Such women, however, so far as records go, are few. Much might be done by science to discover what are the causes of the reverse condition, and if possible to attempt to eliminate them.

In view of the agony which myriads of women throughout the ages of civilization have endured, it seems strange indeed that no effort should apparently have been made by the learned to understand the causes which control the individual formation of the growing structure, with a view possibly to securing some such development. In recent years, however, a little has been done in the recognition of the causes of the converse, that is to say the excessive narrowing of the pelvis to the degree where child birth is not only torment but a life and death agony. And it is now well known that this condition is associated with malnutrition and rickets in infancy and early girlhood.

The little baby girl who has rickety bones (which result from being improperly fed as an infant) is, in extreme cases certain, and in many cases very likely, to have such contracted pelvic bones that when her turn comes for motherhood, the birth of a living child may be impossible by the ordinary processes of Nature. Here again, as so often is inevitable, in the course of any consideration of the profound truths of mated existence, we impinge upon the treatment of the unsound and the diseased. This under development of the mother’s pelvic bones is a different problem from that evolutionary one touched on in the paragraphs above.

Alas, that it should be true that the great majority of city dwellers come into the category of the spoilt and the tainted in some respect or another. But with the vision of true health and beauty as a standard before our eyes, many might escape the incipient weaknesses by consciously pursuing a standard of health, beauty and normality. It is this standard, this ideal picture, which may yet be reproduced in the lives of millions, which I desire to present in this book, so that in telling young married people some of the great facts which are ahead of them I will present only those difficulties which are inevitable, and leave to others the handling of disease. As things are to-day among British stock,[3] it is the very exceptional women who find birth an entirely easy process of which the pain is trivial, and this is chiefly due to the bony structure fixed and limited in size, which stands as a gateway of pain between the infant and the outer world, between the young wife and her motherhood.

Before the hour of birth is reached, however, the young mother-to-be, if she is neither instructed nor helped by the wisdom of her elders, may have already endured much that it will distress and dismay her lover and husband to observe, and much more which she, being a woman, will endure without allowing him to perceive, although she may be so frightened that it may be hard indeed for her not to cry out in her bewildered pain. How much of this distress and pain is essentially “natural,” how much is the artificial result of our mode of living and our ignorance of Nature’s laws? What are the things which a healthy, finely-built young woman mated to a healthy young man must endure, those experiences which she cannot escape and those which she may with proper help avoid altogether or in part? It is the object of several chapters in this book to answer these questions more truthfully and I hope more helpfully than they have yet been answered. The things I deal with specially, because they will face nearly every healthy girl, are in most books ignored.

My chapters may appear superfluous to those who view the long list of books purporting to give advice to the young wife and expectant mother on how to treat herself and the coming child. I have read the majority of those books, and I write this one because of their failure to touch on the profoundest essentials in a way which will truly help the healthy and sensitive type of young people. The healthy, normal and happy in my mind’s vision are the standard of the race: those who to-day to some extent foreshadow the strength and beauty of bodily and mental equipment which will become a commonplace when all have risen to their standard, and it is for them that I feel it imperative to add this one more book to the long list of books advising the young mother. With the young mother I also consider and try to help the young father who has been so strangely neglected and ignored and who also needs help.

The majority of the writers on cognate subjects, like the majority of the minds of those who are concerned at all with the problems of the young mother, really though perhaps unconsciously present studies in disease, pictures of aberrations from the normal, accounts or innuendos dealing with illness and handicaps, with abnormal conditions which should never arise, and the knowledge of which should not be brought before the sensitive mind as if they were a usual and general thing. The acquiescence in a low standard of health, the discussion of diseased conditions as though they were normal, or even as though they were unavoidable, are intensive in their result and harmful to all who come under their influence. The race sickens ever more and more profoundly because of such influences.

We have to-day in our community a new conception in the Government Department of the Ministry of Health, but alas, that Ministry is engrossed in the contemplation of disease. In the present state of our civilization this is perhaps unavoidable, because there are not enough people in the country of standing and experience in scientific research who have concerned themselves with the problems of the healthy and beautiful, and with the needs and requirements in the way of instruction and outward conditions and environment of those who by nature are healthy and normal, and who desire to remain healthy and normal. Even these need instruction to compensate for that which Nature cannot give to those who toil apart from her bosom in the cities, where they cannot hear her voice for the roaring of the traffic. This is the piteous plight of the majority of our citizens to-day, for so many live in towns.

