THE MOTHER I WOULD CHOOSE.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3148, 18 December 1922, Page 2

THE MOTHER I WOULD CHOOSE.

(By An Undergrad.)

As a "Girl of To-day" graciously admitsl that sons —after daughters—may have a useful! word' to add to this controversy, perhaps my idtea of the best mother in the world may be considered worthy of a place in the picture gallerv.

If I ever 1 make good in the career 1 have chosen, I shall owe it to the fact tkvt I had a mother with hrains enough to shine in a career of her own. Like the "Girl of To-d'ay's" sister-mother, my intellectual mother, was the pride of the family. We d'ktn't regard her as a rival, 'fcut as an inspiration. And now that she is only a sacred memory, we are even prouder of her achievement than when she wafe alive.

More than that, I am grateful to her for having bequeathed her brains —or at least a fraction of them —-to her son. 1 don't believe people who would choose a sweet and stupid housekeeper for a mother realise that aspect of the question. Do they—or Mr Hutchinson —in their condemnation of the mother who feels she hu,s work to do in the world outside her home understand that they owe their intelligence' at least in part to the fact that their father happened to choose an intelligent woman for Iris w i fe ?

Of course, all mothers whose interests? are centred 1 in the management of their home and children are not stupid women. But they often arc, and they are certainly much more likely to lack mental 1 power than the Mrs Oceleve type. In our home I confess we all cared more about books than about food. Our family table might have aroused the criticism of a gourmet, but it was a good deal better than the awful stuff we got toi eat at. school. Then the fact that our mother was busy with her work most of the day taught us selfreliance. Wei w.eren't coddled 1 , either physical! or morallv. And I'm glad of it/

Not' do I believe Hit average boy really likes to see his mother leading' the life of an upper servant, often the worst paid and the hardest worked in the bouse. Hew can you. talk to that. sort of mother? How. can you expect fier to sympathi :e with your ideas; and ambitions? She simply couldn't understand the difficulties a fellow is up against at school or at Oxford, still less the other and deeper difficulties of life which every man has got to face and solve as best he can. Now my mother ,was the sort of woman to whom you could (ell anything. She had a mind, besides knowledge and experience of life outside the narrow walls of home. She wasn't so much a sister as a friend, and when I lost her I lost the best friend I've ever had.

On the mother question, a daughter's* point of view must always, I suppose, bo different from a sou's. Girls like being fussed over, and perhaps they need it. But boys of the healthy, manly sort neither like vt nor need it. Sooner or later they know they've got to stand on their own feet, and it"s easier when they get the chance to begin young.

What they do want —and I know many of them db —is a friend at home who speaks the same language, a friend to whom they can bring their hopes and their troubles and discuss 1 them frankly as man to man. 1 hadn't got a. father at that time, and I shouldn't have granted to talk to him if he'd been alive. But I had the luck to have such a mother, and T wish there were more like her.