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THE ABSENCE CURE FOR FAMILY ILLS
One of the most pathetic things on earth is the unnecessary unhappiness we endure. The big, heartbreaking tragedies no one may escape. The loss of those we love. Frustrated hopes. Disappointments. Despair. These are the inevitable portion of humanity, and there is dignity in meeting them with courage.
But to have your life poisoned by the sting of a gnat; to be done to death by pin pricks, to be robbed of your happiness by petty aggravations, that is a different matter, and one rages alike against the futility of it, and the ignominy of it. And, curiously enough, we neither endure with fortitude these little, petty ills that spoil the peace of our days, nor do we try to seek a remedy for them.
Take family troubles, for example, which are responsible for more real, heartbreaking, never-ending misery than anything else in the world. A man and a woman drawn together by some fleeting physical attraction get married. When that is over, they find that they have not one thing on earth in common. Their tastes differ on everything from politics to pie. Their every idea and opinion is antagonistic. They do not think the same thoughts, or speak the same language. They may be people of the highest integrity, models of all the virtues. They may try to do their duty nobly and with self-sacrifice. But their home is a dark and bloody battleground where they fight over every topic like dogs over a bone, and they make life a hell on earth for each other.
Sometimes parents and children cannot get along together. Sometimes a nice, domestic old hen hatches out a swan. Sometimes a swan finds that nature has bestowed an ugly duckling upon her, and great is the clacking, and the clucking, and the feather-picking around the barnyard.
Often brothers and sisters cannot agree. They clash on every subject under the sun. They express their opinions of each other with the brutal candor of near relationship, and leave each other sullen and sore with resentment. They never sit down to a meal without being verbally armed to the teeth, and the maimed survivors feel as if they had been through the battle of the Marne. Sometimes there is just one particular member of a family who is a perpetual storm center, and who has but to blow in at the door to shatter the peace and harmony of the household.
Being obliged to live with disagreeable and antagonistic people is the greatest affliction that can possibly befall us. Nothing compensates for it. Not tho we dwell in a palace, with every meal a banquet, and have everything that money can buy us. Better it is to dwell on a housetop, or in a lodging house, and eat at a quick lunch place, and have peace, than abide in splendor with those who irritate the very soul out of us.
Nor are we consoled by the fact that the very people who are so impossible to live with love us well enough to die for us.
We know well enough that it is mother’s affection for us, and her anxiety about us, that makes her nag us incessantly, and hand out advice to us until we are ready to scream. In their philosophical moments men and women realize that even their in-laws knock them for their own good.
But it is the result, and not the theory, with which we are concerned, and as you listen to the wail of those who cry out against uncongenial marriages, and the moans of anguish of the in-laws who dwell under the same roof, and listen to the sounds of fratricidal strife, when everybody could be so happy if they didn’t have to live with each other, you wonder that so few people have the wisdom and the courage to apply the one sure cure for their misery. That is to separate. Apart they would be happy. They would even love each other. They would get a perspective on each other’s good qualities. But living together they merely get on each other’s nerves, and hate each other.
The old idea that blood is thicker than water, and that just because you happen to be born in a certain relationship to a group of individuals makes you automatically love them, and desire their society, hasn’t a word of truth in it. It is not even true in the relationship between parents and children.
As long as their children are young and helpless, most mothers have an animal fondness for them. But when they are older, it very often happens that a mother cannot get along in peace with her children. She does not understand them. She has nothing in common with them, and she is glad enough when they are grown and leave home.
No theory has been more mischievous than the old convention that people who were of the same family had to keep on living together, no matter how much they rubbed each other the wrong way, nor how unpleasant this enforced companionship was. There is no sense in doing it. No rhyme nor reason for it. Because Aunt Jane is Aunt Jane is no reason why you should take her into your home and be bored the balance of your life by her reminiscences, nor is there any reason why you should have your temper continually rasped by antagonistic sisters and brothers when there are plenty of agreeable strangers in the world.
Try the absence cure on your domestic troubles. Get up and leave an unpleasant home. You have no idea how much better you will love a lot of your relatives when you put about a thousand miles between you and them.