Alas, that there are physical facts which all must face of a type which makes one feel that Nature is cruel in her treatment of us. When two young, beautiful and ardently happy beings are embarking upon the greatest work for the community which they can do, with a desire to create further beautiful and happy lives, it seems indeed an ironic and wanton mistake that there should be distressing physical experiences for both of them to endure. But “As gold is tried by the fire, so the heart is tried by pain,” and if they are given a conscious knowledge of what they must face and what they may avoid, there will then be a firm foundation and a triumphant consummation to the visions and ideals of splendour and perfection which they can secure unimpaired through the trials which they conquer.

CHAPTER IV
The Young Mother-to-be:
Her Amazements

The intermingling of the physical, the mental and the spiritual is so subtle, intricate and inexplicable that, in describing the states of the bride who is about to be a mother, it is difficult to know with which first to deal.

In an Appendix, p. 229, I put in compact form one or two of the obvious physical phenomena with which it may be necessary for the bride and bridegroom to acquaint themselves. Although generally known to their elders, my many correspondents have shown me that even such simple and direct facts are often unknown to young people, who are frequently so shy that they do not like to consult a medical practitioner or an older friend. Assuming then that the simple physical facts are known, there still remain innumerable subtleties which may cause heart searching, perhaps to both bride and bridegroom.

It is almost as though the bearing of a child were a function so primitive in its origin that it tends, to some extent, to dissociate the ordinary coherence of the mother’s life, and to result in a weakening of the sub-conscious control over her emotions to which she had all her life grown accustomed. Thus she enters upon a complex state in which primitive instincts and feelings may be at variance with the conscious thoughts and aspirations of highly civilized and sensitive humanity.

This complexity of her instincts and her conscious feelings may lead the young wife to find an apparently inexplicable conflict in her attitude towards her husband. Consciously she desires ardently, with all that is best in her nature, to bear the child of their love. She adores her husband and is full of tender emotions towards him as the coming father, and experiences a form of gratitude that he should be the means of fulfilling her dreams; but possibly, at the same time, she may be amazed to find in herself an intense and active antagonism to his personal presence, an antagonism which she has to fight against revealing. She may realize that it is utterly at variance with her real feelings, and she may know that it would be the acme of cruelty to allow him to become aware of it, particularly when he is full of deep concern and love for her, and is doing all that a loving consideration can do for her happiness and welfare.

Such a complex diversity of mental states existing perhaps co-incidently at the same hour in the mind of a girl may, if acute, lead to an outwardly recognizable form of hysteria and even to an unbalanced mind. Of such, however, I am not speaking, but am now describing the outwardly controllable, but nevertheless inwardly felt effervescing conflict of instinctive emotions, which is far more frequent than is generally recognized, and which the best balanced and most loving women are amazed to experience in themselves.

From women whom I know to be exceptionally happy wives and mothers, I have evidence on this theme. With, of course, personal variations, they tell me that they have never confided this bewildering experience to their husbands, their doctors or their relatives, but, in essence, they say what is said in the following words by one of my correspondents:—

In the first few months of coming motherhood she had a feeling of antagonism so strong “that it amounted to actual dislike of my husband’s presence, and a desire to be right away from him. This distressed me very much at first as I thought I must be losing my love for my husband, and could not understand such a sudden reversal of feeling as I loved him very deeply.... At the end of the first three months, I found that my feeling of love returned in full strength, and with it a feeling of intense devotion and tenderness towards my husband as the father of my coming child.”

Some such experience, generally and fortunately limited to comparatively short though different periods, is not infrequently felt and is often a source of secret distress and anguish to the young wife whose sense of loyalty to the man she loves and married bars her from the relief of talking of these feelings. As is now beginning to be realized, emotions deeply experienced which are deliberately suppressed, may have far reaching effects even on the health. It is, therefore, well that she should know what is, I am sure, the truth, that this physical repugnance, which sometimes even amounts to a detestation of sharing the same house with the husband, and a desire to escape even from the superficial contact of eating in the same room with him, is a temporary phase, possibly phylogenetic[4] in its origin.

