moral invalid and dependent on her children for that coddling of her personality without which it is not possible for her to find life endurable.

With the whole world to live in, with every interest of mind, hand, and heart open to her, " mother " has narrowed her interests so that she can be nothing but contagiously dreary and low-spirited unless one of the " children " (now men and women like her-self) puts himself out to live the lie of being still dependent on maternal care. Or, if this is not possible, "mother " droops and pines, complains that she is no longer " necessary " to anyone, and casts a blight of cheerlessness upon the most remote of her children.

We all have seen this situation many times; and it is a curious commentary on human nature that none of us in our heart believes that we shall ever find its hard problems pressing upon us. We know well enough that in all probability we shall be only a little over fifty when the youngest of the children is practically grown up and straining like a young eagle to be free even from the loving bonds of our protecting affection. We know that the twenty years of life which will remain to us after that ought to be as valiant and vigorous and useful years as any in our lives. And finally we know perfectly well that the children will not be children during that time. Oh, yes, we know it. But we don't believe it.

And right there is the sore spot on which the wise man would put his finger as the source of all the trouble. We ought to admit and face the fact, hard as it may seem, that whatever it may have been in other periods in history, at the present day maternity is not the occupation of a lifetime. It does not, as modern existence is organized, last long enough to fill adequately the entire length of a vigorous woman's existence. " But what hard conditions are these!" do we cry. " We are asked to give up twenty-five or thirty years of our lives to an occupation eminently absorbing and confining, and yet to emerge from it in middle life still flexible enough to turn to another method of existence." There is no denying that it is hard. But the reward is great beyond price. And is anything easy that is worth doing? Furthermore, we are to blame if we are taken by surprise, and unprepared. We knew well enough, when we became mothers, that children insist upon growing up, and that when they are adult, it is better for them to run their own lives.

So let us take counsel together, now while the children are still tugging at our skirts and filling our arms, what we shall be when they abandon us. How can we keep, throughout the years of the distractingly absorbing demands of little children, enough of our own individuality for us to live with, when they are paddling their own canoes in waters strange to us?

It must be frankly admitted that for us, taken off our guard so to speak by this dilemma, there can be no entirely satisfactory solution of the difficulty. We must resign ourselves to expedients that are in the nature of things temporary and make-shift, because we cannot go back to the beginning and start over again. Those mothers who chance to be very competent and ingenious and physically strong and mentally alert may be able to supply adequately all the conflicting demands made upon a modern mother, at all the various stages of her life. But most of us, none too well equipped by nature or training for success, must be content with striking some sort of compromise which will keep us from failing too ignominiously. That is all we can do with our lives.

The sort of compromise made by any mother of the present generation must depend, of course, upon her individual temperament and capacities; but there is one expedient which should be open to all of us alike, the simple expedient of bearing in mind that while maternity is a job from which one is certain to be dismissed, matrimony is a position for life. The essential thing is to clasp John's hand so tightly over the little heads which crowd between you that when, with miraculous suddenness, they are no longer little nor between you, their father's hand is still in yours. It is not only physical distance which separates. It may very easily chance that a man and a woman who began their adult life together have, during the teeming years of rearing a family, entirely lost touch with each other, although they may have slept under the same roof every night of those years. No platitude is more threadbare with repetition than that the centrifugal tendency of a man's Iife and the centripetal tendency of a woman's are apt to be intensified during the children's early years. And so we see the old familiar situation when the children are gone, the mother is left with the habit of seeing nothing but the home, now empty, and the father with the habit of looking only for a large measure of success, now no longer so essential as when, an anxious young father, he began concentrating on business to provide for his brood.

So this is the first way out of our wilderness, the realization that the children go, but their father remains ; the effort to continue on more than mere speaking terms with him ; the attempt to live life with him rather even than for him. This not only means the exorcising of the dread specter of loneliness, this not only means the comfort and solace of a loyal figure beside yours as you say good-bye to the children vanishing into adults, but it is the last and best service you can render them. After all is said and done, the sum total of the influence of the parents on the children's lives tallies exactly with the degree of valiance and sweetness and resourcefulness with which the parents have met the years and gone along with life. In the fever and ferment of their own first meeting of adult years, we can do little directly for them. They must live their own lives. But because to live one's own life is at many moments a very formidable and daunting undertaking, their anxious and troubled young hearts are lightened and calmed by any proofs that the adventure of living may be a fortunate one. There is no proof which can so poignantly go home to them as their own intimate knowledge of peace, harmony, and good-will between their parents.

