# The Adopted Mother

Extracted from The Century Magazine, vol 82, 1922, pp. 654–668. Almost all the right-hand pages had problems with text in the left edges missing. These were sourced from a matching file in Hathitrust.
An autobiographical extract on how Honoré Willsie lost a brother and gained three (adopted )children.
The Adopted Mother
By Honoré Willsie
Years and years ago, when I was about eight years old, I came into the dining-room on a wet November morning and found that my mother was not at the breakfast-table. Mrs. Schaeffer, the neighborhood nurse, was there instead. She was a very brisk person, as I remember, and she answered the quick fall of my heart before my lips framed the question.
"I have a present for you, my dear. The doctor brought it in the night. Your mother is staying in bed to take care of it. Look!"
There was a chair drawn close to the base-burner. In the chair was a clothes-basket. Mrs. Schaeffer stooped over the basket and pulled down a bit of blanket. A baby! A tiny red-faced baby!
Underneath a bashful, tomboyish exterior I was an extremely emotional child. I had lived much in my eight years in the way of tensity of feeling. Yet after all these years I still recall that the profound emotion that shook me then dwarfed all the sensations that I had experienced before.
It was not at all the feeling that all little girls have on seeing a new baby. It was not the feeling that I myself had had and still do have when some fortunate woman allows me to hold one of those heavenly little bundles. This was different.
In the first place, I held in complete scorn the drool about the present and the doctor. I was eight years old and I had been in public school for a year. I knew where babies hailed from. I knew their cost. Nobody knew that I knew; that is, none but my playmates. My mother had told me to come to her when I was twelve and she would tell me the true story of the stork. I fully intended to come to her then. But, in the meantime, knowing that the baby was coming and full of erroneous information, I had suffered torments of apprehension.
I adored my mother. She was a brilliant and beautiful woman whose affection for her children reached heights of passionate devotion possible only to the highly mental type. My brother, my sister, and I were bound to her by ties so vital that any thought of her suffering was misery to us. I had been very sure that she would die. And now it was all over; she was doing well, and this was her baby. Our baby. Life, so strange and in many ways so frightening, once more had twisted me with fear and vicarious pain and then, as often before, had relented and left me with something beautiful. I felt this clearly. The baby was to me what the rainbow must have been to the lonely and bewildered voyagers stranded on Mount Ararat.
She was more than that. She was the mystery and beauty of life.
I knew much more about grown-up troubles than my elders dreamed I did. I worried over family matters that they did not dream I knew. I was finding life full of incomprehensible responsibilities. I wanted to help so much and didn't know how to make them understand that I was quite capable of understanding. And in the midst of all the uneasiness and bewilderment this beautiful thing had happened. How marvelous! How unbelievably good! What happiness!
My big brother and my younger sister stood beside the basket with me.
"She shall be my baby!" announced my brother. "Let me hold her."
I looked at Mrs. Schaeffer in an agony of apprehension. She smiled and lifted the orris-scented bundle.
"A man can't have a baby," she said with finality. "This shall be sister's baby." She laid the bundle in my arms.
And she was my baby. Mother was an invalid for several years. There was no money for a nurse. She was my little child. She was with me every moment when I was not at school. I bathed her, fed her, tended her, and loved her for three years.
Three years! What a tiny lifetime! Too short to have meant much of itself, but what a long, long life in the profundity of its influence on me!
She died of diphtheria after an illness of a single day.
We had thought it only a heavy cold, and we children had not been isolated. I was standing beside her when the doctor shook his head at my mother and laid down the feeble little hand. It was January. I went out into the back yard and knelt in the snow by the woodpile.
"Listen, God," I said threateningly, "I'm going to pray to you to save her. If you don't save her, I'll never pray to you again. I'll not even believe you are God."
I did pray, and He did not heed, and I returned from her funeral a complete little atheist and with a more or less serious attack of diphtheria.
Some fool—many fools, have said with a sigh and a smile that it's a blessing children forget their griefs. Listen! A child over ten forgets nothing in the way of actual grief. The wound heals, of course, but the memory scar is permanent.
I have no regrets now for that tragedy of my childhood, though it took me many years to give up regretting. I do not think it a good or gracious thing for a human being to come through childhood without having looked upon some of the gaunt realities of life. Such glimpses tear away illusions while the mind is still plastic enough to reform to the actual, give a capacity for evaluating joy impossible to the untried child, give maturity a poise that life's worst blows can only temporarily disturb.
