Such women, although not very many, do exist among us. Their existence is perhaps the source of the hope which always animates every girl first embarking on her parenthood that she, by the sheer force of the longing for health which is within her, will prove also to be such an exception. Sometimes this desire may be apparently fulfilled, but generally, unless it is coupled with much greater knowledge than most girls possess, as the months pass one by one, her proud spirit will bend, she will give up and give up and give up. Humbled, weakened, humiliated before herself, through the fact that she is not strong enough to fight what she now is inclined acquiescently to call “Nature,” she too goes down the stream with all the myriads of other happy hearted girls, whose gallant endeavours have equally failed. Then she creeps, wearily resting by the way, where she had hoped to tread with a firm and lightsome step.
There grows in her mind, and this is stronger the more she loves her husband, the added distress that she feels that she is failing him. He married a mate, an equal, who lighter of step could yet cover the ground as well as he, and who could share his amusements, his work to some extent perhaps, and his pleasures. She feels that she must, so far as she possibly can, maintain this position. This hope impels her particularly if they have been married but a short time, and hence their days of delightful untramelled companionship have been so few.
In this unselfish distress, which is primarily for him, she is tempted to conceal her effort and tends to overstrain herself in an endeavour to act as completely as she can the part, as reported, of the early Greek or Roman matron or of the proud and savage mother who could bear her children as lightly as a woodland creature. Finding sooner or later that she cannot do so, she suddenly gives in. Her strength, undermined by the series of distresses, the subtle shocks and blows to which she is secretly subjected, she yields and takes on that air of semi-invalidism, demanding constant care and consideration from her husband and those about her, which in a way represents the hauling down of her gallant flag. Her dreams of an easy motherhood are vanquished.
She will at times be dimly conscious that she is no longer able to feel so acutely. This, in a way perhaps, is Nature’s provision against the too intense experiencing of emotion, which would otherwise come with sensitive motherhood. The sensation can be described, as one woman put it, as though each one of her powers of feeling were wrapped round in cotton wool, deadened and clogged so that they no longer gave contact. This may be well, but it adds in a dim way to the various distresses, a sense of unreality and apartness, which, if it coincides with that temporary antipathy to her husband, which was noted on page [33], may make the mother-to-be, for the time at any rate, indeed a wanderer in the valley of the shadow.
CHAPTER VII
The Young Father-to-be:
His Amazements
Till from some wonder of new woods and streams
He woke, and wondered more; for there she lay.
D. G. Rossetti.
The young father-to-be, though a real and very important person, has been curiously neglected by all and sundry who concern themselves with the affairs of the “expectant mother,” “child welfare,” and the other social and semi-eugenic matters about which well-meaning people have so voluminously written and so sedulously talked.
Sometimes jesting reference is made to the rather strange fact that, in some savage races, it is the father and not the mother who lies in bed for weeks after the birth of the child, but of the material and very real psychological experiences and physical difficulties which the young father is encountering and living through during the months before the advent of his first-born, few have any knowledge. Fewer still have offered the father-to-be any sympathy or help. Nevertheless with the increasingly perceptive and specialized individuals comprising our civilization, there arises an increasing number of young men capable of feeling and suffering in some degree corresponding to the great realities of which, for each, his home is the centre. And, moreover, it must not be forgotten that among our thoughtful classes are now growing up the young men whose mothers were among the pioneers of women’s emancipation, whose mothers, therefore, were voluntary mothers who have trained their sons consciously and unconsciously, directly and indirectly, to be more in harmony with the true and natural attitude of a sensitive human being to its mate than are the average gross and over-bearing males, sons of enslaved and involuntary mothers. The sensitiveness of the modern young man towards his duties as a father, towards his wife as the mother of his child is, in my experience, very remarkable in its extent and its beauty. I have direct and indirect evidence from thousands that among the young Army men in various messes on the continent in recent years, an unexpected racial seriousness of attitude was shown when the necessary key that unlocked the secret chamber was available. Although it is a most deplorable truth, that there has been an increase in the racial diseases and an outward levity towards women, this is less an inherent baseness on the part of the young men than the result of the existence of the false conditions in which they have been placed, due to the criminal mishandling the whole racial problem has received from those older and in a position of authority.