CULTIVATING OUR PARENTS

Cromwell Argus, Volume L, Issue 2646, 27 October 1919, Page 2

CULTIVATING OUR PARENTS

'The admonishment of the Fifth Com-

mandment is singularly tactful, writes the New York ‘ Outlook.’ It cannily refrains from enjoining obedience. The stark fact of abstract obedience to any one is repellent to every independent mind, whether that mind is live years old or oU, while honoring has a securer foundation in human impulse. Honor is an attitude conspicuously exempt from responsibility to reform its object, whether that object is one’s father or one’s son. In our earliest acquaintance with them we had no difficulty in honoring our father and mother, for the simple reason that their personality then appeared to us so mysterious and so potent that we could do nothing else than respect it. The. exhortation of the Fifth Commandment was therefore addressing itself, not to our infancy, but to our later age. when having come to years of indiscretion, we should feel called upon to re-educate our parents, to bring the dear old fogies abreast of the times, and make them over to suit our

taste as once they felt it incumbent to make ns over to suit theirs. Everyone who has _ ever been 10 and recovered from it knows that the Fifth Commandment perceived what was needed. Even when one has safely emerged from the terrible teens one may still ponder with profit the only genial exhortation of the Decalogue. Perhaps even stern Moses desired folk to feel friendly toward their forbears. The word honor implies respect for the essential freedom that is the foundation of all friendship, and conspicuously of that intimacy between parents and children which, however we may gloze the fact, is actually so rarely existent. Against this spontaneity of comradeship, two tendencies are potent. A dutiful child is prone to feel responsibility for his father and mother, and to have an impulse at anxious moments to put a skittish parent under some form of moral restraint. Indeed, even physical restraint is all too common, of course kindly not crudely administered, but none the less effective for being expressed in constant “don’t, dears,” rather than in bolts and. bars. If we really honor our parents, we shall leave them free, even at a cost. Another and more selfish impulse sometimes prevents our enjoying our fathers and mothers as much as we might; most of us cherish an inner resentment that our parents do not understand us better, forgetting the strain they arc under—due to Laving known us all our lives—of having to merge into one astounding composite all the myriad selves we have been since first they met ns. It may easily be that at five or 1-5 our personality was so offensive that no parent could be expected to perceive that we ever afterward outgrew our evil condition. Even when our parents’ recollections of us have been agreeable, it is but natural that they should revert to the lifetime habit of regarding us as inlantile. Perhaps also they are loth to relinquish their attitude of protection aml■ ol precept. We grow tragically self-sufficient with maturity. Some-

tunes the only way for a parent to pierce our engrossment is by pin stabs of fussiness. Sometimes the onlv wav to reach ns is to irritate us, hot this is only when we om-selvcs have looked the doors of intimacy so tight that love has no language of admittance except nagging. r J he fact is, parents are often worth a child’s cultivating even when that eiiiid is grown np. Parents, however, are extremely elusive in friendship. A child must he patient, not precipitate. Parents often have rare confidences to make, hut in order to receive these sons and daughters have to he themselves of rare imaginativeness. Margaret Ogilvie had a son to whom she appeared eternally a girl, hut not many sons have Barry’s imagination, and so not many sons have such maternal companionship to remember as he commemorates in his life of his mother, it is more incumbent on the young to understand the old than on the old to understand the young; for the old arc heavy with experience, and experience lends to stultify the imagination by its pain and poignancy. If yon really want to get at a parent, you should endeavor to make him comfortable in your presence, so that wisdom, hesi-1 laid; and shy il you are young and I arrogant, will come forth from him confidently. Sometimes a parent’s thoughts are very different from what) we had supposed, hut the best way of 1 eliciting them is by submitting to the ! old habit that controls their utterance,! the old habit of thinking us little I children. ]

A recent story is built on the poignant thesis that the best thing one can do for a parent is never to let him know he has grown old, oven though his over-confidence lead to peril oi life and limb. The author puts into a daughter’s month words that few of iis would have* the courage to embody in our treatment of our parents. Anxious coddling is an insult, she maintains; “II all we can do for them is just to keep their poor old rusting machinery oiled and working—at whatever cost to pride and manhood and usefulness——if that’s the price they have to pay for just keeping alive, is it worth the cost? What do a few years more or less matter so long as one is living to the very end? ” "

Tito essence of comradeship is letting others have their adventure at whatever cost to ns or to them ; for parents this moans letting people have their adventure i ront the beginning; for children, letting people have it to the ('lid. All ol ns have had to he children, many ot us have had to he parents. The best way of getting even with the grim necessity is. if a parent, to stop being one as early as possible, and if a child, to remain one as long as possible.