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

by Ursula Bloom

Now I would warn you of the devastating effect of your fussy habits. You treat your baby like a toy. You are prepared to do everything that you can for your child, you shepherd it through life, shielding it from unkind contacts, helping it over all rough patches, and only because you take a delight in playing the fussy father. And you are so wrong! You are being very cruel, although you flatter yourself that you are being extremely kind. Teach that child to fend for itself the very moment it can, and before it can, if possible. The animals are far better parents than we are, and they never impose their own affections to any degree on their cubs; their first lessons, begun as soon after birth as possible, are the great lessons of self-preservation and of doing for oneself.

  Do teach your baby the same way.

  Teach him to pull on those ridiculous woolly boots of his. It will be laborious showing him the way, and it is of course so much easier to push them on to him yourself, and not wait for him to play about with them. But it is unfair to your child.

  It is laziness which makes parents what the world calls ‘such good parents’. They hate your saying this, because laziness is not half such a nice way of putting it as making out it is generosity of heart and the desire to do their best for their children. It takes so much longer to teach a baby to live, than to live its life for it. They are peculiarly stupid. I spent hours of my life trying to persuade you to put on a woollen vest. You fingered it in a leisurely fashion. You eyed it coldly. You thought it an enormous joke. All the time I was itching to get away. But the fact remained that all your life you would have to get into vests, with which nobody would help you. The sooner you learnt the lesson, the sooner you would become a self-reliant and sensible person who knew that the first elemental lesson is to do for oneself.

  So I went on teaching you.

  Now, the lazy mother dresses her child, and people glow and say what a wonderful mother she is and how she dotes on the darling. But she is not being a wonderful mother at all. She is doing his job for him.

  Teach your child to fend for himself the moment that he is able, and he will be able much younger than you suppose now.

  Don’t pick up rattles for him; later on in life nobody will pick up the things which he drops deliberately. Let him learn that now. All you are doing in your kindness of heart is to give him quite the wrong idea of life, and show him a world which is non-existent. You are deliberately cheating him because you are just a silly, fussy and spoiling father.

  Don’t be a fool!

  You have got to remember that however much you long to do it, you must not intrude your own personality on his; he has a right to be himself. If he shows a marked preference for certain things, then encourage him along those lines. Don’t force food on him which he dislikes, but don’t encourage those dislikes by dwelling on them. It won’t do. Accept likes and dislikes as being the normal points in the everyday person. Never let him think that there is anything unusual about him, but treat him as being ordinary. I know you think that he is far from being this, but the outside world probably sees him with less glow.

  This is unlikely to be your only child. If you give all of yourself to him, he will be an embittered baby when the brother or sister comes along and you start dividing your attentions. Charming as it may be, don’t be tempted into baby-balminess. Lots of men are, and it is such a grave mistake, and bad for the child as well as for yourself.

  A baby is a man of to-morrow. He has all the man’s emotions bottled up inside him, and if you will insist on treating him as a diverting toy, you are being grossly unfair to him. Give him a chance.

  Don’t talk baby-language to him, so that he has to unlearn it all a little later on when he will have to speak English. Don’t pander to his intelligence, believing it to be somewhere miles below your own. He is a great deal more intelligent than you suppose, and by thinking of him as a toy, you are deterring him from thinking for himself. He has got to learn all these things, and you are the proper person to teach him. In the first year of his life his development is little short of a miracle. He grows as you look at him.

  I have practised what I am preaching in my upbringing of you. You are four years old. You can dress and undress yourself after a fashion. You can do your personal shopping, and you can live your own life independently of me. I do not grovel for the toys that you drop; you have to get them yourself or go without. As you don’t like going without, you have decided to be careful and not to drop them till you are sick of them. Lesson number one! You have few illusions about the world you live in, but you have a jolly good idea of how to make the most of that world, and to get the best from it.

  I wish I had known as much as you do, when I was four, and lived in that sheltered nursery where everything that was real was kept from me, and where I existed in a fool’s Paradise, in a dream-world which never could be beyond my four walls.

  Scrupulous fairness in upbringing is the only kindly method. To cheat is unfair. To tell a child lies is unfair also, and believe me when I say that a child who is old enough to ask questions is old enough to be taught the truth. You should be the sheet-anchor to whom he can turn, confident of knowledge. The first time that you lie to him, you abuse your position as parent, and he will see through that lie, and never treat you with the same respect again.

  Fussing is being unfair.

  You cannot hope to shelter your baby from the blows which Fate will ultimately give him, and it is useless starting on the principle that you will shield him as long as ever you can. Far, far better let him learn the primitive principles of cause and effect. This will teach him how to steel himself against those blows, and how to live life as a staunch and faithful citizen, and be of the greatest value to himself, his companions, and the world that he is to live in.

  Here are a few final facts which I should be very grateful if you would think over for yourself, my son.

