MOTHERHOOD VERSUS THE WIFELY ROLE

New Zealand Times, Volume LIII, Issue 12394, 13 March 1926, Page 9

MOTHERHOOD VERSUS THE WIFELY ROLE

By Philippa Kendrick. Long before the psychologists and philosophers got busy on the theme in plays and novels, we knew that the vole of wifehood wee , apt to become submerged in that of motherhood. We knew that for mariy women the quickly kindled flaine of love soon dies down and burns with the ardent afterglow of maternal passion,- that once the child comes, the husband takes a back seat. That is a true, unexaggerated picture of the-State of affairs in innumerable homes where the whole household revolves round Molly or Jack. It is riot merely a clever imaginative thesis of some' up-to-date playwright 1 or romancer. It is as true as the-tragedy that sometimes eneuee when the mother in her turn is “euted” on the mental plane and the growing adolescent turns to the father for companionship. For that is the punishment Fate often metes out _ ( to the woman who forgets she is a wife, and remembers only that she is a mother. She 5 who has spent all her devotion on the toddlers in their' faursery days awakens to the realisation that adolesence is - veering towards paternal rather than maternal companionship. This is not a generalisation, of course. , There are exceptions to this as to other rules of human relationships and human conduct, But you will find these exception* are mainly provided by loving mother* who have never ceased to he loving wives, and who have taken care always to make the parental and filial rela tiOriship a trio and not a duo. Father: has never been made to feel “out of lit,’!-andl the ohild has not been a separating, but a more closely binding influence. . The mother , who abandons the rota of wifehood is also prone to forget that in the years to come, when Mony or Jack make a home of their own, she may bs more than glad of ti'w companionship of their fsther, who is incidentally her husband! And. she may rue in bitterness of soirit the Wifely neglect which has wrought a gradual estrangement. |f, with the passing of years, she has made it increasingly plain that her chiMra© were her whole world and their father, merely the homevarpyidet-

. she can scarcely expert the long-suffer-ing husband to lavish on her the tenderness and sympathy of which she is in aching.need! when for so long she herself has withheld from him that same sympathy.