XXIV
GRAFTING ON THE OLD FOLKS
It is a curious thing, in a way it is a beautiful thing, and it’s a selfish thing, that children rarely ever think of their parents as human beings. Children think of their fathers and mothers as the source whence all blessings flow or they think of them as an avenging justice. But it seldom occurs to them that their parents are men and women, in addition to being parents; that they have the same preferences and long for the same pleasures as other people, and that they have a few rights that even their children should respect.
Of course, a small child unquestionably takes for granted all that its parents give and do for it. It is merely the order of nature that Mother should appear at its bed with the cup of water for which it cries out in the night; that Mother should clean up the dirt it brings into the house and spend hours over the stove cooking the things it likes to eat; and that Father should work while it plays and go shabby to give it fine clothes.
As they grow up, children continue to demand more and more of their parents. They bleed Father and Mother white for the things they want. They are not intentionally cruel, but they will take the last dollar they can wring out of the family purse without ever once thinking that Father and Mother might like to spend some of the money they earn on themselves and in gratifying their own desires. And, curiously enough, even after they have grown to man’s and woman’s estate, the great majority of people still hold to this point of view about their parents. In regulating their lives, they do not take their parents’ rights into consideration. They do not say, “My father and mother have sacrificed enough for me; they have done enough for me. Now I will stand on my own feet, and be as little a burden as possible to them.”
Of course, the most flagrant illustration of this is found in the loafer sons and daughters who let their old parents work and support them. We all know husky, able-bodied young men who play golf while Father slaves in an office, and strapping big girls who perform on the piano while Mother is performing on the gas range. Apparently, it never crosses the mind of these despicable young people that after they are old enough to support themselves they have no right to sponge upon their parents, and graft their living off them. Still less do they ever think that Mother and Father would like to take things easier as they grow older, and indulge in a few of the luxuries they have had to deny themselves while they were raising and educating their children.
Another illustration of how little children regard the rights of their parents you may see in the nonchalance with which young mothers turn over their children to their own mothers. When Sally wants to go to a bridge luncheon or Maud wants to take a trip, they dump the children down on Mother. When Clarabell wants to go to Europe for the summer, she doesn’t worry at all as to what to do with the children. She leaves them, with a thousand instructions as to diet and clothes, and manners and morals, with Mother. So that in innumerable families Mother becomes nothing but a sort of universal nursemaid.
It would shock these daughters to be told what a mean, selfish thing they do in not standing by and doing their own baby tending as Mother did hers. They, themselves, know what it is to walk the colic—what broken nights mean, how incessant must be the care given little children—how nerve-racking children’s noise is. Yet they foist this burden on Mother without a pang of compunction because they are so used to seeing her doing everything for them.
It never occurs to them that she would like to fold her hands in a little peace and rest; furthermore, that she has earned it by bringing up one family, and her daughters haven’t any right to make her substitute on raising another one.
Then there are the children who lay their matrimonial burdens on their parents. John gets married before he is earning enough to support a family. Susie marries a ne’er-do-well, in spite of all efforts to prevent it. Fanny discovers that the man to whom she is married is not her soul mate, and gets a divorce, and comes back home with two or three children. None of these selfish young people, bent on gratifying their own desires, considers Father’s and Mother’s rights in the matter, yet the parents, in the end, are the real sacrifices.
They can’t let John and his wife and children starve, and so the money that Father and Mother had saved up for their old age goes in pittances to help him along. They can’t shut the door in Fanny’s face when she comes back with her divorce and her half-orphaned children, so Father works harder, and Mother pinches and economizes more to raise and educate this second family that their children have thrown upon them. Surely there is no other thing that children need to realize so much as that their parents have some rights. Perhaps if they understood this, and that after a man and a woman have raised a family of children they have a right to peace and quiet and their own money, there would be fewer parasitic sons and daughters.
Perhaps, if they realized that parents had rights, more young people would consider how their marriages would react on their parents, and many a disgruntled wife would carry on with a marriage that wasn’t perfectly congenial rather than burden her old parents with her own and her children’s support.