  My grandchild is not the most

  (a) marvellous,

  (b) beautiful,

  (c) intelligent

  baby that was ever born. His prep schoolmaster will disillusion you on that score a little later on, though you will probably think that the man is merely biased and that years have made him hard.

  You are not the most blessed among men to be father to this paragon. The man next door has possibly got an equally magnificent baby!

  I blush for what you may be led into saying about your child. I blush for your poor innocence.

  Even if you feel all these things, don’t say them. Suppress the desire to tell the world about your good fortune in the possession of one most perfect son. Take my advice, have another baby and cure yourself of your fussiness.

  A man never wakes his second child to see it laugh!

  As always,

  Mother.

  DIVORCE

  Frinton-on-Sea.

  February 1922.

  DEAR BABY,

  It seems frightful to be writing a letter to you on divorce, when you are a small, very pink person, who is playing on the rug with a tin train, a pug dog, and a box of bricks. I sincerely hope that divorce will never come into your life, because even at its best it is disillusioning, and is the hall-mark of much suffering, but this letter has to be written, because it covers a subject which seems to affect the modern young man and young woman a great deal.

  I have got to say as a start that I don’t believe in divorce. When I promise on oath that I will carry out a contract to my life’s end, I carry that contract out, come what may. This is, I know, quite stupid. I am a Victorian. I have principles for which I have already suffered very badly, but at the same time I personally should suffer more if I lowered those principles into the dust. Because I am that sort of person. But the modern young people don’t feel that way, and it is a new type of world and a new type of girl and man living in that world.

  The Victorians did anything rather than confess a mistake. They drew down their blinds on their errors and hoped that the world would not penetrate through those blinds. Alas! they were only lace cu
rtains.

  Those lace curtains were as transparent as possible and all the world knew; but because it was a different world, it pretended that nothing was amiss. It was all a system of transparent pretence. I don’t know if it paid or if it did not. Quarrels were patched up for the sake of what the outside world would think. People put up with conditions and made the best of a bad job; whether they suffered more for it, or less, I don’t know.

  Anyway, it isn’t the same world to-day.

  The war is over. There has been a wave of wild dissipation, and people have thrown their bonnets over the windmills. Divorce is everywhere. People don’t try to patch up quarrels any more, they blazon them out into the harsh light of day. They chat wildly about them.

  I don’t know what sort of a world it will be when you are a man, and therefore my advice may be a little out of date, but if it goes on this way, it is going to be a very peculiar life, to say the least of it.

  A great many of us will have to re-shape our ideas to the changing world which goes on around us. Although I personally do not like the prospects which that world seems to offer, I will try to be tolerant about them, and to treat the whole thing broad-mindedly.

  I have seen a great deal of unhappy marriage, because my grandmother made a horrid mess of her second marriage, my mother left my father, and I had rather a difficult time myself. I am not blaming your father; it was nobody’s fault, circumstances drove us very hard. Unhappy marriage is never a pleasant prospect, and there is the gruelling fact to abide by, that you have only the one life to live, and therefore it seems cruel that you should be forced to sacrifice it in being tethered to someone you do not love. The idea of being an example becomes a mockery. It seems calamitous that wedlock should become deadlock, yet this is what it amounts to.

  Unfortunately if you take steps to make the way out easy, it seems to me only too apparent that young people will be tempted to take this more serious step in their lives more flippantly, and more lightly, and without stopping to consider fully the disaster which may attend it.

  Marriage is never a thing that you can rush into. Divorce is something that nobody wants to dash at, and however it may be authorized legally and smiled upon, it is only too obvious that it is bound to leave the scars of bitter experience behind it, and that it cannot do very much to make a couple feel happier about life.

  I cannot see where the remedy lies. I do feel that it must be a pity to make the way out of marriage simple, because too many people will say, ‘I’ve made a hash of it, far better to make the clean break than go on trying to stick things out’, and will be tempted to give up trying, when a whole-hearted effort to put things straight might have resulted in a satisfactory partnership.

  Divorce belittles the old maxim of ‘try ‒ try again’. And the fact that you know you can get a divorce does not help you to settle down and make the best of things.

  Still, perhaps all this is beside the point and goes for nothing. This letter is intended for the day when you have discovered that you have made a mess of your marriage, and that you have got to do something about it.

  What about divorce?

  Now I am taking it for granted that the mess you have made is a big one. It is no good contemplating divorce as the result of the first upset in your marriage. Everybody has upsets. People may tell you, ‘We have been married fourteen years and have never had a quarrel’, but you can take that with a grain of salt. They may not have had an absolute quarrel, but they quite definitely have had bickerings. It is impossible for two people to live together in such close intimacy as marriage, with all the continual difficulties of living life and of arranging their days, without them occasionally coming to loggerheads. Those quarrels do not matter. They form character, they develop personalities, they make the couple even more fond than they were before, provided they stay within limits.