The only marked outward result of this childish experience was that for long years I kept away from little new babies despite an inveterate and in curable love for the little children of the neighborhood which was so marked that their mothers trusted them to me when they would not trust them to their own older daughters. Inwardly I remained an atheist, though they sent me to church with meticulous regularity. How could they know that I had the same contempt for their stories of the Eternal Goodness that I had had for the tales of the stork? Me! I had seen a new-born babe and I had tested their God, whose very foundations they said was love for His children. There was no fooling me!
I grew into my teens, rather wary about the building of air-castles, but unshakable in one determination. I was going to have a family of five children after I had finished college and married a man. My mother was very firm about my having a profession. And she was canny. She said that having a profession was a woman's insurance against poverty for her children. She was quite right. I told her she was quite right. None the less, I proposed to have a profession that would in no way interfere with the having and training of five youngsters. It was a matter of serious annoyance to me that my mother felt that my only talent lay in the direction of fiction-writing. I wanted to write, but by the time I had reached college I realized that the writing profession was monstrously exacting and might interfere with maternal efficiency. Nevertheless, with all the extreme valor of ignorance, after I had finished school, I gathered my skirts together and leaped into the whirlpool of the writing game.
Funny old whirlpool. Lots of us paddling madly about in it. All of us half baked. Most of us mistaking taste for talent, the patter for the solid structure. But all that is another story. What counts here is that after a due amount of sweating blood I reached the point where my writing made me self-supporting, and that I married, and that I found my life extraordinarily full of interesting things.
Interesting—yes, that's the word. Days, months, and years filled with hard work in which I was vitally interested. Vitally? No, that's not the word. Interested with my brain, not with the inner me. I realized this when a little son was born to my sister. Moved to forgotten depths when once more a tiny orris-scented bundle was placed in my arms, I lived again that grief of my little girlhood. And with a sudden fierce resolve that that little life should not have been lived in vain, that that pain should not be permanently barren, I turned to paper and pencil and sought to make a record in fiction of those short three years of life.
But I could not do it. The sorrow was still too profound. It had become an inalienable part of my inner structure. I could not segregate it. I could not form it into something beautiful that I might share with the world. After all, it seemed in the very fullness of truth as if that little existence had returned to the nothingness from which it had set out.
I can recall the very moment at which this conviction came to me. I had returned from two years in the desert country and was in a hotel in New York. From my window I could look across a paved yard into the windows of a rooming-house—a rooming-house occupied by women of careless reputation. As I sat at my desk I saw two of these women enter into a violent discussion, which ended in their ejecting each other's clothing from the window, into the paved yard. I was amused for a moment, then a sense of their vulgarity, and of that sordid side of New York for which they stood, swept over me, and I longed to be in the loneliness of the desert again. One can endure the tragedies of life with more equanimity than its sordidness.
The loneliness of the desert—could anything so filled with beauty as the desert be lonely? Was not sordid New York far lonelier? Was I not really finding loneliness within myself? What, after all, except a keen interest in things of the eye and mind had the years brought me?
I re-read the meaningless words that I had so painfully wrought, and pitched the manuscript into the wastepaper basket. Then I closed my eyes and marshaled the years before me. Things of the mind and eye. Adventure, action, work, but not the vital, the racial thing that makes for content. I was lonely for a fundamentally sound reason. I had wandered from my destiny. Nothing to show for those three short years woven of laughter and love, but atheism and the futility of my art to express what was real within me.
It must not be so. Since fate had denied me those dream children of my teens, I would discover another way. Somewhere I would find a child that would carry on the little life that so long since had slipped over the border.
It was my great idea. I kept it within myself for a long time. Then I broached it to the boss.
He was sane, scientific, and kind, but obdurate. One's own children were well enough. There was a mixture of fate and duty about one's own. But failing these, why go abroad looking for trouble? Of course the maternal instinct was a perfectly normal factor. The right kind of a woman always had it. But why mar the perfect calm of a childless life by dragging into it somebody else's youngster? Absurd, chimerical.
Chimerical. So it was. I admitted it. All the ordinary arguments were on the boss's side. My proposal conjured up a horrid picture of discomfort, of responsibility, and of risk. I saw this quite clearly. But, still, I reiterated, I wanted to adopt a child.
The boss admitted grimly that this was obviously true. But as yet, he also insisted, I had given no sound reason for making the sacrifice.
§ 2
I cast about in my mind. It was patent, even to me, that an ancient bereavement, however permanent and far-reaching in its effect, was not a sound reason for involving a man in this particular kind of discomfort and responsibility. And, anyhow, I had just proved to myself that I had no words for expressing the wordless. But there must be other reasons. I dived into the workaday part of my mind.
It was, I said, a question of one's philosophy, of the code on which was based one's plan of life. There had been a time when the church planned and inforced such a code. But most of us now, church-goers or not, were masters of our own line of conduct.