But it is no fairer to a husband to make him the sole occupation of one's life than to do the same misguided thing for children. One ought not to be wife only, any more than mother only. To be either of these things with any success presupposes being a person to begin with, and being a person presupposes having tastes, interests, judgments, and occupations of one's own. Let a woman, while she is still young, search her heart to know what would have been her keenest interest if she had not become a mother; and then let her hold fast to that interest through all the busy rush of rearing a family, let her hold fast to it in the fact of other demands, even in the fact of ridicule and laughter, yes, even though that interest be only a liking for tatting. Any-thing is better than having no personality at all. Whether her tastes turn to gardening, or to study, to teaching, or to preserving fruit, to sewing, painting pictures, or to social service, let her keep her little flame alive.

The mother of grown-up children finds herself in exactly the position, notoriously perilous, of the businessman who has retired from active life while still vigorous. Let her look at the fortunes of that individual, which, like her own, vary according to the means taken to meet the new conditions of life. Some fall into a flabby listless inaction, others rise to greater heights of purposeful energy than they have ever known. Some fret themselves into nervous prostration, others discover in themselves unsuspected mines of interest and capacity which lead to happy years of usefulness. It all depends upon the factor which means happiness or misery to all of us at all times of our lives. If there is something to do worth doing, we will be happy. If not we will be miserable. In the life of the average American woman of to-day, coming from a fairly prosperous family, there are two danger-points. The first is in her girlhood, when her formal education is finished, and she faces life with all the full flowing vigor of her youth turned back upon itself by the lack of real work to do. For most of us this period of uneasiness is ended by our plunge into the absorbing and exalting task of bringing up a family. But that does not last out our lifetime. And in middle age we face a second time the problem which oppressed our youth, how to find something worth doing which we are able to do. There is nothing but this to the problem of the mother with grown up children. But this is enough !

Like the retired business-man, we are in a much harder position than those people whose work is continuous, and who at fifty or fifty-five are putting their mature energy and staying power into work which has occupied them since youth. We must not only do our new work, but find it, and it is hard to find things at fifty or fifty-five. Of course, there-fore, what we ought to do is to begin to find it long before we are fifty, so that when the inevitable comes we may slide smoothly into our new element like a boat launched head-on, and not splash into it like a man tossed overboard. And although, coming late to our work, we are at a disadvantage compared to those who have been steadily devoting themselves to it, our very freshness to the subject we choose has some advantage in it. We have more experience of life than specialists can have, we have come closer to humanity and to reality in many ways than they ever can. Almost all business-men with active minds find themselves increasingly preoccupied with some aspects of modern society which they long to look into at their leisure. One business-man of my acquaintance has for his goal a searching inquiry into the subject of taxation. He has been so struck in the course of his business by the inconsistencies and barbarities of the present system of taxation that he can hardly wait for the day to come when he may try to make some sense out of it. Will anyone say that, untrained in theoretical political economy though he may be, he will not bring to his investigation as valuable qualifications for the work as many a college professor, who has read all the books ever written on the subject. He will have, to offset the professor's technical knowledge, his grasp on actual business conditions as they are, his observations on the real working of taxation as it exists, his hardly bought experience in forcing things to come to pass somehow in a very imperfect world, instead of theorizing about how they ought to work.

Another old friend of mine, now almost ready to retire from active work, has been all his life a highly successful corporation lawyer ; and his dream is to devote himself to a study of how words may be made accurately to express thought ! All during his career he has been impressed by the fact that language is the master not the servant of the thoughts of most men, and that it warps and perverts and twists most ideas instead of expressing them lucidly. He will not know as much as a professor of English rhetoric about the traditional technic of language-study, but what a freshness of viewpoint will be his! And what fervor in his chosen undertaking. For him it is a vital matter, which touches real life in a vital way.

