THE OBSESSION OF POSSESSION
The undemocratic character of the home reveals itself in a way that is
familiar enough,--the way of parental possession. Nothing could be
more difficult for parents to abandon than the sense of ownership,
tenderly conceived and graciously fostered. And yet, hard as the
lesson may be, it must be learned by parents that the spirit of
proprietorship cannot coexist with the democratic temper in the home.
I sometimes regret that children are not born full-grown, that they do
not subsequently develop or devolve into babies, so that the earliest
aspect of a child, diminutive, helpless, should not, as it does, evoke
the sense of absolute and exclusive ownership. If children would only
at six months or a year begin to argue, vigorously to combat their
parents' views, the ordinary transition from bland acquiescence to
over-facile dissent would be somewhat less harsh and startling. The
thing, which perhaps does most to intensify the shock and pain
incidental to divergence of opinion, is that the first eight or ten
years of childhood give no intimation or little more than intimation
of the possibility of conflict in later years. The unresisting
acquiescence of children in never-ending bestowal of parental bounty
offers no hint of the possibility of future strife. The legal plea of
surprise might almost be offered up by parents, who find, as one of
them has expressed it, that, when children are young, they "stay put,"
can be found whenever sought. Later they neither stay nor are put, but
move tangentially and, it would seem by preference, into orbits of
their own,--and not always heavenly orbits.
Some parents never wean themselves nor even seek to do so from the
sense of proprietorship, which is sure to be rudely disturbed unless
parents are wise to yield it up. No grown, reasoning, self-respecting
person wishes to be or to be dealt with as a being in fief to another.
Ofttimes it proves exceedingly hard for fond parents to relinquish the
sense of ownership, for the latter is deeply satisfying and even
flattering to the owner. In very truth, parents must come to
understand that children are not born to them as possessions. The
parental part does not confer ownership rights. Children should not be
regarded and cherished as a life-long possession nor even for a time.
They are entrusted by the processes of birth and the decree of fate to
parents, to be cared for during the days of dependence, to be nurtured
and developed till maturity, the latter to mark the ending of the
period of conscious parental responsibility.
As long as children have not reached adolescence and the consciousness
thereof, they may endure nor even note the mood of parental
possession. But once complete self-consciousness dawns, the sense of
ownership becomes intolerable to any child that is more than a
domestic automaton, and, if persisted in, makes any wholesomeness of
relation between parent and child unthinkable. Many years ago, a sage
friend tendered me some unforgettable counsel. I had, perhaps
unwisely, commiserated with him upon the fact that his lovely
children, sons and daughters alike, were leaving the parental roof
and beginning their lives anew in different and remote parts of the
land. His answer rang prompt and decisive: "Children were not given to
us to keep. They are placed with us for a time in trusteeship and now
that they are old enough to leave us and to stand upon their own feet,
it is well for them to make their own homes and become the builders of
their own lives." This sage and his like-minded wife had achieved the
art of dispossessing themselves of their children, or rather they had
never suffered themselves to tread the pathway of possession.
To a rational adult the sense of possession by another is irksome,
save in the case of youthful lovers whose irrationality may for a time
take the form of pleasure in the fact of possession by another. But
when sanity enters into the joy of the love-relation, then the sense
of ecstasy in being possessed vanishes and with its passing comes a
renewal of self-possession which alone is complete sanity.
Self-possession brooks no invasion or possession of personality by
another. The matter of possession becomes gravely disturbing because
the parental tendency in the direction of proprietorship becomes
keenest at a time when children are least disposed to be possessed in
any way. As children near adulthood, they desire to be autonomous
persons rather than things or possessions. Then the conflict comes,
and, though not consciously, is fought for and against possession.
Briefly, adolescence brings with it an insistence upon the end of the
relative and the beginning of absolute, that is unrelated, existence.
Somehow and for the most part unhappily, the child's insistence upon
absolute self-possession and self-existence comes at a time,--it may
be evocative rather than synchronous--when parents most desire or feel
the need to be parents. This craving for a maximum of parenthood, not
in the interest of filial possession, is evoked by the normal,
adolescent child, as it begins to find its main interests and
absorptions outside of the home, with the consequent loosening of what
seemed to be irrefragably close and intimate ties. And the parental
sense of proprietary supervision is not lessened by the circumstance
that the child now faces those problems the rightful solution of
which means so much to its future.