Among the tenets of my own code was the idea that you are obligated to put more into society than you took out of it, to leave life in some way a little richer than you found it. The theory of social evolution was based on this idea. Mental and spiritual progress of society could come only if enough of us recognized this obligation and fulfilled it. I had always believed, I said, that I had a peculiar gift in training children. If I could adopt a child I would be doing my best bit toward my obligation.
And on what, asked the boss, did I base my belief that I had talent for child training?
He had me there, of course. I did not realize then, as I do now, that my conviction was common to every woman who loves children. But I was silenced for the time being, and we let the matter rest. Outwardly, at least. But I had no rest within. For as the months rushed swiftly and more swiftly into the years, I realized that what I had thought to be a longing was really an urge too deep to control.
Why do we do things? Are our acts entirely controlled by race memory, by voluntary desire, by forgotten incident, by the nuances of suggestion? Or is our lot predestined, and does something higher than all these influences direct our ends, rough-hew them how we will?
I do not know. Rough-hew them how we will, I did not at all want to be the editor of a woman's magazine. I was over-persuaded to take the job. Once undertaken, however, it proved to be entirely absorbing, and I liked it. I liked particularly the vast amount of work done for babies, which was traditional with this particular magazine. Among other services demanded by the readers was that I give information as to the where and how of child adoption.
Now, strange as it may seem, I never had looked concretely into this matter. The reason was perfectly sound to me. Of what use was it to torture myself by focusing on some particular child until the boss would consent to our taking one? But here were other people without my complicated inhibitions. They must be informed fully and accurately. I undertook to do so.
My idea had been that when I was ready to take a child I would search through an orphanage until I found one I wanted. That is the old method, and most people still think it is the only method. It did not take me long to discover that I had been deeply and inexcusably ignorant.
The first orphanage to which I made a pilgrimage for information referred me to a child-placing agency in New York City. One of the workers of this agency took me in charge, and a most drastic educational process was begun on me.
I cannot here set down the details of that intensive course, but I must give you at least an outline of what I learned that you may understand its effect on me.
I learned that the handling of the dependent child by certain groups of people had become as nearly scientific as anything as intrinsically inexact as the handling of the child could be. Not that all child-placing agencies are now scientific in the placing of children or that orphan asylums have become Binetian models of perfection. Far from it.
But the Wasserman test and intelligence tests have come into practical use, and the psychiatrist has fought his way from the children's courts into a permanent place as consultant for those who endeavor to study children intelligently. I discovered that in numerous instances there were child-placing organizations which took full advantage of these advances in science, that these organizations worked with a degree of understanding in finding homes for children that was almost unbelievable. I found that while numerous orphanages and agencies were conducted on the old lines of stupidity and sentimentality, still there were institutions to which one could turn with confidence that all that science could do for the right handling of a child's body, mind, and soul was being done.
The old way! The worker in the organization took pains to show me that the old way had not been pretty. I learned how black from their angle is the page of history that tells the story of the progress of the dependent child up from slavery. Quite so! Slavery. Charles Dickens told a part of it in his "Oliver Twist" and "Nicholas Nickleby," but only the kindlier part.
At the very time that philanthropists were stirring the sensibilities of England with tales of the brutalities of the American slave systems, they were ignoring the fact that English mill-owners were trafficking in child labor. These mill-owners were supplied regularly with pauper children by overseers of the poor. It was often customary for the parish authorities to get rid of imbeciles by supplying one idiot with every group of twenty sane children. All of these children were doomed to slavery from the moment they entered the factory door. Nominally, they were apprentices. Actually, they were slaves who got no wages; whom it was not necessary to feed or clothe decently because their places could be easily filled.
Their hours of labor were limited only by total collapse. There was no segregation of sexes. Disease, misery, vice, grew as in a hotbed. Many died and were buried secretly lest the uncanny number of little graves at tract public notice. The philanthropists took no heed until the factories bred a malignant fever that spread over the people at large.
America has no greatly better boast to make of her earlier treatment of the pauper child. It has been a long, bloody climb for little, unguided feet from apprentice days to the present time, from the little factory slaves of England to our own sweatshops and cotton-mills, from the workhouse of Oliver Twist to the baby-farms of Chicago, from old Fagin to the New England housewife who adopts a girl to make a household drudge of her or the farmer who takes a boy to become the perpetual hired man. A long and bloody climb!
But the new era has arrived. We have with us to-day the social worker who uses the intelligence and Wasserman tests directly on the child and indirectly but none the less thoroughly on the would-be parents. We have gradually dawning on the public the idea that the pauper child is also a human child, that bad habits are not heritable.