This passing phase, whether it lasts a few days or months, is neither necessary nor absolutely universal, but so far as I can ascertain it appears to be a common occurrence in the lives of the more sensitive and tenderly loving of wives. Where the coming child has not been desired by both parents, and where the mother resents her coming maternity, there is, of course, a totally different problem for which there is a very obvious reason. I am speaking now only of the mother-to-be who deeply desires her child, who is physically healthy and well formed, living under comfortable, protected and happy conditions, and who ardently loves and is loved by her husband; it is she who may and most frequently does feel this passing phase of intense physical antagonism. That she loves, and consciously loves, gives her an outward control so that this under-current of inherent antagonism is not allowed to show, and is gallantly concealed from the whole world. She would feel it an intense disloyalty to speak of it to any living soul, but it is there and it is so often a source of distress and strain upon the nervous system that it should be openly faced instead of being as it now is a repressed feeling. This repression tends to result in one of the greatest difficulties of the healthy woman who is carrying a child, namely sleeplessness. The complex balance of her nervous control is strained by her surprise at herself, and perhaps by her self-reproaches, and thus she has an unnecessary burden in addition to the one of the coming child. This phase, therefore, is not a fact to be ignored or treated too lightly, and while it lasts it should be respected so far as is compatible with the circumstances of the two and with due regard for the mother. It is not a thing either to fear or to be ashamed of. It is perhaps best openly faced as a fact of rather curious interest as an ancient survival in oneself of racial history. If possible it should form the object of innocently playful laughter between the girl and her husband; this would do much to prevent its suppression taking a serious root.

Aware of the existence of this phase and its probable meaning and treating it in this simple sensible way, neither the young mother nor the father-to-be need fear this brief physical antagonism. Where its danger lies, however, is in the possibility that unrecognized, it will, with those who live a shade less perfectly, result in the beginning of a habit of irritation, and perhaps in the setting up of some form of verbal bickering on the part of those who cannot lead as secluded and separate lives as would be possible in a spacious country or in a large establishment. When once the pair have broken the sweet custom of speaking only in love to each other, then, even after the temporary phase of antagonism has passed, they may find themselves with a habit of verbal bickering which is intensely corrosive, ultimately perhaps more than any other thing tending to destroy the outward beauty of a mutual life.

There is another and reverse aspect of the mental phases through which a young mother-to-be may pass, in which she has an intense and added passion for her husband, and, as this leads to a subject of great importance, and a subject which has never been adequately handled, I will defer its consideration to Chapter XII.

CHAPTER V
The Young Mother-to-be:
Her Delights

In a happy and desired motherhood, every hour of the day and night may bring its intense delight, both in the dreams of contemplation, wherein the experience of love sinks deep into the heart, and of the linking up of the present with the future. All natural functions rightly performed give a deep satisfaction and content, but this, the greatest function of all, now so specialized and intimately interwoven with every highest racial impulse and every dearest personal desire of the loving pair, yields a wealth and profundity of experience surpassing all else.

In my opinion, undoubtedly the ideal way of spending the earlier months of coming parenthood is in the form of an extended honeymoon, in which the couple travelling slowly should follow the guide of seasonal beauty or should visit place after place of historic interest or natural charm so that the mother’s mind should be fed and stimulated by historic memories, by the exquisite freshness of nature, and the grandeur of man’s artistic achievements. This, of course, would not be possible in its fullest extent to many, until, in the future, society recognizes the supreme importance to the race of the expectant mother. Some such course, however, might be possible to a larger number than it is at present were they to realize not only their personal good but the racial benefit of this procedure. In our country, owing to our artificial and unclean attitude, the mother-to-be, particularly during the later months, stays at home so far as possible, and does not go from place to place. When going about entails battling with crowds on public conveyances, this is wise. But the easy effort of walking or of riding in the old fashioned horse carriage from place to place on an extended journey, is ideal, and sometimes appears to have beneficial reactions on the character and quality of the child that is coming. But, even if such a mode of life is impossible, yet the mother by reading and conversation can, if she has a mind of trained imagination, vary and enrich the mental environment of her child while it is developing.

Then, too, the mother-to-be can count among her delights all the intimate personal enjoyment of the little physical things which contribute to the great anticipations of the future. She can, if she has the skill herself, sew the little clothes, stitching into them sunny thoughts and beautiful hopes, making them links between the present delightful solitude à deux and another beautiful time which the little one who is coming cannot comprehend till, many years hence, he or she will experience its charm in turn.

