Letters to My Son: A mother's words of warmth, wit and wisdom from 100 years ago

by Ursula Bloom

  These are above price.

  The ceremony and the excitement have been a big ordeal for any girl, and if she sheds a few tears, it relieves the tension, so try not to misunderstand them.

  You drive away in a car that has been provided by yourself, though all the rest of the wedding carriages have gone down to Mamma-in-law’s and Papa-in-law’s bill. You will probably arrive at the house before they do.

  You take up your stand to receive people in a room which has been decided on beforehand, and the in-laws probably stand in the doorway and say ‘how do you do’ to people first, passing them on to you. Everybody wishes you happiness, and you find that there is nothing new to say, and wish that they would not go on doing it. During the party the bride cuts the cake, and you stand by her side feeling very foolish but comforting yourself with the thought that all young men have been through this once. Somebody will step forward and make a speech, wishing you both the same old wish, and by now you are heartily sick of it, and you will then hop up and make a reply speech. And make it snappy. Make it brief. Don’t go trailing on because you have no idea how to end it. If you are a wise man, you will have learnt it by heart the day before, trot it out and have done with it.

  You will slip away to change when the whole thing is nearly over, and then there will be the final moment when your car is at the door, and the good-byes are being said, and you are longing to get her away and to yourself.

  She doesn’t hurry.

  No, of course she doesn’t, and in this you must not be resentful. The moment that she comes down the hall and steps into the car, she crosses the border-line into a new world; she will have severed all the old home ties. Perhaps in these last few minutes she realizes how utterly sweet those ties were, and how much she wants to hold on to them. She goes out of that house, where she was the petted daughter, never to enter it again except as ‘Pip’s wife’. There is a big difference, and now quite suddenly she is realizing it.

  You will have given your best man a cheque, and he will cover all the expenses of the ceremony. When you return from your honeymoon he will render you an account, otherwise don’t worry about it. You will be besieged with confetti, and the thing to do is to start off gaily enough, back the car up the first lane you find, and have a general clean-up. If you think that you are going to get rid of the confetti, you make a mistake. Far better to have taken time by the forelock and have supplied your guests with the large pink rose petals that you can buy at any store. These are simplicity itself to pick up and push out of the window, and will not defy you, like those horrid little bits of paper.

  I want you to be considerate and understanding on your honeymoon. This was a time really allotted so that you might get to know one another in a new relationship and a new life. It is a time during which you adapt yourselves to new conditions, and to learning the most perfect truths about one another.

  If at first she is a trifle homesick, don’t take this as a personal injury. Never be jealous of a girl’s love for her home, because this is a loyalty which has some fine element in it.

  A wedding is the greatest day in a girl’s life (or it should be), but it is a big upheaval of all her ideas and theories, and the mental change which comes to her is something which is almost too great for her to bear. Do let her have a little time in which to ‘find herself’.

  Choose beautiful surroundings, because this is going to be a time that you will look back upon, and you cannot be faddy enough about its background. You will have consulted her, of course, as to where she wants to go, but I personally think it is a pity to decide on somewhere with too long a journey, because getting married is a fatiguing day, and then to start off on a trip across the Continent (when perhaps she has not travelled much before) is really asking for trouble.

  Don’t worry too much if confetti splashes out of your bag on to the hotel carpet. All the world loves a lover and is tolerant of them. It is nothing to be ashamed of.

  Standing on the threshold of your married life, my boy, there seems to be so much to say, so much to warn you of, and so many pitfalls which offer themselves, about which I cannot advise you, because it all seems to be so far away and remote. It is difficult to contrast you to-day, in your very short smock and very brief knickers, with the young man in a silk hat and stripey trousers setting out to get married.

  Happy marriage is the loveliest alliance that life can offer you, just as unhappy marriage is the most bitter. Please remember this.

  Again I would say ‒ and I realize that I am always stressing it ‒ try to keep sentiment with you for ever. Don’t, because later, when you have been married a long time, you grow a little cynical, scoff at sentiment and consider it cheap, because this can do more to making your marriage a success and to cementing your happiness than anything else.

  Do not shut away in your heart’s memory the little foolish things that you once did. Because life may have seemed to grow practical and commonplace, don’t scorn the romance that once was, and the tenderness that in your early wedded life was so precious.

  Don’t grow stodgy.

  Try to carry on your honeymoon into your life, so that you keep the memory fresh and green, a loveliness that is yours for ever. And may your marriage be the happiest one ever.

  Always your

  Mother.

  WHEN YOU ARE MARRIED

  Frinton-on-Sea.

  August 1919.

  DEAR SON,

  There is coming a day in your life when everything else suddenly begins to look drab and ordinary beside it. You are going to get married.

  Naturally you think that she is the most wonderful girl whom you have ever met, and that you are not half good enough for her. You make this remark really as something of a phrase, not meaning it in its entirety, but, mark my words ‒ and this sounds strange as coming from the mother-in-law-to-be ‒ there is no man good enough for a good woman.

