Growing Up (Vorse)/Chapter 16
KNOWLEDGE about the Other Side is dangerous to the peace of minds of parents. So are glimpses into children's minds. If you get to know too much about people you get to know how they feel. If you know how they feel you cannot have the belief that you are always right. Such knowledge leads to such things as the Distressing Doubt.
Alice's Distressing Doubt was the heresy that it was perhaps she who was naughty instead of her children. This is a very complex way for a mother to feel. It is hard enough to bring up children with the old belief of the infallibility of parents to bulwark you. The Distressing Doubt not only took this belief from Alice, but it also bred a family of other doubts concerning goodness and badness, which shows that when you once leave the solid ground of tradition there is no end to the trouble that you may be giving yourself, for among all the doubts Alice even had one concerning her new point of view.
Alice was forced to admit that it wouldn't do to have too queasy a delicacy in bringing up children, and that the hard nature of childhood probably adapted itself better to the cheerful hardness of the old régime than it did to the uncertain quicksands of attempted understanding. In those days if a child itself did not know what was right and wrong it had ample opportunity of learning from its elders what they thought was right and wrong, every day and all the time. Their ideas on these subjects never varied; obedience was obedience, and a lie was a lie.
Now she was even no longer sure any more what a good boy was and if she could only have decided that she would have been a happier woman and she certainly would have been a much happier mother. She looked back with envy upon that time before the coming of the Distressing Doubt, when her simplicity made it possible for her to pick out good children from bad children and good acts from bad acts. She saw other mothers doing that now and her own enlightenment made her scornful, while yet she envied them their calm security.
These women moved serene and goddess-like among their offspring, meting out praise and blame without the quiver of any emotion more disquieting than that of self-approval, and when their serenity became shaken, their wrath was the wrath of goddesses, since it had for a background the mighty force of trust in their own righteousness. This repose of conscience rested upon the mighty world-old belief, heritage of the ages, that of necessity Mothers were Right and Children were Wrong.
When in a moment of impatience Alice confided some of these doubts to Tom's mother for the pleasure of easing her own mind, she asserted that she believed that disobedience was often good for children.
"Hoity-toity," responded her mother-in-law, "if everybody were to go on talking like that what would become of discipline; what would become of the Home?"
To this Alice responded flippantly that she for her part did not care what became of it, and she often thought that the Home was the canker spot of our national life and that if one could only abolish Home—. When she got to this point her mother-in-law remarked that she knew where Sara came by her contrariness.