Growing Up (Vorse)/Chapter 29
WHAT ails Sara?" Tom Marcey wanted to know. Alice told him. "She's cranky again," said he lightly; but Alice had got to the point where she could not lightly dismiss the doings of her children with explanations like this. The impassioned desires of Sara came from somewhere. They had their reasons, and once a mother has come to the point where she knows everything in the world of childhood has a possibly important reason, she is lost. Forever after she will spend her time following blind and elusive trails in her children's minds. Forevermore she will try and find out the why of things. There is no search more fascinating in all this world, and scarcely one more difficult. How can one find out why? They do not know themselves.
From the depths of Sara's nature there arose this necessity of putting to bed everything that she could lay her hands on. Laurie and Tom thought it mere perversity, a desire to make trouble for grown-up people, and shoved it from their minds with the amiable explanation that Sara was in her crankiness trying to provoke them. But these impassioned desires of childhood, Alice knew, came from other sources. Like any real need of the human mind opposition caused it to burn with a fiercer flame. Any real passion, like love, like religion, craves martyrdom, so Sara would not have been averse to having her passion for putting the furniture to bed quickened by suffering.
Perhaps, Alice thought, it was a welling up of the maternal instinct; but wherever it came from, there was one thing of which one could be as sure as one could be sure of all Sara's impassioned desires, and that was its reality.
Taking it all together, Alice decided that many of Sara's most inexplicable wishes flowed from the maternal instinct, and she wondered why civilization has tried to chain and check and train the instinct to love, and why through the ages it has dug deep channels, the channel of marriage for instance, into which it has attempted to divert its turbulent waters, while its sister instinct, equally ferocious, with equal powers of destruction, the maternal instinct, has been allowed to roam unchecked. It has no conventions. We do all we can to prevent the instinct to love from appearing prematurely among our children and young people; but let the maternal instinct rear its head, however young and in whatever extraordinary forms, and we pamper it.
Only thus and so, civilization has agreed, shall love receive our sanction. For the good of the race we will try and see that it walks within such and such appointed limits—at least as much as we can; but to the maternal instinct everything is allowed, unseasonable appearances and unlovely manifestations. All sorts of vagaries of young and old we explain by saying "She felt the maternal instinct." Why chains and conventions and inhibitions and taboos for one, and a whole world of license for the other? Why this complacent fostering of the maternal instinct in very little girls until we have emotional scenes over dolls, was the question that Alice now increasingly put to the universe.
A cataclysm that happened not long after the Kewpies made Alice wish that civilization had as little considered cultivating the maternal instinct in the young as it has the instinct to love. In other words Alice wished that dolls had never been invented. All too soon had Sara emerged from the little girl state where one doll succeeds another only to be broken, and, unlamented, removed from the nursery. All too soon had the cheap and breakable species of toy given way to a lifelike creature who was, this side of a hammer or hatchet, indestructible. Her clothes were made by hand, replicas of Sara's own. She had a nightgown and a bath robe, and upon her Sara lavished the care of an anguished mother of one child who has nothing whatever to worry about but this one child's health and adornment.
Instead of long real hair which came out shockingly, disclosing a hollow skull, or in the case of another type of head, came off, Georgiana—for this was her name—had short curly hair which apparently could no more be removed than Sara's own red thatch. With the advent of Georgiana, Sara gave up putting Kewpies to bed. No more were automobiles tucked in and kissed good night. She rocked her child asleep, she sat and jounced it on her knee, she did, in fact, all the things that mothers in this generation are supposed not to do.
"Hush! Don't wake my child!" she would cry, and she had been brought up in a household where all the noises of life went on unchecked, baby or no baby. From out of the great storehouse of the past had come to Sara instinctively all the harmful lore of long ages of unscientific mothers. Relentlessly she practiced this lore upon her suffering family, knee-trottings, rockings to sleep and all.
Alice watched her. As far as she knew, her daughter had never seen such goings on with little babies. Where did she come by such tricks? Mystery impenetrable, and in the same category with the games beloved of childhood such as "house" and "school," where the mother is invariably a scold and the teacher a shrew, let their own teachers and mothers be as gentle as possible. The humorous convention of childhood insists on this travesty of its parents and instructors.
Georgiana, however, was endurable. The trouble really began with Lilietta, who had brown eyes instead of blue, and who had the further disadvantage of coming dressed in one brief garment, so that Georgiana had to share her clothes with her new sister. She did not mind it, being a broad-minded doll, but it rent Sara's heart. It rent her heart in both ways. She hated to take clothes away from Georgiana in the first place, and she hated Lilietta to wear given clothes in the second. Again her mother beheld in Sara things she had never learned at home. It had not been Sara's lot ever to give her clothes to other children or to receive clothes. Whence came this prejudice with its accompanying anguish?
Sara wanted clothes for Lilietta with an intensity that had a wolfish quality. So fierce a light shone in her eyes that Alice bestirred herself with needle and thread, remembering a sampler with three holes cut in it—one for the head, two for the arms—that hung in a stairway in her mother's house. This sampler, according to tradition, had been cut up to clothe a doll which belonged to Alice's grandmother, and it must have been with a similar fierce light in her eye that this ancestor of Sara's had pierced these holes in the piece of cloth. Anything might be snipped up by Sara, Alice realized, unless Lilietta were clothed.