A Mother’s Mistaken Kindness

It is a mistaken kindness for mothers to do too much to make life easy for their children. However desirous they may be to shield their little ones from care and responsibility, such things are inevitable; and the child who is taught early in life to meet disappointment and failure with a brave heart is more wisely equipped than with a queen’s dowry.

I know a mother who toiled early and late to save her daughter from the hardships that had beset her own life.

“Julia shall never know what it is to drudge as I have,” she was wont to say. “If she never learns how, she will not be so likely to have it to do.” And so, handicapped by ill health and a scanty income, she yet managed to keep Julia’s hands out of dish water, from the broom, the duster, the mixing bowl and the ironing board.

The child as she grew to girlhood, found other and more congenial avenues open, and naturally availed herself of the privilege which immunity from household duties afforded her, of equipping herself for a life work that promised splendid possibilities.

The girl was bright, alert and willing. In her own chosen profession her career seemed full of promise. Her mother, proud of her daughter’s achievements, continued to keep the domestic machinery oiled and running; and the daughter saw not the fading cheek and faltering footsteps until, one day, they were missing from their wonted place, and an untrained, incompetent girl found herself suddenly called upon to take her mother’s place as a homemaker.

The experience was a hard one. The work which her mother had apparently done with so little effort seemed an herculean task to her untrained head and hands.

“I never supposed that you had to plan housework,” she said to one of her mother’s friends who happened in, one day, to see how the household duties were progressing in the absence of the director of affairs.

“Didn’t you ever help your mother about the house?”

“No; mother never seemed to want me to and I, of course, was glad enough to get rid of it,” was the candid answer.

“But now you wish you were a little more experienced, I fancy,” her mother’s friend made answer, as she laid a sympathetic hand against the girl’s flushed cheek.

“Just now, Mrs. Wentworth, I would give all my artistic training to know how to make and bake a pan of biscuits such as mother used to make. Look at these!” Julia exclaimed in a tear-choked voice. She took from the table a pan of soggy looking biscuits, the tops of which were blackened from a over-heated oven. “Mother always seemed to do all these things so easily,” she said, smiling ruefully.

“Did you imagine that she did them without effort or experience?” kindly questioned her visitor.

“I didn’t know. Mother never talked with me about her work. She always said she’d rather I’d be educated for something besides housework. But I don’t think a mixture of the two would have harmed me,” she whimsically replied as she relegated her uneatable pan of biscuits to the garbage pail.