Cultivate a taste for intellectual pleasures, home pleasures, and the pleasures of benevolence.
Have some regular plan for the employment of your time, and in this plan have chief reference to making home pleasant to your husband and children. It will save them from a thousand snares, and you from many sorrows.
[CHAPTER XXXII.]
WORDS OF COMFORT FOR A DISCOURAGED HOUSEKEEPER.
There is no doubt of the fact, that American housekeepers have far greater trials and difficulties to meet than those of any other nation. And it is probable that many of those who may read over the methods of thrift and economy adopted by some of the best housekeepers in our land, and detailed in this work, will with a sigh exclaim, that it is impossible for them even to attempt any such plans.
Others may be stimulated by the advice and examples presented, and may start off with much hope and courage, to carry out a plan of great excellence and appropriateness, and after trying a while, will become discouraged by the thousand obstacles in their way, and give up in despair.
A still greater number will like their own way best, and think it is folly to attempt to change.
For those who wish they could become systematic, neat, and thorough housekeepers, and would like to follow out successfully the suggestions found in this work, and for those who have tried, or will try, and find themselves baffled and discouraged, these words of comfort are offered.
Perhaps you find yourself encompassed by such sort of trials as these. Your house is inconvenient, or destitute of those facilities for doing work well which you need, and you cannot command the means to supply these deficiencies. Your domestics are so imperfectly qualified that they never can do anything just right, unless you stand by and attend to everything yourself, and you cannot be present in parlor, nursery, and kitchen all at once. Perhaps you are frequently left without any cook, or without a chambermaid, and sometimes without any hands but your own to do the work, and there is constant jostling and change from this cause. And perhaps you cannot get supplies, either from garden or market, such as you need, and all your calculations fail in that direction.
And perhaps your children are sickly, and rob you of rest by night, or your health is so poor that you feel no energy, or spirits to make exertions. And perhaps you never have had any training in domestic affairs, and cannot understand how to work yourself, nor how to direct others. And when you go for aid to experienced housekeepers, or cookery books, you are met by such sort of directions as these: “Take a pinch of this, and a little of that, and considerable of the other, and cook them till they are done about right.” And when you cannot succeed in following such indefinite instructions, you find your neighbors and husband wondering how it is, that when you have one, two, or three domestics, there should be so much difficulty about housekeeping, and such constant trouble, and miscalculation, and mistake. And then, perhaps, you lose your patience and your temper, and blame others, and others blame you, and so everything seems to be in a snarl.