Nowadays, with increasing frequency, many middle-aged matrons are making themselves more useful to the world than ever before by applying to various forms of social uplift the experience, the poise, the knowledge of life which they have acquired in the years of their mothering. And they are not the listless or lonely ones ! Even though many of their contemporaries have not their taste or capacity for adventuring into public life, the valiant spirit of their beneficent lives is worth imitating.

It is usually taken for granted that the close attention given to home economics and the training of children during twenty or thirty years will cause most matrons to turn naturally to some phase of similar activity in the community, "neighborhood work" or college settlement, or crusades for pure milk, or against child-labor. And it is true that a majority find their interests along these lines. But it not infrequently happens that after twenty or thirty years of enforced attention to the needs of children and the cares of a home a woman with no especial native passion for those occupations turns to something else entirely. She finds that her flagging interest in life, her decreasing zest for occupying herself, a certain flaccidity of mental attitude which she usually thinks is the inevitable concomitant of advancing 'years may yield entirely at the touch of a totally new. interest. A certain grand-mother of my acquaintance astonished all her family by "going in for beetles " as her grandchildren put it, and, from a Stygian ignorance of entomology, has developed into an alert and keen eyed observer and investigator who was able, more than anyone else in the community, to give useful information to experts trying to stamp out an insect pest. A conventional-minded person once asked her how she ever happened to begin the study of insects and was a little shocked by her whimsical answer, " Well, I wanted a real rest from ` mothering' and bugs seemed to. need it less than anything else." Without going so far, a good many middle-aged women if they were honest would admit that they have always had cravings for some phase or other of life, or study, or activity which was not connected with the traditional occupations of home-keeping women. I do not intend here the list is too well known to cite the numerous and honorable examples of people who have acquired new accomplishments and made themselves useful in new ways after middle life.

" It is too late ! Ah, nothing is too late
Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate.
Cato learned Greek at eighty; Sophocles
Wrote his grand Oedipus, and Simonides
Bore off the prize of verse from his compeers,
When each had numbered more than fourscore years."

To offset the daunting quality of these great examples, rather too high for ordinary mortals to try to imitate, let me cite a very homely example in my own circle. An elderly woman of plain antecedents, Ieft in the familiar old situation of loneliness after her children had grown up and married, had apparently not one weapon with which to fight off dry-rot. With the usual misguided devotion of grown-up sons and daughters, her children besought her to " take it easy " while they looked out for her.

Mother has worked so hard all her life, it's time she should have an easy time." Her instinctive good sense came to her rescue in front of this insidious temptation and she turned resolutely away from this facile " descensus " into the Avernus of sloth, idle misery, and melancholy, and cast about for a real interest of her own. Her intense absorption in a very difficult domestic life had left her with but the faint memory of one other interest. Before her marriage she had intended to learn how to do " spatter-work " and never since had she had time enough to go on. Undeterred by good-natured shouts of laughter that anyone in this day and age should go back to so antiquated a fancy as " spatter-work," the very name of which was unfamiliar to her grandchildren, she looked up old directions, and began. The results were about what might have been expected at first ! But she did not stop. She kept on. And after a time she began to apply the old principle in modern designs to modern fabrics and then produced articles which made people stop and inquire if that were a new form of Japanese decoration. The elderly artist, after years of enforced concentration on the useful, felt the most vivid delight in struggling to produce something ornamental. She threw all of her energy, staying power, and ingenuity, acquired in "managing" a family, into the work, experimented with dyes, branched out into other similar methods of decoration, took lessons from a Japanese student was undismayed by failure, and to make a long story short is now conducting a sort of " home factory " which has a limited output of very exclusive fabrics and designs, and in which a young lady grand daughter is only too glad to co-operate with her grandmother. " Grandma " in that family is by no means the traditional unconsidered old party who has to be helped across the street because she is afraid of the automobiles.

Somewhere between Longfellow's shining roll of illustrious old and the woman who had nothing but a dimly recollected interest in " spatter-work " there ought to be a place for every one of us. In any case, whatever gifts we may cultivate, let us cultivate most of all any capacity we may have simply to enjoy life, which is perhaps the greatest gift of all.