_MOTHERHOOD._
IT is supposed by some that to become a mother is of itself a healing
and saving dispensation; that of course the reign of selfishness
ends, and the reign of better things begins, with the commencement of
maternity.
But old things do not pass away and all things become new by any such
rapid process of conversion. A whole life spent in self-seeking and
self-pleasing is no preparation for the most august and austere of
woman’s sufferings and duties; and it is not to be wondered at if the
untrained, untaught, and self-indulgent shrink from this ordeal, as
Lillie did.
The next spring, while the gables of the new cottage on Elm Street were
looking picturesquely through the blossoming cherry-trees, and the
smoke was curling up from the chimneys where Grace and her husband were
cosily settled down together, there came to John’s house another little
Lillie.
The little creature came in terror and trembling. For the mother had
trifled fearfully with the great laws of her being before its birth;
and the very shadow of death hung over her at the time the little new
life began.
Lillie’s mother, now a widow, was sent for, and by this event installed
as a fixture in her daughter’s dwelling; and for weeks the sympathies
of all the neighborhood were concentrated upon the sufferer. Flowers
and fruits were left daily at the door. Every one was forward in
offering those kindly attentions which spring up so gracefully in
rural neighborhoods. Everybody was interested for her. She was little
and pretty and suffering; and people even forgot to blame her for the
levities that had made her present trial more severe. As to John, he
watched over her day and night with anxious assiduity, forgetting every
fault and foible. She was now more than the wife of his youth; she was
the mother of his child, enthroned and glorified in his eyes by the
wonderful and mysterious experiences which had given this new little
treasure to their dwelling.
To say the truth, Lillie was too sick and suffering for sentiment. It
requires a certain amount of bodily strength and soundness to feel
emotions of love; and, for a long time, the little Lillie had to be
banished from the mother’s apartment, as she lay weary in her darkened
room, with only a consciousness of a varied succession of disagreeables
and discomforts. Her general impression about herself was, that she
was a much abused and most unfortunate woman; and that all that could
ever be done by the utmost devotion of everybody in the house was
insufficient to make up for such trials as had come upon her.
A nursing mother was found for the little Lillie in the person of a
goodly Irish woman, fair, fat, and loving; and the real mother had none
of those awakening influences, from the resting of the little head
in her bosom, and the pressure of the little helpless fingers, which
magnetize into existence the blessed power of love.
She had wasted in years of fashionable folly, and in a life led only
for excitement and self-gratification, all the womanly power, all the
capability of motherly giving and motherly loving that are the glory
of womanhood. Kathleen, the white-armed, the gentle-bosomed, had all
the simple pleasures, the tendernesses, the poetry of motherhood; while
poor, faded, fretful Lillie had all the prose—the sad, hard, weary
prose—of sickness and pain, unglorified by love.
John did not well know what to do with himself in Lillie’s darkened
room; where it seemed to him he was always in the way, always doing
something wrong; where his feet always seemed too large and heavy, and
his voice too loud; and where he was sure, in his anxious desire to
be still and gentle, to upset something, or bring about some general
catastrophe, and to go out feeling more like a criminal than ever.
The mother and the nurse, stationed there like a pair of chief
mourners, spoke in tones which experienced feminine experts seem to
keep for occasions like these, and which, as Hawthorne has said, give
an effect as if the voice had been dyed black. It was a comfort and
relief to pass from the funeral gloom to the little pink-ruffled
chamber among the cherry-trees, where the birds were singing and the
summer breezes blowing, and the pretty Kathleen was crooning her Irish
songs, and invoking the holy virgin and all the saints to bless the
“darlin’” baby.
[Illustration: “An’ it’s a blessin’ they brings wid ’em, sir.”]
“An’ it’s a blessin’ they brings wid ’em to a house, sir; the angels
comes down wid ’em. We can’t see ’em, sir; but, bless the darlin’, she
can. And she smiles in her sleep when she sees ’em.”
Rose and Grace came often to this bower with kisses and gifts and
offerings, like a pair of nice fairy godmothers. They hung over the
pretty little waxen miracle as she opened her great blue eyes with a
silent, mysterious wonder; but, alas! all these delicious moments, this
artless love of the new baby life, was not for the mother. She was not
strong enough to enjoy it. Its cries made her nervous; and so she kept
the uncheered solitude of her room without the blessing of the little
angel.
People may mourn in lugubrious phrase about the Irish blood in our
country. For our own part, we think the rich, tender, motherly nature
of the Irish girl an element a thousand times more hopeful in our
population than the faded, washed-out indifferentism of fashionable
women, who have danced and flirted away all their womanly attributes,
till there is neither warmth nor richness nor maternal fulness left
in them,—mere paper-dolls, without milk in their bosoms or blood in
their veins. Give us rich, tender, warm-hearted Bridgets and Kathleens,
whose instincts teach them the real poetry of motherhood; who can love
unto death, and bear trials and pains cheerfully for the joy that is
set before them. We are not afraid for the republican citizens that
such mothers will bear to us. They are the ones that will come to high
places in our land, and that will possess the earth by right of the
strongest.
Motherhood, to the woman who has lived only to be petted, and to be
herself the centre of all things, is a virtual dethronement. Something
weaker, fairer, more delicate than herself comes,—something for her to
serve and to care for more than herself.
It would sometimes seem as if motherhood were a lovely artifice of
the great Father, to wean the heart from selfishness by a peaceful
and gradual process. The babe is self in another form. It is so
interwoven and identified with the mother’s life, that she passes by
almost insensible gradations from herself to it; and day by day the
distinctive love of self wanes as the child-love waxes, filling the
heart with a thousand new springs of tenderness.
But that this benignant transformation of nature may be perfected, it
must be wrought out in Nature’s own way. Any artificial arrangement
that takes the child away from the mother interrupts that wonderful
system of contrivances whereby the mother’s nature and being shade off
into that of the child, and her heart enlarges to a new and heavenly
power of loving.
When Lillie was sufficiently recovered to be fond of any thing,
she found in her lovely baby only a new toy,—a source of pride and
pleasure, and a charming occasion for the display of new devices of
millinery. But she found Newport indispensable that summer to the
re-establishment of her strength. “And really,” she said, “the baby
would be so much better off quietly at home with mamma and Kathleen.
The fact is,” she said, “she quite disregards me. She cries after
Kathleen if I take her; so that it’s quite provoking.”
And so Lillie, free and unencumbered, had her gay season at Newport
with the Follingsbees, and the Simpkinses, and the Tompkinses, and
all the rest of the nice people, who have nothing to do but enjoy
themselves; and everybody flattered her by being incredulous that one
so young and charming could possibly be a mother.