One evening, not long ago our daddy was delayed a few minutes with his evening chores, just enough that we missed connections for about five minutes before we reached home, I had to leave to go to town with some neighbors. And for that little interim, the children were left alone in the house. The thing like that doesn't happen often, and all evening a ghost of a worry haunted me: even though I was sure they would be perfectly safe. The next day at dinner, talk came up of some event, to which dad and I both wanted to go: but we are so in the habit of arranging for someone to be with the children that we had to decide which of us was to go. Baby boy, age 6 looked up a matter fact, way and remarked, "Why don't you both go? We can do the outside work like we always, and we can run the house."
A simple remark, but how startling in its significance! Can it be that there is a time coming when we won't need always to plan our days according to whether someone can look after the babies? In the beginning the chains galled us some, but as time went on, it became second nature for us to adapt our comings and goings around the welfare of the little ones and the stranger the habit grew, the less the chains chafed. And now, at the prospect of liberty, we are almost appalled.
Begged to Get Back
A few days ago the newspapers carried a story of an old man, who, after spending most of his years in a penitentiary, was pardoned and turned loose in the world strange to him. In a very short, while he came back to the prison, begging, pitifully, to be re-admitted, for he couldn't adjust himself to freedom. I think parents can understand his feelings, when their children shoot up suddenly and independent girlhood and boyhood. One by one, the bond are loosening: babies learn to feed themselves, and dress themselves, and bathe themselves, to keep out of dangerous places without being watched, and later to think, and decide and act for themselves. It all leaves a parent with us for sort of feeling, questioning whether freedom is all that it is cracked up to be. Those bonds were sweet, after all.
If there is a moral to all this, it would be a word of encouragement to those poor, tired, young mothers, whose moments are packed so full of tending babies that they have no time to take care of themselves, that there is an easier time coming: that this hardest time is short. And a word of warning to the rebellious young mothers who are afraid that they will lose too much of their own life if they devote themselves to babies now. "Who looses his life shall find it." In tending this rose garden of babyhood we have a thorny time in many ways. Some days we can notice nothing but prickles. But after the hard work is done, and we look back on the arduous days, we see nothing but a massive bloom. – Hope.