The nursery should be a sunny, pleasant room, large and cheerful, for here much of the time of the mother will be spent, whether she be able to keep a nurse to share with her the care of the little one or not. No true mother gives over the entire care of her children to a nurse, however efficient and kindly and cultured and wise the nurse she may have, may be; but she will keep the oversight and spend hours daily with her little ones, in their care and supervision and tender mothering, which no one else can give the child which is part of her very self. Mother should be to them the dearest being in the world, and no one should be allowed to come nearer them than she, in her loving sympathetic devotion and care.
Through all the months of pregnancy, the thoughts of motherhood have been taking root in her heart (we wish we might say in every case, “watered by joy and gladness,” but not always is this so); sometimes the roots are set in bitterness, and the little soul growing to maturity under her heart, is absorbing the bitterness, to the sorrow and hurt of all its after life.
Of the first class Mrs. Burnett has given us a lovely type. A mother is looking down into the face of her firstborn, and exclaims, “And this fair soul given to me from the outer bounds, we know not, and the little human body it wakened to life in; think you that Christ will help me to fold them in love, high and pure enough, and teach the human body to do honor to its soul? Surely that which He made in His own image, would not that it should despise itself and its own wonders, but do them reverence and rejoice in them nobly, honoring all their seasons and their changes. I pray for a great soul, and great wit, and great power to help this fair human thing to grow, and love and live.” Is it any wonder that she should say of such a mother, “’Twas not mere love she gave her offspring. She gave them of her constant thought, and of honor such as taught them reverence of themselves as of all other human things. She was the noblest creature that they knew; her beauty, her great unswerving love, her truth, were things bearing to their child eyes the unchangingness of God’s stars in heaven.”
Again Mrs. Spofford in her incomparable little prose-poem, The Nemesis of Motherhood, pictures one of the other mothers, a vacuous, trifling woman, who utters the soul-cry, when she began to wake to her real self, as the little firstborn nestled in her bosom. “Do you suppose he knows I am his mother?” and the little head had snuggled into place. She gazed at him in a bewildered wonder; something seemed to be taking hold of her heartstrings. “Oh: this scrap of a creature was part of her life itself; she had made him; she had struck this spark of a soul into a being; the idea; the dear thing had a soul of course! And she fell to wondering what kind of a soul it was. What kind of a soul? Why didn’t people say the son was the avatar of the mother? A soul like hers to be sure. Heaven help her, what kind of a soul was hers? She saw herself. That was the kind of a soul she had, a little paltering, worthless one, and that was what she had given to her boy.”
Oh the sorrow of such motherhood! Sorrow for herself, more sorrow for her children, and most sorrow for the great wide world, into which her child has come to take a part—and which must of necessity be a sorrowful part, unless he be regenerated. And even then the superlative of sadness is this, that he is not all he might have been had his progenitors given him his lawful inheritance.
Mothers! mothers! choose and live for the highest and noblest in yourselves, and for your children. Bless the world with your offspring. Crown them with your pure and noble life, and your memory shall be blessed.