MY SON’S WIFE.

Otago Witness, Issue 3854, 24 January 1928, Page 73

MY SON’S WIFE.

By Nora MacLeod, in a Scottish paper. Many a young wife suffering from an overdose of mother-in-law vows if ever she occupies that position herself she will ‘ be the ideal mother-in-law.

To make a vow of this sort is easy enough when one’s son is peacefully sucking his thumb in his cot, but as time goes on and the daughter-in-law appears on the domestic horizon, one sometimes pipes quite another lay. Still, as mothers-in-law go, I do my best, and in many ways have kept to my old vow. I never dream of interfering in any .way in my son’s menage, and never shall unless my help or opinion

is asked. Let the young people along. This is a sovereign rule. No matter if you see things that should be altered, Let them find it out for themselves. Your suggestions do no good whatever. It is hard to see why they should not, but, they won’t. Your oversight as a mother, so beneficial to your boy, so satisfying to yourself, has simply got to end now, whether you like it or whether you don’t. The traditional evils connected with the “ mother-in-law ” relationship chiefly arise, I believe, from good in the first instance, the genuine desire to afford the benefit of experience to those who are loved and cherished. But you cannot do this. It is the law of life that the young people must work out their own solution to the many problems that are sure to present themselves in the forming of a home. My daughter-in-law must gain her experience from her own mistakes and not from those I made at her age, for I know that the greater part of advice and warning given by age to youth goes in at one ear and out the other. Youth is so extremely clever. It is only the aged who know there is still a great deal to learn. A mother may give herself untold and perfectly needless worry about her son’s married life. “Is his wife careful and considerate enough? Does she realise thateJohii is not really strong? Does she know how I had to look after him? she anxiously asks herself. “Is she paying cash for everything, or running up) bills that will cause trouble later on? Do her own family coine to the house too often ? ” The questions sound trivial and silly, but there is no end to them or to the worry a fond mother may give herself. And, I may add, there" is no end to the harm she may all unwittingly do the newly formed household.

Every mother, I suppose, has her day dreams of what her son’s wife should be? I certainly had mine, and no girl could be more unlike my dream girl than the wife my boy brought with such pride to mother. Yet the longer I know her, the more I love and admire her. We do not see eye to eye on every point, but there is one subject upon which we both agree, and that is, that we possess the best son and the best husband in the world.

FOR SCHOLARS. My figures are “ excited,” So good people say, But the sky’s excited Each time it writes a day!

God who made the dodo Surely loves a joke. “ Ha! ” the thunder shouted When it hewed the oak.

May makes coral coloured Metaphors of trees; August loves the lightning's White hyperboles.

Tigers are a bonfire, Only moles are grey. One can’t take a world like this As donkey’s munch their hay.

Sunset is a burning bush, God is in the flame. If my words are fierce and gay His peacock is to blame. ' —E. Merrill Root, in the Forum,