Little things intensely loved undoubtedly bring a greater reward in human happiness than great and numerous possessions, the joy of which can be but partly grasped. Within a tiny home, a mother whose heart vibrates with love can find a thousand sources wherewith to enrich the coming life.

But of all her delights, the greatest must always be the thought of the wonderful gift, which, at some ever nearing date, she will be able to give to the man whom she adores. Some men are negligent of the charms and enravishments of children, but I think in every man who fully loves and is fully loved by his wife, the thought of the child of them both must always be a stimulant to everything most ardently beautiful and profound in their natures.

Pictures of the child in after life filling brightly and beautifully some big position in the world may flit past the mother’s mind during this time, but, if the mother is wise, she will not too intimately visualize the outward form of her child as a maturing girl or boy. By so doing she may indirectly wrong it. (See Chapter XIV).

Her delight should be to picture a tiny laughing messenger from God, thinly veiled so that its sex is hidden; the figure of a child a few years old, still full of divine innocence and radiant possibilities. Happy hours of bodily rest may be spent picturing it in a thousand beautiful actions dancing in the sunlight, a contagious centre of joy in the whole world around them. On such an idea of delight she may lavish every day invigorating thoughts and wonderful dreams; none will be wasted, of that she may be assured. If, at the same time, she is securing the coming child’s bodily well-being through the proper material channels, then she can feel that these dreams of higher than material beauty are being built into reality. The secret sacred wonder of the process of which she is the active centre casts its spell of magic and delight around the willing mother. “A Garden enclosed is my Beloved,” and she feels within her own existence the mystic sense of divine beauty, which one feels in another form in a walled garden in the summer twilight.

CHAPTER VI
The Young Mother-to-be:
Her Distresses

The bodily changes which at first almost imperceptibly steal upon the mother, if she be a girl who has enjoyed her own physical beauty, and has taken that care of herself which so delightful a thing as a young woman’s body merits, will be at first a series of amazements and perhaps of delights as her body rounds itself and becomes more perfect. At this time the husband should fill his memory with her exquisiteness, for though she will, in the end, return perhaps to her normal strength and a re-awakened and different beauty, she will never again in her life reach such a point of bodily perfection as she does during the first three months or so of her coming motherhood, culminating at about the close of the third month.

As the years pass, hallowed and sanctified by love which is understood, even when grey with age, her face may gain an ever increasing beauty and power, but the perfection of her body is reached in the early days when she is first about to become a mother.

To one who cares for the outward form of her body, changes will occur inevitably as the months pass, which may give rise to deep distresses, principally because they feel at the time so permanent and it is difficult to believe that the disfigurements will ever pass. For a time she must inevitably become less and less beautiful; she may indeed become, even to herself, repugnant. Perhaps to her as to so many thousands of women the sight of themselves then is a torment, and the conquest of this feeling is a great and increasingly difficult mental exercise. As this time approaches and is upon her, the young mother-to-be must concentrate all her conscious thought on the beauty of the future. She must forget the present and its cruel distortions and live in the months and years that are to come when she will have with her another life and lovely form to which she has given origin.

Nothing is at present gained for our civilization by the obstinate blindness on the part of some, and the wilful deception on the part of others, which together encourage the concealment from the bride of what she has to face.

On the one hand stand these prudes, but on the other the too eager and explicit, even lewd and profane and soiled minds who delight in lugubrious warnings.

The result has been that many a woman enters upon her motherhood gaily and eagerly, totally unprepared for what is to follow, totally unaware that, by the first act of motherhood, she gives up something essential to herself and something which is irreplacable in all the after years. So great a gift should be made not only voluntarily, but consciously, and with full knowledge of what it entails.

Cruel indeed is the callous hardness of the older mind that can see without desiring to help the proud and sensitive young spirit embarking upon a course which cannot but entail subtle difficulties at the best and extreme physical anguish at the worst, yet help of the kind the modern sensitive girl needs is almost unobtainable. Rare indeed is the mother of the last generation who has the power and the knowledge to meet the unvoiced demands of this.

