XI
THE DEADLY RIVAL
It would be interesting to know how many estranged husbands and wives began drifting apart with the advent of the first baby. Children are popularly supposed to be the tie that binds a man and woman indissolubly together in body and spirit in marriage. Often this is true, and in their love and hopes and ambitions for their children a husband and wife literally do become “two souls with but a single thought, two hearts that beat as one.” Also very often for the sake of their children men and women endure a marriage that they have come to loathe and hate, and are bound together like prisoners whose balls and chains clank at every movement they make.
Unhappily, children’s hands do not always draw husbands and wives closer together. They just as often push them apart, and when this happens it is oftener the woman’s fault than the man’s. Few men prefer their children above their wives, but for the great majority of women their husbands exist only as their children’s father and as purveyors to their children.
The first baby definitely and for all time puts the husband’s nose out of joint. Up to that time, husband has been king of the domestic realm. His wife has put on her prettiest clothes and adorned herself for him. She has been chum and playmate. She has exerted herself to amuse and entertain him. She has looked out for his comfort, has seen that he had the best of everything, and he has reveled in the bliss of having the center of the stage and the spotlight turned always upon him. Then arrives the baby, and from having been the worshiped head of the house, husband finds that he is nothing, with no one so poor as to do him reverence.
Wife no longer cares what sort of a figure she cuts in his eyes, or whether he admires her or not. She looks sloppy around the house because the baby pulls at her clothes and musses her chiffons. When husband wants to go out at night she refuses because she can’t leave the baby, and if he drags her along anyway, she interrupts the most thrilling part of a play to ask him if he thinks the nurse has forgotten to give the baby his bottle.
There are no more chatty evenings at home, because she is off worshiping before the baby’s shrine. She quits reading anything but baby books, and her conversation gets to be about as stimulating as sterilized milk. She is too busy with the baby to show her husband any of the little attentions that men so love, or to see even that he has the things he likes to eat.
There are thousands of homes which are run exclusively for the children. There is never any food on the table except just the simple things that children can eat. There is never any conversation except about the children. The wife never manifests the slightest interest in her husband, or shows him any affection. All of the tenderness, the caresses, the sympathy and understanding is lavished on the children. It is the children’s likes and dislikes and prejudices that are remembered and catered to.
There are many wives who begrudge every cent that a husband spends on himself because they want the money to throw away on the children. They will nag their husbands into giving up smoking so that they can buy the baby a real lace cap. There are wives who literally work their husbands to death that their daughters may go off to finishing schools, and their boys have the latest model sports automobile.
Now the average man loves his children, but he has not this crazy, obsessing passion for them that their mother has. When the first baby comes he is proud of it and fond of it, and he wants it to have every proper care and attention, but he doesn’t want to spend hours sitting by its crib, gloating over it and marveling at how naturally it breathes. He wants to go about the ordinary affairs of life as he did before the baby was born, and he wants his wife’s companionship.
But she will seldom go with him, and when she does, she is no fun because she doesn’t enter into the spirit of anything. She has left her whole interest in life behind in the nursery. Nor is she an entertaining companion at home any more. And it gets on his nerves being told to “sh-h-h-h-sh” every time he shuts the door, for fear he will wake the baby.
He even discovers that his wife is relieved when he goes out without her, and leaves her undisturbed to her infant adoration. And so the rift is first made between them. Each starts on a life in which the other has no part, and that takes them farther away from each other as the years go by.
If the true co-respondent were ever named in many a divorce case, it would be the first baby. There are always plenty of women a man can find who will play with him while his wife is busy in the nursery; who will listen to him and flatter him, while his wife is telling the baby he is the most boofulest thing in the world. While mama is holding the baby’s hand, some vamp is generally holding papa’s. It is a great thing to be a good mother, but it is equally as great a thing to be a good wife. And it is a bad thing to do either one at the expense of the other. Often children are better off for a little wholesome neglect, but a husband never is.
Remember that, ladies, and don’t make your baby your husband’s deadly rival.