I blush to admit that most of these facts about the handling of the dependent child were new to me. Once launched, however, on the trail of this most poignant type of news, I was unwearied in my pursuit of it. I was shown the ignorant and the intelligent placing of children. I learned that nothing is so terrible as ignorant sentimentality may be, nothing so tender as the ruthlessly scientific system is. Day after day I saw unsung miracles wrought, unsung tragedy averted, ceaseless endeavor rising above seemingly hopeless failure.
I saw the lovely four-year-old whom everybody wanted to adopt withheld until a would-be mother could be found who would face unflinchingly the fact that the charming little girl's Wasserman test had been positive—a mother thoroughly equipped to handle the terrible problem of venereal taint. In the earlier days the taint would not have been detected until at fourteen or fifteen the child broke down physically or mentally.
I saw the bad boy of eight whom nobody wanted put again and again under the intelligence tests by a psychiatrist who finally discovered his childish complex and began the struggle for his cure, which was wrought after many months of patient effort by the organization. He was then taken by people who before his treatment would not have given him a moment's consideration.
I saw the handsome little boy of five whom again everybody wished to adopt withheld because the intelligence test had found him defective. He must have no home save with people who would be willing to act as foster-parents to a subnormal child.
I saw frowsy, uncouth, foul-mouthed children of ignorant and disgusting parents tested and pronounced normal. I then watched these same workers systematically groom the small imps into pleasant-mannered youngsters purified of body and mind, and I saw them enthusiastically adopted by people who would on earlier contacts have drawn their garments aside.
The children that I saw! The little, poignant life histories that I read! The curious psychology of would-be parents that I observed! The infinite patience and persistence of the child-placing experts whom I watched!
I could not, of course, hope to understand more than the general methods used by the people who had given their lives to this highly specialized work, but what generalities I got had a far-reaching effect on my own purpose.
All that I learned I handed on to the boss.
Marriage is like any other difficult profession. One learns not to expect quick results. The boss never asked me to tell him the details of my search. What I did tell him was couched carefully in terms of work for my magazine. But my reports were full, and deliberately lost none of their poignancy in the telling. A man married to a female fiction writer has his own side of the story! Nevertheless, I gave the boss the tales as they happened. I could not hope to improve on the truth.
The real effect that I wanted to produce on him was that child adoption as handled by a scientific organization had reduced the gambling element to about fifty-fifty with the own-child hazard. You ordinarily know far less about the eugenic history of your husband's family than you do about the ancestry of the child you have adopted under proper conditions! I wanted the boss to get this, and I wanted him to feel that while he suspected that I was actuated by deeply sentimental reasons, I was actually going about the matter dispassionately, that I was learning with my mind and not with my heart A man wants his wife to be dear-seeing about everything but himself! And that, too, is biologically right.
Perhaps a year after my first contacts with the child-placing organizations I began to invite to our apartment youngsters who appealed to me as attractive. I always asked them for a Saturday afternoon when the boss normally would be at home. But almost invariably, on such Saturdays, the boss would leave as the child appeared.
But not every time. One afternoon as I was coming into the apartment with a little gray-eyed boy, the boss, hastening out, bumped into us. He gave the child a keen glance, muttered that he had business in Jersey, and rushed away. Half an hour later he returned and joined the little boy and me in the window-seat. The three of us played together all the afternoon, the boss never ceasing to regard the child with a keenly appraising eye.
After supper, when the little boy had been returned and the wreckage of the afternoon cleared away, the boss remarked that the child had a brain, a good brain. I nodded and said that his intelligence test had been high. But, commented the boss, he didn't look strong. No, he was not strong. He was just over an attack of bronchial pneumonia and needed special care. I was favored with an enigmatic glance, and the conversation languished.
One Sunday the boss said:
"What's that patter-phrase you've been using? Oh, I remember, case history. Is that child's case history satisfactory?"
"Exceptionally fine," I replied carelessly.
"But he looks delicate. Big enough perhaps, but bad color."
"As I told you, he's been very sick."
The boss favored me with a stare, lighted a cigarette, and went on with his Sunday paper.
On Monday he said:
"Well, you pseudo-scientists get me! There is a fine little child evidently ill,—he might get T. B. for lack of a good home,—and you cold-bloodedly piffling around about intelligence tests and case-histories. I'm going out and buy a child's bedroom set. You go get that child."
And thus the first battle was won.
But not the war. That was to continue.
Life is so. In one of Robert Louis Stevenson's poems there are some lines that to me are unforgetable.