Acquainted as I am with all sorts and conditions of men and women, I am nevertheless frequently amazed and filled with burning indignation at the well-nigh inhuman cruelty, stupidity and hypocrisy of the older generation towards young potential parents. It is not an uncommon thing to hear a man who is unfaithful to his wife because she has lost her physical beauty, at the same time haranguing the public on the compulsory duties of parenthood on the part of all young married women, and coupling his denunciations with sneers at the young girl who fears to embark on motherhood, reviling her as selfish. Yet the cause of her shrinking may be that from all the weltering confusion of contradictory and scrappy information which may have been allowed to reach her, the one which has fixed itself in her mind most vividly, is that which promised her loss of her bodily charm and that of all she possesses which is most valuable to her as a bond which binds her husband’s affection to her. The woman who is perfectly sure of the continuance of her husband’s spiritual and romantic love does not fear the risks of motherhood. All who truly and deeply love, desire parenthood. But can a woman who was married by a shallow man only for her beauty dare to risk the thing which holds him to her?

There is indeed a diabolical malignity in the older man who is himself unfaithful because of the very things in his wife which he denounces the younger girl for fearing.

This must not be misunderstood by my readers as indicating that I think a woman should shrink in any way or that her husband should grudge the sacrifice of all the fragrance and beauty which they possess towards making the child of their love the citizen of the future. But with fervent intensity, I feel that to keep the young woman ignorant of facts, and, at the same time, on the one hand to upbraid and bully her and on the other to terrorize her with evil minded tales and tragic sights, is conduct which would be laughable in its absurdity did it not touch the spring of tears.

As the months of expectant motherhood succeed one another the girl will find her power to walk and run, to keep up with her husband in his pleasure, his out-door exertions, or even to do the usual standing involved in the course of her house work, increasingly curtailed. This is perhaps the inevitable consequence of the burden of actual weight which results from the later growth of the child within her as it increases and approaches the size of a living baby.

Sometimes the fortunate mother finds that she is still capable of the same amount of exertion to which she is generally accustomed, but, under modern conditions, this is but seldom. The stories of Kaffir women on the trek who bear their children and follow on with the rest, and savages whose activity is in no way curtailed, are neither applicable to modern conditions, nor are they fair standards to set, because such women do not live as the modern woman is forced to, nor is their bodily organization really comparable with that of our highly sensitive brain-evolved race.

Nevertheless, with the exception of heavy exertion, the girl who is carrying her child should be able to indulge in a much greater amount of healthful exercise, without undue fatigue, than she is generally able to enjoy. (See also Chapter X).

Most women have heard rumours of others who have been able to follow out almost all their usual occupations, and have felt little or no handicap from child bearing. Such an exceptional woman is my correspondent who wrote:—

Such women, although not very many, do exist among us. Their existence is perhaps the source of the hope which always animates every girl first embarking on her parenthood that she, by the sheer force of the longing for health which is within her, will prove also to be such an exception. Sometimes this desire may be apparently fulfilled, but generally, unless it is coupled with much greater knowledge than most girls possess, as the months pass one by one, her proud spirit will bend, she will give up and give up and give up. Humbled, weakened, humiliated before herself, through the fact that she is not strong enough to fight what she now is inclined acquiescently to call “Nature,” she too goes down the stream with all the myriads of other happy hearted girls, whose gallant endeavours have equally failed. Then she creeps, wearily resting by the way, where she had hoped to tread with a firm and lightsome step.

There grows in her mind, and this is stronger the more she loves her husband, the added distress that she feels that she is failing him. He married a mate, an equal, who lighter of step could yet cover the ground as well as he, and who could share his amusements, his work to some extent perhaps, and his pleasures. She feels that she must, so far as she possibly can, maintain this position. This hope impels her particularly if they have been married but a short time, and hence their days of delightful untramelled companionship have been so few.

In this unselfish distress, which is primarily for him, she is tempted to conceal her effort and tends to overstrain herself in an endeavour to act as completely as she can the part, as reported, of the early Greek or Roman matron or of the proud and savage mother who could bear her children as lightly as a woodland creature. Finding sooner or later that she cannot do so, she suddenly gives in. Her strength, undermined by the series of distresses, the subtle shocks and blows to which she is secretly subjected, she yields and takes on that air of semi-invalidism, demanding constant care and consideration from her husband and those about her, which in a way represents the hauling down of her gallant flag. Her dreams of an easy motherhood are vanquished.