  But directly you get distressing quarrels, which last longer than they should do, and spoil days on end, then it is a different matter. If you find that you or your wife is developing a vile temper which is unbearable in the home, and seriously affecting your marriage, then is the time to consider a change in the future. But not divorce. Nobody should give way unreasonably to a violent temper, and you should take it in hand. You must try to see things from a sane angle, and gather that if it is an upsetting factor of this kind, it is your duty to take the factor to task, and not the marriage.

  Marriage can only be dissolved because of a much more obvious fault. Unfaithfulness is a just cause, particularly if it be of the persistent type, which makes it an obstacle that you cannot overcome. If it is your wife’s fault, and you forgive her once and then take her back to start all over again, only to find that once more she is deceiving you, you must part. It is not fair on you, or on your children. Also you have got to face up to the fact that an unfaithful wife may present you with somebody else’s children to care for and educate, and that this will affect not only you, but your whole family. In our family a woman did this for us; the husband thought it better to draw those lace curtains of Victorianism over the whole thing, and admit nothing. Naturally he said a great deal to his own people about it. They avoided the scandal and everything went beautifully; not a soul thought the darling little girl was anything but the ‘nice little sister’ she should have been, and left it at that.

  This man thought that he was doing right in forgiving his wife and avoiding a scene. He forgot that there was money in trust which was divided amongst the ‘child or children of the marriage’. That dear little girl walked off with her share of this money, and impoverished her two brothers.

  To shield your wife is all right, provided you are not doing so at the expense of your children, and the unfaithful wife very often is a menace to your family.

  There is an old saying that a woman who has been unfaithful once goes on at it; it seems hard, and I think that there are many exceptions, but unfortunately exceptions prove the rule. If, on the other hand, you are finding that you have attractions elsewhere, that you simply do not care any more for your wife and are for ever dangling after somebody else’s petticoat, I do not think this is sufficient cause for a divorce.

  Divorce should not be yours because you have grown tired of the bondage; I know that there are people who manage to put this a great deal better than I can, and who bring up high-sounding arguments to the effect that it is quite wrong to continue a love-knot when love has ceased to be. But, after all, if you have ceased to love your wife, and are not desperately in love with somebody else, I do not think it is fair of you to throw her aside.

  Life treats women far more unfairly than men. It has a vendetta against them all the time. Love is a woman’s whole existence, and she wilts with loneliness and lovelessness. Yet her love-life lasts at the most thirty years. When she is in the forties that life is dying for her; Nature has merely the one use for her, which is to produce children, and when she ceases that function, it does not bother a couple of hoots with her any more. The country is full of women who have passed the hey-day of their attraction and are very lonely, and very unhappy. If you throw your wife aside believing that she is happier on her own, and thinking that you are doing the right thing, I would ask you to think again.

  To make somebody unhappy is never the right thing.

  It is all very well being frank about it and saying, ‘We have both made a mistake, and the fairest thing is to admit the truth rather than trying to abide by a lie’. You have not made a mistake, you have just grown tired of her, though that does not sound half as grandiose, or half as clever.

  But if you are in love with somebody else, then it is a very different story.

  I personally think that you can split your marriage if there are real, very violent quarrels, quarrels which hurt badly; drunkenness; ‘going in danger of your life’; or unfaithfulness. Because all these vices affect other people. They will react badly on your children.

  I was one of the children brought up in a household where things were not going too we
ll, and the whole of my life has been warped by the bitter experiences of those unhappy early days.

  The people who brought me into the world and were responsible for my happiness, for my early impressions, for my life, ought never to have allowed this to be. That is why I do emphasize the point that when the rupture is of such a serious nature that it comes under one of the above headings, the only thing to do is to make it complete, for the sake of the people whom it may so adversely affect.

  We will say that you are in love with another woman.

  This is a situation old as the hills, though new to you. Please don’t dramatize yourself. People in love have a horrid tendency to theatricalism, and to the foolish belief that they are the only ones who have ever fallen in love, who have ever wanted to split their marriage and to run away with another woman.

  You will trot out the old arguments. You will argue that you and the other woman are desperately happy together, why should you confiscate this happiness, for the sake of your wife who begs you not to leave her? It is two being made unhappy, whereas it might only be the one.

  I cannot believe that I should ever divorce anybody, because I should be so ashamed that I could go back on the vows that I had made. The happiness of two for one is a poor argument, when the one happens to be your wife. Once you were crazy to marry her. You will reply with the age-old arguments, ‘She is cold to me’, ‘She has changed’, ‘We don’t get on well together’, and finally, ‘I’m not happy’.

  The wife who is cold is generally so because her husband does not know how to make love to her. There are two sides to every question, you know. Unless she is of the adventuress type (and you will long to pluck this word away from its context, brandish it high, and cry ‘That’s just it’, so I warn you about that first), she is unlikely to have changed. The glamour may have gone. Marriage is settling down; it is not a continuation of the rather crazy loveliness of being engaged. That change would have been bound to happen, had you married any woman in the world. The Browning emotion is a rare quality; I doubt if you are ever likely to find it.