# Growing Up (Vorse)/Chapter 5

IT was things like this that made them reserve judgment about Jamie who was born not long after. By the time he was two and a half, Alice had become a humble parent. She had changed from her attitude of the beneficent providence in the home, to an observer. Instead of saying "Let there be Light!" in a grand way, or "Let there be Order!", or "Let there be Clean Faces!", she tried to understand the why of things. She began to understand that children aren't like plants. The same course of treatment doesn't get the same results.
You can divide parents into two classes—the humble and wistful ones, who like Tom and Alice wonder how much they can find out about their children; and those around whom still lingers the assumption of Divine Rights of Parents.
Some mothers, as soon as they come near their children, pounce on them and set about, as briskly as possible, making them good. Indeed, there are still a great many mothers who spend all their time making their children over into different kinds of persons from the sort they were born. This is hard on both of them, and the only thing that happens is that the child grows a shell to keep his mother out, and grows up inside it in peace, but not nearly as nice and big as if he hadn't any shell—shells are cramping things at best.
Not all parents do this, but there is hardly a parent living who does not greet his children with:
​"Good gracious, child, how dirty you are!" There are some babies who walk hesitatingly forth into the understanding of speech only to hear, "Oh, what dirty little hands!" It must be a disappointment if you have been eagerly listening and listening to find out what your mother meant by the words she spoke.
Indeed, if it were not for tooth brushes, soap, hair brushes, baths, and table manners, parents and children might often have a wonderful time getting to know each other; but these things stand between them until the children are as old as their mothers and fathers, and then generally it is too late. For when you've spent fifteen years, or twelve years anyway, hardly being able to get at your parents except over a rampart of tooth brushes, and shoe blacking, the doors of communication get rusted from disuse. I often wonder children don't turn on us with:
"Now, I don't want to hear you say 'tooth brush' to-day," or, "Any parent that speaks of hand-washing, or hair-brushing, or eating fast, has got to leave the table."
There are, however, a few mothers who are forever wondering what their children are really like. They wonder this so hard that they sometimes even stop talking about baths and going to bed so they can watch. These mothers are forever on the alert to catch some word or sign sent to them from the place where the children live. For the moment parents are out of the way, children's talk is different; their very voices, their words, their looks, all change.
Alice was always snooping on the edge of this place, straining her eyes to see what went on. At night when she tucked the children in she was especially watchful, hoping to surprise a confidence as it scuttled past her. She gathered up stray words they dropped and put them ​away carefully; and then she would spend afternoons trying to put together the words and all the things she had learned in a sort of pattern. If one learned enough about them she thought one might really begin to be a good mother.
She learned after a while that every child's mind is a wild, trackless place, with little trails wandering about it, down which thoughts can walk. But as thoughts make different kinds of tracks in different children's minds, learning to find your way about one will help you hardly at all with another. The only thing to do is to sit quiet and watch, as one would for shy wild things in the forest. Then, if you make no grown-up noise at all perhaps some day you will see a thought from The Other Side come out. You may even have the good fortune to see them come out singing and dancing like motes in the sun. Some un-grown-up mothers have even got to know by sight the mysterious playmates that come to children from The Other Side. For want of a better name this was what Alice called the place where children live their real lives.
Alice had a theory that each of the children had another personality. When she tucked them in at night she made shy little approaches toward The Other One. At night, indeed, when she sat close to the bed with her face in her hands and the light making a golden ring around her hair, any one who didn't know her well wouldn't have guessed her for a grown-up. She had the same calm, serious look in her eyes that children as young as Jamie have, and there is no look more disarming to the Other Ones than that; and nothing that sends them away quicker than a grown-up smile lurking in grown-up eyes.