She will at times be dimly conscious that she is no longer able to feel so acutely. This, in a way perhaps, is Nature’s provision against the too intense experiencing of emotion, which would otherwise come with sensitive motherhood. The sensation can be described, as one woman put it, as though each one of her powers of feeling were wrapped round in cotton wool, deadened and clogged so that they no longer gave contact. This may be well, but it adds in a dim way to the various distresses, a sense of unreality and apartness, which, if it coincides with that temporary antipathy to her husband, which was noted on page 33, may make the mother-to-be, for the time at any rate, indeed a wanderer in the valley of the shadow.

CHAPTER VII
The Young Father-to-be:
His Amazements

The young father-to-be, though a real and very important person, has been curiously neglected by all and sundry who concern themselves with the affairs of the “expectant mother,” “child welfare,” and the other social and semi-eugenic matters about which well-meaning people have so voluminously written and so sedulously talked.

Sometimes jesting reference is made to the rather strange fact that, in some savage races, it is the father and not the mother who lies in bed for weeks after the birth of the child, but of the material and very real psychological experiences and physical difficulties which the young father is encountering and living through during the months before the advent of his first-born, few have any knowledge. Fewer still have offered the father-to-be any sympathy or help. Nevertheless with the increasingly perceptive and specialized individuals comprising our civilization, there arises an increasing number of young men capable of feeling and suffering in some degree corresponding to the great realities of which, for each, his home is the centre. And, moreover, it must not be forgotten that among our thoughtful classes are now growing up the young men whose mothers were among the pioneers of women’s emancipation, whose mothers, therefore, were voluntary mothers who have trained their sons consciously and unconsciously, directly and indirectly, to be more in harmony with the true and natural attitude of a sensitive human being to its mate than are the average gross and over-bearing males, sons of enslaved and involuntary mothers. The sensitiveness of the modern young man towards his duties as a father, towards his wife as the mother of his child is, in my experience, very remarkable in its extent and its beauty. I have direct and indirect evidence from thousands that among the young Army men in various messes on the continent in recent years, an unexpected racial seriousness of attitude was shown when the necessary key that unlocked the secret chamber was available. Although it is a most deplorable truth, that there has been an increase in the racial diseases and an outward levity towards women, this is less an inherent baseness on the part of the young men than the result of the existence of the false conditions in which they have been placed, due to the criminal mishandling the whole racial problem has received from those older and in a position of authority.

In the nature of things, at first the young man can scarcely avoid taking fatherhood much more lightly than the girl takes motherhood. In normal, sweet, and healthy men, a desire for children of their own is very strong. Yet, however sympathetic their dispositions, however observant they may be of others, the unmarried young men cannot, under present conditions, have a full comprehension of what the attainment of motherhood involves in sacrifice for the mother. Hence the ideally mated young couple embarking upon parenthood set about it gaily, but before many months have passed, the young father-to-be must also be filled with amazements. For, control her impulse to be alone as she may (see Chapter III), curb her induced fretfulness as she may, the general psychological attraction between the man and the woman must be affected by the physiological state of the mother. The young man should find himself, if not actually repelled as the months progress, at least much more able to give his wife an impersonal tenderness in place of an active desire for physical union than he would have imagined possible. However sweet their love, if they are average human beings and not exceptional, he will perhaps, from time to time, be amazed and pained by unexpected peevishness and fretfulness, perhaps by what appear to be quite irrational and unjustifiable complaints from his wife. He should be made acquainted with the facts on page 33, and should apply them to himself and his wife. Knowing of the liability of such a temporary development, he can guard against any permanent injuries to love arising from the experience, such as often do result when it is unexpected and misunderstood.

I remember once being told by a nurse who had been at a large maternity home that of those who came there for the birth of their child she had only seen one couple between whom there was no bickering, not even infinitesimal criticisms and gusts of temper to ruffle the surface of their intense and romantic devotion. “Generally the women at this time,” she said, “lead their husbands an awful dance, and are always snapping at them, but they do not really mean it, of course.”

Men, on the whole, I think (although it is difficult and dangerous to generalize) are less tolerant of “superficial snappiness” than women, and the ruffling of the surface which comes with a few angry words enters probably deeper into the life of a sensitive man than it does in the life of a girl of corresponding type, although, on the other hand, a man may very quickly acclimatize himself to ignoring such comparative trivialities. Yet at first, at any rate, they not only amaze but distress, and when they appear irrational and swiftly pass, they may, although a trifle in themselves, be the cause of much misunderstanding and may be the foundation of more serious later disharmonies.