"To go on forever and fail and go on again,
And be mauled to the earth and arise
And contend for the shade of a word and the thing not seen with the eyes.
To take punishment standing and, if not gaily, at least silently. To be unafraid to face facts and never, never to bluff yourself. To speak truth or be still. To give more than you take—these are the basic ideas that I 'm trying to give my little son.
§ 3
I paused here and looked out of the window. Young April. Just beyond the window the waters of Long Island Sound, blue beyond comprehension, lap-lapping against gray rock heaps. The rose pink of budding oaks, the smell of moist earth and salt tide—God, how curiously that odor moves one!—the scream of gulls, the song of robins. How for, how very far from that little mid-Western town and the basket before the base-burner—the basket that held the three most important years of my life! I fought with God for her life and I failed.
I want my little son to fail in many things. Failure will temper his metal as nothing else can—if he learns to meet failure gallantly. I want him to succeed with his talent if he develops one, but far more than this I want him to succeed as a human being.
Well, he came to us, quite as uneasy, quite as eager and excited, as we were, but with a far greater burden than ours resting on his tiny shoulders. For little as he was, he knew, with that pathetic too-early knowledge of the dependent child, that he must make good with us. Failure was terror unthinkable to him.
Heavens, how hard it all was! The high-strung, difficult child, the two grown-ups with their set, old-maidish ways, the little New York apartment. There is no underestimating the discomfort of the first six months. It was chaos. I almost went mad over my upset routine. I woke every morning with a sick sense of our overwhelming and unescapable responsibility. I discovered depths of irritability and bad temper within myself that I never before had sounded. The grasshopper became a burden, and desire failed. Yet never from that first morning, when, a small, naughty, clinging hand in mine, we came home together, have I regretted the undertaking.
It goes without saying that almost every one who knew us thought we were fools. Why, why, they insisted, take on a burden like that when you don't have to! Some comment, eh, on the having of own children? They pitied the boss. They considered me as a poor, well-meaning nut. Why, why, with a so-called art which, they said, some people at least liked, why jeopardize it by an act like this?
Good heavens! as if talent was so fragile a thing that a child riproaring about the house could destroy it! If my talent was of so frail an order, it was not art at all that I was cultivating, but sickly temperament, and the sooner I discovered it and changed my work, the better.
The happiest thing about life is that nothing lasts forever. How unendurable living would be if this were not so. Joys and griefs, laughter and tears, sunshine and shadow, change and counter-change, how wonderful, how intriguing it all is!
Imperceptibly, of course, we grew accustomed to one another's ways. The child gave in to our ideas and idiosyncrasies. We eased off here and tightened there, and finally, assured that nothing could take him from us, the child became normal. I, responsible as a mother must be for the details of training of a child's early years, changed too, changed more than anybody. Perhaps I, also, was merely becoming normal. At any rate, by the end of the first year, the apprehensive side of my feeling of responsibility had disappeared. My nerves had steadied. The home had again become well ordered and how much more a home I surely need not attempt to say. I had come to see that, after all, even in moments of deepest exasperation and exhaustion, the overwhelming sense of tenderness toward a child's helplessness never leaves one, that having seen what I have, the eyes of the brain never lose sight of that long, sad procession of little lonely feet moving up from slavery. And a dawning sense of having fulfilled one of one's obligations ushered in a sort of content that nothing else can bring.
Nor is that all. I have said that I have changed, and I have. It is not only that now I can forgive the unforgivable and refuse the pardon to pardonable, that my nerves are now polished steel, that my sense of humor has fed vastly and deliciously and waxed stronger. It is not only that I have become a member of a class that speaks the language of childhood, that can see life table-high with all its mysteries, incongruities, and joys, that my whole angle toward child training has shifted, but that there has come to me, just at what point I cannot say, a profound conviction that the little child who died so long ago has never died, can never die as long as my home shelters with the old devotion other children of another decade.
But I must get on a bit with the "what happened next" part of this story. The simplest, surest way that I know of to halve the difficulty of bringing up a child is to bring up two children. Any mother will tell you this. Children entertain and discipline one another in a way no grownup can.
I did not discontinue my interest in the general work of child-placing organizations after my own little son came home with me, and so one day, about two years after young Gray-Eyes arrived, I saw a tiny blue-eyed girl whom I instantly knew to be mine. Fortunate it was all round that she proved to be a little person of exceptional brilliancy and fineness, for the hand of fate was on me the moment I saw her, and I had to bring her home. She has explained to me since that the reason she didn't recognize me at once was because they had lost her so long in hospitals. I have accepted her apology.