Thus does the conflict arise. Children, though they know it not or know
it only in part, face the great tests and challenges of life, rejoicing
that these are to be their experiences, their problems, their tests.
Parents view these self-same challenges and are deeply concerned lest
these prove too much for children and leave them broken and blighted
upon life's way. It is really fairer to say that what is viewed as the
parental instinct of possession is really nothing more than the
eagerness of parents somehow to bestow upon children the unearned fruits
of experience. It is the primary and inalienable right of children to
blunder, to falter upon the altar-steps, and blundering is a teacher
wiser though costlier than parents. Reckoning and rueing the price they
have paid for the lessons of experience, parents, whose good-will is
greater than their wisdom, insist upon the right to transmit to children
through teaching these lessons of experience. But they fail to realize
that certain things are unteachable and intransmissible.
Confounding the classroom with the school of life, it is assumed that
certain truths are orally teachable. Children, building better than
they know, insist that the wisdom of experience cannot be orally
communicated, that it is not to be acquired through parental bestowal
or teaching or insistence, but solely through personal effort, and,
though at first they know it not, through hardship and suffering.
Wisdom cannot be imparted to children by parents under an anaesthesia
that averts pain and suffering. Hard is it for parents to accept the
truth pointed out by Coleridge that experience is only a lamp in a
vessel's stern, which throws a light on the waters we have passed
through, none on those which lie before us.
The conflict then is between children who insist upon the privilege of
acquiring the wisdom of life through personal experience which includes
blundering and suffering, and parents whose sense of possession
strengthens their native resolution to bring to loved children all the
benefits and gains of life's experiences without permitting children to
pay the price which life exacts. And parents, in the unreasoning
passion to ward off hurt and wound from the heads of children, forget
that if the wisdom of experience were transmissible we should have moral
stagnation and spiritual immobility in the midst of life.
But if parents may not expect to be able to transmit the body of their
life-experience to children, neither should children assume that the
multiplication table is an untested hypothesis because accepted by
parents, or that elementary truths are wholly dubious because parental
assent has been given thereto. If parents must learn that children
cannot be expected to regard every thesis as valid solely because held
by parents, children need hardly take it for granted, though it may of
course be found to be true, that the parental viewpoint is uniformly
erring and invalid.
If parents, who are tempted to yield to the instinct of proprietorship
rather, as we have seen, than of domination, would but understand, as
was lately suggested in a psychological analysis of Barrie's "Mary
Rose," that there are women who mother the members of their circles so
persistently that they impose a certain childishness on them, the
mother's influence often producing incompetence and timidity! To such
parents, however, as will not admit the fact of possession, it remains
to be pointed out that parents do not live forever and are usually
survived by their children. The "owned" child is not unlikely with the
years to become and to remain a poor, miserable dependent
intellectually and spiritually, once its parents are gone.
View another case, the marriage of the "owned" child, even when it
does not accept any marriage that offers as a mode of release from
parental bondage. I have had frequent occasion to note that the
"owned" child, freed from parental suppression, is often revenged upon
parental tyranny by an era of luxurious despotism, or, what is worse,
renews the reign of ownership and dependence by becoming the "owned"
wife or undisowned husband, a sorry, beggarly serf, whose lifelong
dependence in the worst sense is largely the sequel to parental
proprietorship or overlordship. The parental tyranny that is
well-meant and gentle yields place in marriage to a tyranny that is
most untender and may even be brutal, its victim, male or female,
habituated by parental usage to the art of unrevolting submission, or,
when not thus habituated, goaded to a vindictive and compensatory
sense of mastery.
To urge parents to relinquish the sense of possession, to prepare them
for the day when they shall find it inevitable to "give up," is to do
them a real service. Let them prepare with something of fortitude for
the day that comes to many parents, which is to establish and confirm
the fact of parental dispensableness. The fortitude may have to be
Spartan in character. It is our fate, and parents, who are practised
in the art of long-suffering endurance, must learn to bear this last
test of strength with undimmable courage and even to rejoice therein.