Growing Up (Vorse)/Prologue
THERE was a time when being a parent was a simple thing, if not always an easy one. Parents in those days knew exactly what was good for their children. It was good for them to obey their parents implicitly. It was good for them to believe their parents infallible. Parents were to be honored—the Bible said so. The parental will was to a child as the will of God to a true believer. If a child failed in obedience, then, too, one's course was clear—one did the awful thing known as breaking the child's will, and one did it with a clear conscience.
Children in those easy days were considered little lumps of clay to be molded by their parents into definite and approved patterns, and their minds were looked on as empty pitchers, to be filled by the wine of wisdom poured in by parents and teachers and others in authority.
While Tom and Alice Marcey were more modern than that in their beliefs, for the first two years and a half that they were parents they lived wrapped in complacency as in a garment. If they had not hidden the fact that they thought they were pretty nearly the only perfect parents living, no one would have stood them a minute.
They thought in their hearts that Robert was so good and well because they were unusually wise people. They were so sure of this that they spent many agreeable evenings thanking God that they were not as other parents.
They criticised the way their neighbors brought up their babies. Gladys Grayson was not made to eat her meals with unbroken regularity. The Alden twins were having their nerves destroyed by being played with far too much. Indeed, during this time—when Robert's teeth were there and his personality had not yet popped out on them—one would have thought, to hear them, that there were exactly two wise and consistent parents in the world, and their names were Tom and Alice Marcey.
As Alice's mother listened to them her smile was touched with compassion. Older women often smile this way at their sons and daughters, saying to themselves: "Strut while you can, and while you can believe that you are a good father and mother. Soon enough you will find yourselves out." She would have kept still always, except that one day Alice stung her beyond endurance by saying:
"How well I remember when I used to be made to eat oatmeal and soft boiled eggs! And when I think how I suffered all for nothing!—for oatmeal as you cooked it isn't a suitable food for children—"
Her mother at last spoke:
"Alice," said she, "you will find as time goes on that you will make mistakes—many and many of them. All that any mother can do is the best she knows. But I can tell you that the way to do the best she knows is not to be sure of herself. If she's sure she's always right she has even less chance of understanding her children than most parents."
She underscored the "even less," and it gave Alice food for thought, although it didn't seem possible that she or Tom would fail Robert in understanding.
Robert seemed the most easily understandable child in the world. Fearless, full of laughter, walking the earth triumphantly, and passing secure through the pitfalls which lie in wait for children. Alice did not suspect that he was growing a character after his own pattern, the design of which she had no more to do with in the choosing than the color of his eyes or whether he was to be a boy or a girl.
She thought that the hardest part of being a mother was behind her. Teething was over. They had passed that dark spot which in the eyes of anxious young mothers is dotted with small white gravestones and which is known as the Second Summer. Yet there was Robert, hatching a plot that was to kill her complacency forever. He diverted her mind from what he was about by having infantile ailments; by getting weaned, by changes of diet, by learning to walk, growing his personality behind his mother's back.
In the back of her mind she knew that she had been begging the question, and that for a long time this definite personality had been looking at her level-eyed. She had made excuses to herself about it. When the personality showed itself unpleasantly she had explained it with, "Robert isn't feeling well to-day." It flickered in and out of her range of vision, like a will-o'-the-wisp, now staying for half an hour, now vanishing and leaving behind the good baby that regular training had made Robert.
If Alice had wanted to look the fact squarely in the face, she could have seen for some time past Robert was no longer a little mechanism. His conduct had become like bacon, now fat and now lean. Only the other day he had sat down beside the road, and when Alice had told him to come along, he said with his disconcerting tranquilliity:
"I like it here." When Alice had asked him if he would come walking like a man or be carried like a baby, he replied without hesitation that he would be carried like a baby. At that when she tucked him under her arm and carried him off bodily, he roared. But it was when the goldfish came that Robert's character popped out of hiding for good, and it was then that Alice and Tom Marcey started on the Parents' Progress which must begin with humility if it is to end in understanding.