  The day that you marry her, you will be eager to accept all the responsibilities, and to shift all trials and troubles from her shoulders, and with the very best intentions in the world you will be ready to comfort and succour her for ever. At the same time, old man, however hard you try, or whatever you do, you will be shipping a whole load of extra cares on to her, for love and life work that way.

  When a man or a woman marries, then their troubles begin. I sound cynical. I sound old. It isn’t much good jibbing at facts when you are somebody’s mother.

  You will be saddling this girl with the responsibility of running a house, and every year it seems to me that this becomes more difficult. I doubt if we ever go back to the good or bad old days of cheap labour, and comfortable domesticity. Labour-saving has not atoned for the lack of servants. I’d rather have a couple of Grandmamma’s servants than all the chromium and washing-machines, all the central heating and the vacuum-cleaners in the world. I know which stood for the most comfort.

  You say that you can get a housekeeper, which is possibly true, but there comes the vital question of who is going to manage the housekeeper? One thing is certain, you aren’t. That will be ‘her job’.

  Even if it is only figuratively speaking, your wife will have to superintend the darning of your socks, the washing of your shirts, the cleaning of your rooms and the cooking of your meals.

  She will be your unpaid companion; when you are irritable and have ‘got out of bed the wrong way’, she will come in for the curses. When you are ill, she will wait upon you, and she will meet the necessity of having to bring your children into the world, nurse them and superintend them also, and wrestle with all the complications of whooping-cough and measles, tantrums and tempests.

  You will hate me for saying this.

  At the moment you are thinking entirely of life as being a bed of roses all the way. You think there will never be days when you are cross, or when she will be peevish and fretty and look hideous. But such days come into everybody’s life, it wouldn’t be life if they didn’t; it would be a dream and would sate you with its sickliness
.

  Bad days give good days more brightness. We have to have the shadows to show the vividness of the sun. Try to accept it that way.

  Marriage makes very little difference to a man, save that his money does not go so far and he has more responsibilities; it makes all the difference in the world to a woman. Her entire mode of life is changed by it. She is no longer a free agent.

  You may argue that a man also loses his freedom, but I maintain that he never does it in quite the same way. The house is never quite as much of a millstone round his neck. He does not suffer such agonies with domesticity as she does.

  However far we progress, and however independent women become, we naturally accept the burden of the domestic welfare as our share. We cannot be domestic for generations ‒ ever since Eve cleaned the cave, in fact ‒ and then suddenly slip out of that rut because in the war we took up work on the land, and in offices.

  The girl whom you marry will probably be a pampered daughter, who has been delicately shielded from unpleasantnesses. Every care will be taken of her, so that she will have had no onus of responsibility to bear at all.

  She has probably been the lode-star of a dozen amorous youths, all willing to promise her anything if only she will be theirs. She is, the moment that her wedding peal ceases, fettered down to the whims and fancies of one young man; she is no longer so attractive to the multitude. She starts on the domestic life with little experience, but a sublime belief that she will worry through; she is quite inefficient to cope with the problems, and the moment she makes mistakes it is probable that you will grow annoyed, and drop on to her for them.

  How do you suppose she can learn everything at once? Not only is she confronted with the management of difficult servants, and the financial allotment of the housekeeping money, but there is a very big physical change in her life, and in her outlook. Marriage does change a woman’s outlook. You may think that I am mis-stating my facts, but you will find that I am perfectly right.

  Be gentle with her on the domestic side. What is the good of letting fly if she cannot summon up the courage to sack the cook? I have suffered tortures on this score; most women do. There is nothing much more formidable in life than a really irate cook, and if you are to grow cynical and make comments about the stupidity of ‘being afraid of your servants’, you go and sack the cook yourself, and see if it does not take some courage.

  You may learn a lesson which you will not forget in a hurry, and it will do you a great deal of good.

  In life it is the little things which assume the major importances. The annoying, nagging little things upset a woman very much indeed. It is the sacking of the cook, the ordering of eternal meals, the old routine, the darning and mending, doing the same thing at the same time every day of your life, which chafe you so dreadfully.

  You have got to make allowances, even in marriage. She may be the most wonderful woman ever, and the brightest star that ever dazzled in your sky, but she will make the same old mistakes that all of us have made, and she won’t be clever enough to avoid them.

  The trouble is that most men seem to imagine that all women are born with the domestic understanding, and that it is not something which has to be learnt. They hurry us. They do not give us time to find our own feet in the new sphere, before they dictate.

  The first time that you attempt to ride a bicycle, you will wobble out on to the road, and make a fiasco of it. But grown-up people will not reproach you. They will encourage you and try to help you to do better.

  That is what you must do in marriage.