The boss had by this time developed a certain quality of resignation that I have observed is common to most fathers. And, anyhow, answer me this: What man ever held out more than fifteen minutes against a tiny blue-eyed, yellow-haired female, with the beguiling manner inseparable from the perfect blond? Scientific? Businesslike? Hah! It was so easy for that baby girl that it was cruel.
Thus the circle was completed.
Don't let me put the closing of the circle in too casual a light, however. You must realize that in order to recognize my little daughter as instantly as I did, my child-placing expert must have grilled a fair amount of education into me. After you have studied the game some time, if you are a child-lover, you get a sort of feeling about children, a sort of antenna, that tells you things your tongue finds difficult to phrase. Just as,—pardon the analogy,—if you are a dog-fancier, you become expert in picking a good dog. When you guess that a child is thoroughbred, you are not mistaken as often as might be supposed.
As a matter of fact, I was not casual nor was I running any greater risk than the own mother who, poor soul, must take what is wished on her. There are certain fundamental questions which must enter into the forming of judgment about a dependent child. Here are a few of them.
Why is the child open to adoption? Was the physical stock of the family below par, so that there was no surviving relative of either parent to take the child? What were the family traits that brought about the dependence of the child? Were these traits the result of environment and external pressure or of inherent and heritable traits?
If the child is old enough to respond satisfactorily to the intelligence tests, have these tests continued over a long enough period to convince you that the child's mental type will fit fairly well into your family type? For example, a child not of the mental type, though normal, would be unhappy in a college professor's home, but might fit well in a laborer's family. The delicate, artistic type would not be a success in farm life. The out-of-door, husky type would not do in a musician's family. Have you looked the child's weaknesses and bad points in the face and have you firmly made up your mind that, having undertaken the burden, you never will seek to cast it off? Are you conversant with the child's eugenic history? Are the health tests satisfactory?
These were the questions which loomed most important to me in the judging of any dependent child. How many own children would pass such a test with flying colors?
So, behold me, equipped with my fatuous egotism as regards my fitness to be a wise mother, equipped also with many admonitions from the child-placing organizations, and with certain hard-and-fast rules from a children's physician and a psychiatrist, starting out on the fine adventure.
My theories on child training! Alas and alack! not one of them, not a theory of all my original theories, has worked out! Even those that still are academically correct have failed when put to the test against that most immutable and uncontrollable fact of human development, child nature. Not a single one, mind you!
There is the matter of whipping. I don't believe in whipping children. Neither does the psychiatrist who advised me to lift the fear of corporal punishment from my older child, at once and finally. I did so, firmly convinced that a child could be ruled by love alone.
The months slipped by. It was, after all, very difficult to rule a child who did not fear his parents. It was proper to make the punishment fit the crime. Gradually I found myself inventing all sorts of ingenious and complicated rules and punishments, immensely interesting to me and, as to my dismay I gradually discovered, to my children also. Punishments, ft seemed, were not always punishments, but stunts, endurance tests, sporting events. Still, I would not whip the children.
Every parent has one red rag. Mine is lying. Nothing angers me as does being told a lie by one of the children. Every parent has one pet illusion. Mine was that my little son would not lie. One day, a few months after my small daughter came home, I caught young Gray-Eyes in a whopper, a lie of premeditated cussedness. And he sprang it before some guests who were stopping with us over the week-end, a mother and her twelve-year-old son.
The mother was horrified. Her son, she said, never had lied to her, so she could give me no suggestions as to how to handle the case. I put the small criminal to bed on bread and water, and a little later held a conference with the twelve-year-old.
"What," I asked, "would you do to a boy that lied?"
"Well," he replied thoughtfully, "all kids do lie, of course. I used to lie and lie and get away with it, too. I got ashamed of it at last. Mother should have given me one or two good lickings, and I'd have quit sooner. But she doesn't believe in whipping. You bet us kids do. We lick the daylights out of one another."
I was thoughtful and confused. I became more watchful and I scotched many lies. The fear lies and the fairy-tales lies I commented on, but let go. The mean, tattling lies worried me, and I kept after them sternly with every kind of fitting punishment I could devise or read about. This was for perhaps a year. Then came a lie so extraordinarily ornery that I dared not experiment further, and I offered the child his choice between a complete confession and a whipping. He refused to contemplate either, insisting that he never lied. I whipped him severely. When it was over, he was crying bitterly.
"Why, oh, why," I begged of him, "did you force me to do this?"
Suddenly he threw his arms about me.
"I began to lie after I found out you didn't believe in whipping children," he sobbed. "It was a lie. I've told you lots of 'em. But I never thought you'd lick a fellow. I'll try to quit now."
