The Brookhaven leader. [volume] (Brookhaven, Miss.) 1883-1891, 1883-05-17
A Plea for the Step.M Mother.

How many books do we still take up
in which the plot turns on the cruel
Vaccinations of step-mother, and
surely writers ought to be wiser now.
They make the very name hateful it
seems to ring with unkindness and in
justice, and far be it from us to say that
the prototype is nowhere to be found.
Cold-heartedness and oppression toward
the children of one who has preceded
her in the heart and home are no doubt
at times to be met with, but can not
many households tell another tale-a
tale of love and gentleness, and mutual
affection and peace? And can not, too,
some homes tell third story, where
the sufferer is the one who is looked
on as an interloper? Are there not
cases where a man, whose hearth has
been early desolated, and who is left
with little ones whom he can not look
after, with heart still yearning for af-
fection, brings home some warm-heart-
ed girl, ready to pour out no stinted
measure of love on the motherless ones;
and what do he and she find on settling
down to their daily life? That fool
ish relatives or ignorant servants
mind against their second mother,
and that all her efforts to win
their affection and trust are blighted by
the unholy influence that has been
welded. And when other little chill
dren come, too often, instead of being
welcomed with brotherly or sisterly
love, they are greeted with feelings of
bitterness and jealousy. Nor is this
only SO when the children, naturally
perhaps, have feeling that they may
be deprived by stranger of part of
their birthright. Cases there are where
hundreds have been added to the in
come by such marriage-hundreds
not even settled on the woman who
brought them to comparatively poor
household; and yet she was set aside as
nobody" treated with cold insult
by step-children, and undefended by
her husband. We might tell of sick
beds watched with all mothers devo-
ton; of dying hours soothed with all a
mothers faithful self-forgetfulness; of
the young spirit sinking to. the grave,
clinging with fond affection to the rep
resentative of that real parent whom it
was soon to greet in the spirit land; and
we turn with Just anger from. pictures
laid before us as false as they are i'll
judged. Into how many households must
the second mother be brought, or they
could never hold together? How many
families must consist of the children of
the one father. but of two mothers; and
is it well that young minds be prejudiced
against a state of things in many cases
a necessity? But in the. novel or the
tale a youthful hero or heroine is the
more interesting the more he or she
suffers under the domestic roof, and
that suffering is supposed to be most
easily wrought by the ''step- mother. -"
Let us hope that a tI'uer view will be
taken of this relationship; that the
vulgar feeling with regard to it Ga feel
ing showing itself so plainly in some
localities that the name of step-mother
is given to the most painful thing on
the finger, sometimes called a hang
naiD may. ere long pass away from
amongst us; and that, as at last the
long-despised "old maid' is meeting
with justice and kindly judgment, the
same may be meted with no stinting
hand to the often long suffering and
much-slandered "step-mother. = En-.
chance.