XLIV
SELFISHNESS MADE TO ORDER
“My daughter is so selfish toward me,” wailed a mother to me the other day, “she never considers my comfort or happiness in any way whatever. Since the day she was born I have never had a thought except for her. I have given her the best of everything. I have worn old clothes in order that she might have fine new ones. I have done without the things I wanted that she might indulge her every desire. I have gone to the places that she wished to go to, instead of the places where I wished to go. I have cooked and sewed and waited upon her like a slave, but instead of appreciating all that I have done for her she takes it as a matter of course. She thinks any old cast-off is good enough for mother and never dreams of doing anything she doesn’t want to do for my pleasure. And that is my reward for all the sacrifices I have made for her!”
“Say rather that, as the result of all the sacrifices that you have made for your daughter,” I replied, “your girl is just exactly what you have made her. You have put in twenty-two years of conscientious work in erecting a monument of selfishness, and you have no right to complain. You wouldn’t build a house of mud and garbage cans and expect it to be a white marble palace. How, then, can you expect to build up a child’s character with all the meanest characteristics of human nature and expect it to be fine and noble? Impossible. And that is the sort of miracle that you parents expect from your children when you demand that they shall be something totally different from the thing into which you have made them.
“When your daughter was born, she was as plastic as clay in your hands. It was your privilege to mold her into any shape you pleased. You could have taught her to be unselfish, to be considerate, to think of other people, to love and honor and respect you. Instead of that, from her first conscious moment, you taught her to despise you, to think you of no account and not worth considering. You taught her to think only of herself, of her own pleasures and desires, and to get what she wanted at any cost to others. Now you whine because your teaching has borne fruit. You are unjust and unreasonable. What we sow, we reap inevitably. If you make yourself a doormat before your children, they will walk over you and kick you about, because they naturally think that you know where you belong in the household and have taken your proper place.
“They would just as naturally have looked up to you if you had placed yourself on a pedestal above them and demanded to be worshiped. Children don’t reason about their parents. They just accept them as they are and hold them cheap, or dear, according to the way the mother and father value themselves. I have no tears to shed over the sorrows of mothers who have selfish and ungrateful daughters, because every time it is the mother’s own fault. She is to blame, not the girl.
“If she had spent part of the clothes money on getting herself some pretty frocks, instead of lavishing it all on daughter, daughter would be proud of mother instead of being ashamed of her. If she had made daughter help with the housework and the sewing, instead of slaving over the cookstove and the sewing machine so that daughter might go free, daughter would think about saving mother and doing things for her. If she had asserted her rights to her own personal tastes and pleasures, instead of letting daughter’s tastes and pleasures rule the household, daughter would show her some consideration and remember mother’s likes and dislikes, and cater to them. There are mothers who are queens in their families, just as there are mothers who are nothing but the maid-of-all-work in their homes, and it rests with every mother to decide which she will be. It is the queen mothers who are loved and appreciated, and who have dutiful, unselfish children. The drudge mother gets only the wages of the drudge from her children.
“In reality, the mother who rears her children up to be monsters of selfishness has no right to expect appreciation and gratitude from them because she has done them as ill a turn as one human being can do another. She has warped their characters. She has developed in them traits that mar their happiness and are a handicap to success. She has made them egotists, and they are never satisfied and continually at variance with those about them. In particular is selfishness a blight upon a woman’s life, for the selfish woman finds it almost impossible to make the sacrifices that wifehood and motherhood demand of her. One of the main reasons why divorce is so prevalent is because when so many selfish girls find that they can’t treat their husbands as they did their mothers, they throw up their hands and quit.
“And so,” I said to the mother of the selfish daughter, “you are unfair to your daughter. Don’t blame her for being what you made her. What else could you expect?”