And he has tried. He never told one of the mean lies again, and the fear lies are slowly, but surely, disappearing. Curiously enough, the whipping served, too, to increase the sense of companionship between us. I was no longer a mere mother. I was a strong-armed person, something like a fellow who recognizes the value of brute force in another fellow's training. I am now the recipient of many confidences about school fights, in particular why the battles are fought and what is the net effect on the loser.
We have had one other whipping for long-continued and increasing impudence. We are through with that, too.
Then there are rules. The boss and I both had a theory that it worked like this: You make a simple, sensible rule. You make the child thoroughly understand it. You command the child to obey it. Presto, the rule is enforced.
I takes me laugh now to think of it.
Take the matter of punctuality at meals. We are commuters now, and the small boy must leave for school when we leave for the train. Punctuality at breakfast is a prime necessity in our household. All this was explained over and over and in detail to the children. Rule: Rise with the rising-bell, wash, dress, leave your room in order, come to breakfast when the breakfast-bell rings.
At first the small girl was neatness and promptness itself. The small boy, seven years old when we became commuters, would not obey the rule. He read in bed. He read in the bathroom. He played marbles in his pajamas. He hung out the window talking to the milkman. His ears were back. He would not be in time. He said so. He arrived at breakfast frowzy, to find he could have no breakfast. He did not care in the least. He was too late for the automobile rushing the boss off. He calmly walked the two miles to school. Every morning for four months I went to his room and started him to his bath-room. Three mornings out of four he was late for breakfast. Finally, one winter's day, the auto chugging at the door, we rushed to his room. He was sitting against the bath-tub, in his pajamas, playing on his comb, "The Wind in the Willows" open in his lap. We jerked on his bath-slippers, wrapped him in his bath-robe, slammed him in the auto, and started off. He, of course, was taken only as far as the station with us, for he made a promise on the way over, and we sent him home to dress. We've never had to repeat that punishment, either. He is virtually always prompt in appearing at meals now. But Blue-Eyes is a complete backslider. She has become dilatory, slovenly, and adorably casual about it, too. Heigho! All to do over again with her!
Blue-Eyes has had her whipping, too. For lying. That was two years ago. At present she takes keen pride in the absolute honesty of her spoken word. How long this will last I do not know. Her faults are more difficult to handle than her brother's because she is more subtle, less high strung, more sensitive, with less sense of fair play. I must finish whatever I begin with her because she never forgets or fails to take advantage of any weakness or lack of determination on my part. They both apparently have one blanket rule of their own. Never in any circumstances to obey one of our rules until they have tried by every method conceivable to wear us down on its enforcement.
I know exactly what you are thinking as you read this. You are saying to yourself, "No own mother ever could be so harsh to her children." And just because I knew you would think that I put it in the story, which is not a story about child training at all, but about child adoption.
I am undoubtedly stricter with my children than any own mother I know, because I see my children more clearly than own mothers do. I doubt very much if I love them now any less than the others, but I certainly started unhandicapped by the blind love that makes them see dimly.
And what is love, anyhow? Was it love that made the mother of the twelve-year-old fail to see his lies, or was it a sort of self-indulgence peculiar to mothers? I have often thought that love is more maligned than any other human gift. Great love is not blind. Great love sees with a clarity of vision that cannot be hoodwinked. Not that it was love that caused me at first to see my children's failings and to punish them with entire thoroughness.
I saw these children physically as their physician saw them, mentally and spiritually as their psychiatrist saw them. I was as much without prejudice or preconceived idea as you are when you spend a week-end with your old college chum and pass judgment on her children. She, of course, adores them. To you they are badly trained, promising young imps you'd like to get into your clutches for a few months and show her!
And herein lay my vast advantage over own mothers. I saw my children as they were. And because my responsibility was voluntarily taken, I dare not allow my growing love for them to becloud my vision. I dare not let my tenderness for their sweetness and charm and utter trust in me move me one jot from my determination to help them conquer the weaknesses that would mar their success as human beings.
For they must succeed. The whole structure of child-placing rests on the success of the children who are placed. You may fail with your own child. You may let this and that go, betting on his outgrowing it. You may wink at faults you would not tolerate in your college chum's child. After all his failure is between you and him. But my children's failure! Good heavens! If they stumble and fall, they cause to stumble that long procession of little bloody feet moving up from the children's hell.
I must dream big for them. If they succeed, their success has ramifications for good your child's success cannot achieve. My little daughter has responsibilities on her gay and brilliant little mind that your daughters can never take. It is a strange era for women, anyhow. War has so upset the economic equilibrium of the world that all women ought to be producers of economic values. This without regard to their financial status or the ability of their men to support them. Production is at so low an ebb that men working alone cannot increase the world's wealth soon enough to prevent long years of misery. The women, all women, for a few years of their lives, at least, ought to work. And so my little daughter must grow up understanding this and prepared to enter a productive profession.
