MOTHERHOOD

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 19867, 15 June 1927, Page 13

MOTHERHOOD

A WHOLE TIME JOE? NOVELIST GIVES HER VIEWS Whether motherhood is a whole time job or not is a question that has been intriguing some of our most learned men of late, writes Dorothy Black. Never having been mothers, they have mostly come to all the old conclusions: That a woman’s place is the home, and a woman’s goal is the nursery. Speaking as a mother, I would say that they are partly right, but unfortunately this is not a subject that can be dismissed for ever with one grand platitude. Alotherhood is a whole-time job, but only during the nursery years, and only a mother knows how quickly they are gone, and the nursery door is ajar, for the bars at the windows keep nothing inside but our drcams. As long as there are any children in the nursery, motherhood is a wholetime job. But what shall our knowledge of patent foods avail us now that they have taken to cigarettes? They cannot play ring-o’-roses for ever. When the nursery door stands ajar, and all the fledglings have flown, it is a pitiful thing for the woman who realises she has never learnt any other tunc. The fledglings grow up so quickly. And when they come to us with their sorrows, and their joys, and their views on the political situation, and their schemes for rejuvenating the world, woe betide us if we have nothing for them but a feeding bottle and a weight chart! A woman should devote herself entirely to her home, until she has got it going. Afost homes, given a fair start

get up enough momentum after seven or eight years to carry them on under their own way for the rest of the time. It was fun, long ago, to measure out rhe sugar, and lock the storeroom with an important click, but if we do it nowadays the cook will merely leave, and the daily help take another situation.

Tho woman who devotes herself wholly to her homo is usually partially buried under a seething mass of servant troubles which all arise from her having no definite occupation herself, and interfering with people who have. A mother should devote herself to her children until they are on their feet, and at their various schools, being made into reasonable beings who will presently come home for the holidays and require reasonable treatment. Life must for ever be, for all of us, a scries of changes bravely borne. The woman who makes motherhood a whole time job for too long is bound to be a dreadful nuisance presently, for she will not realise that her children are growing up, and that, although little Harold played prettily with a rattle five years ago, he is going to want to talk about cricket whou he comes home to-morrow, and however sweet he looked with curls, would prefer not to be reminded of the fact. She makes her children account for their every movement, and cannot leave them alone? She has nothing else! So the home becomes little more than a prison against the bars of which the children boat their wings, longing to

be gone, instead of a place of rest to which they turn from the buffetings of the everyday world tor consolation, and for stimulation and words of wisdom from one who should have evolved some sort of philosophy of life by this time, as a balm for its bruises.

There is a wonderful bond between a mother and her children, I’hey will put up with things from her that they

would stand from no other woman. But she should not take advantage of it. She should be brave enough not to block their attempts to lead their own lives. She should encourage'them to make their own decisions and not endeavour to lead their lives for them. Life is a transition from one emotional period to another, and it is her task to help her children along as smoothly as possible, even at the sacrifice of her own maternal leanings. No woman who has made motherhood a whole time job is capable of doing this, because there would be nothing left to her. Her whole life has been spent thinking for them, and correcting them, and she will go on with it long after the necessity has ceased, and they have come to resent it. A woman should lead her own life, and to keep her mind alive she should cultivate interests of her own outside her home, so that she may have something to talk about when she is in it. She should move with the times, and understand the current slang of hei children’s generation, so that they can talk to her freely, without fear of wounding her or shocking her, and make a companion of her, instead of having to carry her about with them like a handbag that has long ago lost the only use it ever had, but carftaot be discarded for sent : mont’s sake