  Help your girl to do better, and she will be eternally grateful to you for your gentleness. You can lead a wife whom you cannot drive. Try the method of encouragement, and remember that however bright she may be, when it comes to matrimony she has got a great deal to learn which cannot be absorbed at the church porch.

  You are two young people setting out on a new life together, and although you may think that it is all going to be rosy, there will be dark patches. There are in everybody’s life. But it is a real joy to overcome the difficulties together, and to remember that marriage is a partnership, and that it can be the happiest partnership in the world.

  Always your loving

  Mother.

  BIRTH

  Frinton-on-Sea.

  May 1921.

  MY DEAR SON,

  There comes a time in everybody’s married life when they wonder whether they want children, or whether they do not; they weigh up the pros and cons, and decide for themselves. It is a difficult question, and one which you cannot approach without serious thought, also it is a subject on which few parents help their children; that is why I so very much want to give you some advice.

  It is difficult to be helpful on this point; but after all marriage was invented with the idea of propagating the species, and I am old-fashioned enough to believe that unless you do have children, you will not get the best out of the contract.

  This again is an individual view-point, and one on which you will have to satisfy yourself, not one on which I can really advise you.

  It is quite true that when you contemplate taking on a family, you saddle yourself with responsibilities, and you shackle yourself for several years ahead. I believe that life is worth very little to any one of us, unless it is accompanied by responsibilities, but this may not be your idea. The bringing into the world of other lives with which to carry on that world is the most important work that we undertake. It does not end there. You may hold the theory that paid people can bring up your children even better than you can; that you can supply your sons and daughters with excellent nurses, and send them to efficient schools, that you will anyway get rid of them somehow; but it is not so easy as that. I do not think that if you are a loving and sentimental parent you can do this in the way you suppose.

  Children endear themselves to you, they enchain themselves to you with bonds that are insuperably strong; you will suffer more emotional pangs over your babies than you know of at the moment. And, although to-day you may talk of the unborn as ‘the little brats’, tomorrow you will be thinking very differently when you hold them in your arms, and recognize the enormous strength of their hold upon your heart.

  I do not think that people should deliberately put aside all thought of having children, unless they have a legitimate cause for this. Mere inconvenience is not a legitimate cause. Poverty, sickness, hereditary traits are all causes that come very formidably to the front, and should be considered.

  I have always felt that it is a mistake to have a baby in the first year of one’s marriage, because it spoils a very beautiful time together. But again, although this is my innermost feeling on the subject, as you were born within twelve months of my wedding day, it is quite obvious that I did not practise what I preach.

  If you set about starting a family at once, you lose the first glamour of marriage, which is something that you can never recapture. There is a time for everything in life, and if you allow matters to step out of their niche and take the wrong time, then you lose something which you cannot hope to regain later on.

  Those first few months together have a sweetness; probably it cannot last, because it is too sugary, but it is something which is a pity to cheat yourself of. And you do cheat yourself if you launch out into having a baby.

  Pregnancy is always a gamble. It is all very well for doctors and old wives to say it is a natural procedure and should make no difference to your lives; it makes all the difference in the world. Some women feel miserably ill, and most of them are frightened of what lies ahead. You dare not undertake excursions and trips which would never be thought twice about under ordinary conditions. It clips your wings.

  I am all for a year together first with no outside complications. In that year you will learn to understand one another better, and to settle down to life in harness; then, when that first sugary sweetness is losing its attraction, when you are beginning to see life through more workaday eyes, that is the time to incur third-party risk
s. Then is the time to launch yourself out upon the great adventure of birth.

  When I knew that you were coming, I was afraid.

  Your father was afraid too, for neither of us knew or understood what would happen. It is the ignorance which is so distressing, and unfortunately other people’s experience does not seem to help you very much. We knew that there were women who made a great fuss, and again women who declared stoutly that there was nothing to it. There were people who did not mind being called upon when they were expecting a baby, and others who shrank from contact and thought secretly that it was all rather indecent.

  I want you to know as much as it is possible about these matters, because it is natural for a wife to turn to her husband for guidance, and if he is abysmally ignorant, she is bound to suffer rather badly.

  My mother had always told me that having a baby was a normal and natural thing, and that nobody ought to shrink from it. That may be so; I don’t know. I do know that every year it seems to be more difficult to have babies; whether it is that we are progressing along the path of civilization too far, or what else it can be, I am not sure. I never found having you normal or natural. It is far, far better to be pessimistic, and to treat the whole affair with caution.

  Then you may get a pleasant surprise later on.

  When you are making up your minds as to whether you want a family or no, do take into consideration several points. Children are your insurance upon old age. They are your stake in the land, your justification for existence. Without them you age early. With them you are young again, and in some small measure retread the path of youth. In them you will have an abiding interest, a fresh outlook, and they will save you from growing narrow and bigoted and foolish. They will be untold trouble to you, so don’t imagine that you are getting a great blessing with nothing else to it.