No one has as yet found a substitute for the individual home as the nucleus of the nation. No one as yet has been able to refute the statement that on the sanctity of its women and the integrity of its homes rests the ultimate virility of the nation. Inefficient, slipshod housewife and mother she may be, still the home pivots on her as it will pivot on nothing else. So my little daughter must learn to be a home-maker and a mother.
It is a heavy double job. Even if he could, no man would be fool enough to undertake both. But my daughter must, and so must yours. But here your child's job ends. Mine must go still further.
This is her obligation to that little life of three years. She, too, must see with eyes not always tear-dimmed the procession that has toiled upward for so many generations, and she must yearn toward it with a love nobler even than that she will bear toward her own children, and out of that love must come service to the world's dependent children, service practical, concrete, idealistic
She has a fine mind, but with it, thank heavens! goes a nature inherently debonair. It's a curse for a woman to have a big brain and no charm. I want her always to be debonair even when I can no longer shield her from life's adversities. I want her to be honorable in little things. Few women are. I want her to keep her lovely, quiet sense of humor. As long as she keeps that, it will take many, many tragedies to hurt her too much. For a sense of humor is, after all, a sense of proportion. And I want her to hang to her plan of life. Though she be mauled to the earth, she must rise "and contend for the shade of a word and the thing not seen with the eyes."
Codes are difficult matters to evolve. It takes a great deal of living to make a workable one, and it takes a deal of mental discipline to live up to one.
When I was casting about for the right sort of code to give my children, my mind naturally harked back to my own childhood for suggestion. I had been an atheist, was still, as far as I knew; yet with all and all I knew where I had got such ethics as I had clung to all my life, namely, from the despised Sunday-school lessons of my youth. None, I knew, had evolved such a workable code of ethics as Jesus. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and its Thirteenth Amendment had been possible, I believed, because the moral fiber of the men who created them was woven of this selfsame code. Given this code in early youth, no matter how much of the ritual or credal aspects of it was stripped away, a human being could never, unless wilfully, lose certain clean-cut, workable, ethical standards. So the children and I have gone to the Bible. We read its stories. We learn its poetry. We find what it has to say about our particular faults. It means much to us on Sundays. It means an immense amount to us at Easter and Christmas-time.
Of course I had to face God immediately. Was I or was I not to give Him to the children? Face to face with the query, I did not hesitate. Not for all the gold and perfume of Araby would I let them face the blackness of a childhood without God. And I gave Him to them exactly as Christ pictured Him to those soul-hungry people of Israel. He is a real and living presence to them, a vital influence in their daily lives. Said young Gray-Eyes the other day:
"I sure was bad in school to-day. It didn't seem as if I could be good until I thought of Sunday's text, "There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able." And then I knew I could kill it, and I did."
Not long ago my little daughter came into my room. There was a strained look in her six-year-old blue eyes.
"Mother," she said, "a terrible fing has happened. A child's mother died."
"Whose mother, dear?" I asked.
"I don't know. Over in the village, they said, to-day. But it was a child's mother." She crowded close to me with horror in her face. "Mother, what does a child do when her mother dies?"
"Well," I said, "it all depends. If she was sick and suffering, perhaps the child would be a little bit glad that God put her mother to sleep."
"But she died."
"No; God put her to sleep."
"But they put her in the ground, Mother."
It was no use. Her brother was listening now, both of them with the sort of attention that demands sincerity. I must speak what was in me or fail them. And I went back within myself and brought out something that I had not known was there.
There is no death, I told them. The body laid away in the soil returns to earth again and again and yet again in forms varied and beautiful. And the spirit, set free, wings in some way we cannot know to God, Who is its home. Perhaps on the farthest stars those free spirits find their happiness. What did it matter where so long as we felt they were with God?
It was a halting enough explanation, heaven knows, but they went away quite satisfied, while I went into astonished meditation. For I, the unbeliever, had given them the explanation in entire sincerity. Naïve as it was, it was as comforting as it was surprising to find myself capable of expressing even this much of faith.
Whence had it come? Ah, I knew well enough! It had come through two little children who had led me back to that old, old time when life to me too was only table-high, and I was nearer to the source of being than I am now. My mother had taught me, too, before I was seven that the soul would not die. I had wandered far. But two pairs of trusting tiny hands had set me back upon the "slope which leads through darkness up to God."
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1930.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1940, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 84 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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