LXII
THE CHILDREN PAY
No disinterested outsider ever observes the spats in which so many husbands and wives continually engage without realizing that they quarrel because they enjoy doing so. It is an indoor sport out of which they get a morbid thrill. Domestic life has become dull and monotonous to them. They have nothing new and interesting to say to each other, and so one or the other starts something by making a remark that he or she knows is the fighting word that will inevitably precipitate a scrimmage. And then they go to it, hammer and tongs. It is their way of putting pep into a pepless day, for they know the danger they are running, and the very fact that they are risking their whole life’s happiness crisps their nerves, as going over the top did the soldiers in the war. Besides which they get a strange and savage joy out of stabbing with cruel words and in wounding and being wounded by the ones they love and who love them.
It is because married couples love a fight for the fight’s sake that so many homes are nothing but a battlefield on which a perpetual warfare goes on. Otherwise the dove of peace would roost on the roof of many a household to which the black flag is now nailed. For it is folly to say that the average husband and wife who are forever engaged in an acrimonious debate over every trifle that comes up could not get along with each other if they desired to do so. They get along with other persons. They make allowance for the prejudices and faults of others. They permit other persons to differ from them on matters of opinion and taste. They sidestep other persons’ peculiarities. They control their tempers and their tongues when they are dealing with others. They are tactful and diplomatic in handling other persons. No doctor would ever have another patient, no merchant another customer, no man could hold his job if he was as irritable, as grouchy, as high tempered abroad as many a man is at home, and if he said the insulting things to other persons that he says to his wife. No woman would ever be invited to another bridge party or elected president of the sewing society if she were as much of a spitfire in public as many a woman is in private, and if she said the nasty things to others that she says to her husband.
Now, the rules for keeping the peace are the same everywhere, and both men and women are familiar with them. Every man knows that there isn’t a woman living that he can’t make eat out of his hand by showing her a few attentions, a little tenderness and consideration and paying her a few compliments. Every woman knows that there isn’t a man that she can’t jolly along the way she wants him to go and who does not respond to judiciously applied salve. So when husbands and wives, who know perfectly well how to work each other without friction, deliberately and with malice aforethought rub each other the wrong way, it is obviously because they enjoy their daily dozen fracases and find fun in seeing the fur fly. If that were the end of it, we might well shrug our shoulders and, while wondering at their taste, leave them to take their pleasure as they saw fit in the cruel pastime of baiting each other. But, unfortunately, the family spat is not the innocent diversion that husbands and wives appear to think it is, nor does it end when the husband puts on his hat and bangs the door behind him and goes downtown, and the wife wipes away a tear or two and goes about her daily tasks.
The children are the real victims in these family fights. It is they who stumble from the domestic battleground with shattered nerves, with torn and bleeding spirits and souls, with maimed and deformed characters. All of us have known children who have taken to the streets almost as soon as they could walk to escape homes that were full of bickering and discord. We have seen how little control the fathers and mothers who could not control their own tempers had over their children, and we have not wondered when truant officers tell us that nine-tenths of the wayward girls and hoodlum boys are the children of divorced parents, or else, of parents who did not get along together. Now comes a great psychiatrist who asserts that he has never known an instance of nervous breakdown in the children of happily married parents who were brought up in a peaceful home.
Read that over again. Memorize it, you fathers and mothers who begin the day by having a row at the breakfast table because the coffee isn’t just as you like it or the toast is burnt or you neglected to send up the coal yesterday and forgot to leave the money for the milkman. You think it is of no consequence because your wife knows you don’t mean half of what you say and she is fighting back more from force of habit than anything else. But neither one of you gives a thought to the children who are listening to it all, to the children who are learning to regard you with contempt, who are having all their illusions shattered; whom you are teaching to be bitter and misanthropic, with no faith in anything beautiful or fine. You do not realize that you may not only be giving them a warp in character that will bar them from success in life, but that you may be actually dooming them to a breakdown that will make them wrecks in body and mind.
Isn’t that a pretty high price to pay for the pleasure of quarreling? And isn’t it a cruelly unfair thing to force your children to settle your score? For the sake of the children you brought into the world and for whom you are responsible, isn’t it worth while to deny yourself the pleasure of finding fault with your husband or wife and saying all the mean, acrimonious things you can think of? No use in saying that you can’t get along together. You can, if you want to. You get along with other persons.