To the man who has any biological knowledge, all the wonderful processes of the growth of the unseen embryo, leading up to birth, are full of amazed wonder. If a man knows, as all should in these days (see my book, Married Love, for information about the fundamental processes of mating) how minute is the single sperm cell from which his growing child takes its rise, the immensity of the results of the activity of that tiny cell appear indeed stupendous. His flower-like bride is changed, her whole body is permeated, altered and impressed by the activities of this particle of himself united with its counterpart within her.

Only for the utterly callous can the experience of the months of waiting be anything but full of continual reminders of the amazing complexity of life. Long ago Tennyson felt:—

Even more filled with humble and profound amazement must be the future father, who feels that his wife is now the very centre of the greatest mystery and wonder of the universe. Looking at her, brooding in her dreams, his mind must be continually filled with the consciousness of the eager active growth that is in progress, and the intense desire to take part in the mystical processes.

CHAPTER VIII
The Young Father-to-be:
His Delights

It is said that men naturally have a more casual interest in fatherhood than women have in motherhood. It is sometimes even definitely said that men do not have a passion for fatherhood or care profoundly for young children. This is not my experience. A much larger number of men than are credited with it feel an intense desire for fatherhood, and take a great delight in young children. Though they should share the joy equally, yet the father often has a larger proportion of the pleasure of the little child, while to the mother comes a larger proportion of the burden and the difficulties. To the child itself, too, the father is often more precious than the mother. An accidental testimony to this effect was given by the little daughter of one of those “devoted wives and mothers” who thought woman’s place was only the home, and a mother’s duty only to care for her children. The child and I were chatting and the little one misunderstood something I said, and thought that I asked which of its parents it loved most. The child quickly answered, “Oh, I like father best, of course—mother is there every day and she washes us.” The privilege of being a child’s favourite is no small one, and, as this child shows us, a father may win it with unfair facility.

The conscious dream of parenthood, a parenthood which shall give the children the best possible chance in life undoubtedly lies behind the majority of marriages. Hence when the young man who has married with the desire, perhaps not for immediate, but for ultimate fatherhood, first learns the definite fact that he has already inaugurated the beginnings of his child’s development he must experience an intense and unique wave of feeling, which, as in the early days of marriage, with all its freshness, and with the actual physical difficulties yet unfaced, must be one primarily of buoyant delight.

There is also in the earlier months, for the man of artistic perceptions, an unique experience in the appreciation of his wife’s enhanced beauty. It is perhaps known that the most critical artistic view of woman claims the highest point of perfection in her form about the third month of her first period of motherhood. To a pair of lovers who have delighted in their bodily beauty, as all natural and healthy and well formed young people should do, this period, when the loveliness of the woman is at its very height, and when the man can feel that he has contributed to its perfection, must be a time of very special entrancement. That it is something from within his most sacred being that has added this glow and radiance in perfecting the rounded form of the body that he adored in its virginal grace, must give a man with artistic and poetic potentialities an all too brief but never to be forgotten experience. The young father-to-be should not lose a day of these swiftly passing weeks, for this phase, like all human developments, but even more intensely so than most, is passing and transient, only to be immortalized in the permanence of a perceptive memory.

When, as is inevitable, it has passed, and is followed within another month or two by a phase so acutely, perhaps agonizingly its reverse, the crucifixion of the mother’s sensitive feelings which is entailed should be hallowed and elevated in both their minds by that deeper, less personal, and more profoundly racial delight, the picturing with each other of the radiance, the strength, the power, the purpose and passion of the life which they are creating. So tragically soon after the days when he has feasted his eyes and filled his memory with her beauty, she will, she must withdraw her body from him and for months to come he will be shut out entirely from all sight of her. The reward will be an inner experience of the mind.

A day will come when, for the first time, the father-to-be may lay his hand upon his wife below her waist and feel the sturdy little kicks of his future son or daughter, and can know that, though hidden from him, still there is beside him a vital and independent being whom he has wakened to life. The presence of this little creature whom he has not seen colours and permeates every hour of their joint existence, and links the family in an extraordinary unity, the full significance of which I will consider in Chapter XII.

When the later months pass, the father-to-be will have lost one of his most exquisite memories if he has not already talked and laughed with his future child, and if he and his wife and child together have not united in that most mystical union possible to human flesh.

CHAPTER IX
The Young Father-to-be:
His Distresses