THE life cycle of man has been satisfactorily divided into seven well-established stages, but the life cycle of parenthood—from Adam and Eve to Gesell and Spock—has never been so easily or finally computed. Instead, in an era of scientific classification, parenthood, with all its indefinable, innumerable stages, remains the rebel individualist. It is, almost, like an inexhaustible box of Kleenex in which each phase pulled out sends a new one popping up so constantly, so promptly yet so insidiously, that many a parent wakes one day in shocked surprise to discover that the cuddly, darling baby with whom he has been more or less “playing house,” the lovable, Pygmalion child he has been gently molding to a desired shape, is incredibly become a full-fledged human being, an independent fellow man, a loud-voiced, opinionated, challenging, unavoidable partner on the home front!
This, in any case, was precisely what happened to John and me in connection with the Affair Bradley: not once did we even consider the possibility of juvenile intervention—much less concern! So much so, that while all about us cannons of controversy (on the subject of our fourth baby) volleyed and thundered—Lizzie, Martha and George knew neither what nor why.
“After all,” as I told John once in the very beginning, when the subject had casually come up, “there’s plenty of time to tell the children. Remember how disinterested they were when George was due? Excited, of course, at first, then somewhat curious, and finally just childishly impatient. Why involve them now?”
In my mind’s eye, as I spoke, Lizzie (almost ten) and Martha (over six) were both fondly lumped together with George into a kind of nondescript, irresponsible, pleasing mass of infancy. Nor did John, as he listened, volunteer the least reminder that four full years of further growth and maturity might very well have sharpened our children’s tongues and wits since the last addition to the family.
In retrospect, of course, I realize that even an elephant would have been more aware of a fly on its back, than I was of the situation right under my nose. But then, unfortunately, I was judging strictly by past experience, that excellent teacher indeed in matters of rote—which this was not! Then too, moreover, the constant condition of siege, in which I found myself after the first public announcement, plunged me into a state of oblivion. From within these embattled depths, little else mattered.
Unquestionably, even the occasional proddings of those more sensitive than I, failed to penetrate the all-enveloping haze.
Agnes Abbot, for instance, did ask one afternoon: “And how do the children like your having a new baby?”
To which I repeated blankly, as if I had been asked something as ridiculous as ‘Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?’: “The children? Why, we haven’t even told them yet! But they’ll love it, I’m sure.”
When another intelligent party inquired: “Tell me—what do the children think of the whole idea?” I was equally amazed.
“I haven’t the vaguest notion,” I replied, missing the more subtle implications entirely. “Good heavens! What do you expect them to think? They’re only children!”
Actually, Lizzie and Martha were no more “children” in the sense of insignificance implied, then dinosaurs are ants; but this was something far beyond me at that particular time—a beautiful Age of Innocence that was as ill-fated and brief as a summer romance.
The original, major dent in this idyllic delusion, however, was made exactly two weeks after the “Margaret Sanger” explosion had temporarily restored an interlude of sweet peace to our ménage. It was the first of many such unexpected incidents to come in this Fourth Baby Project, and it occurred, coincidentally, in the fourth month.
The time specifically was one of those suddenly cold nights in September, and John and I were sprawled side by side on the living room couch, relaxing after an ordinarily hectic day. The children were all in bed, safely asleep for the night. There was a bright, noisy fire in the fireplace which took the chill from the air and cast a warm, orange glow over everything in the place. For the first time after the long, hot summer, it was good to be indoors again, to feel protected from the elements, secure against the angry, north wind that kept shaking at the windows.
“Nice, isn’t it?” I asked John contentedly, waving my hand at the house and burrowing a little more deeply into the sofa pillows at my back.
“You bet!” he agreed, equally satisfied.
Smug, you might call it, but quite pleasantly so. We had just finished our customary rehashing of the details of the day. We were now ready, therefore, to let our conversation sink from its lofty level of politics, pestilence and personalities, to that predestined one so terribly dear to parental hearts—the children.
“Did I tell you about George today?” I began, after a comfortable pause in which I reached lazily for some peanuts.
“Nope. What happened?” John asked eagerly, his interest perking up as though I had promised to announce a new cure for leukemia.
“Not what happened but what he said,” I hastened to explain. “He was getting to bed and saying his prayers when he started talking about God. ‘Can God see everyone everywhere?’ he asked. ‘Even if I hide under the bed?’ I told him yes. ‘Oh,’ he answered, ‘I guess he has X-ray eyes like Daddy’s machine in the office. Isn’t that how?’ ”
John’s appreciative chuckle put the story in No. 1 place on the Non-Fiction, Humor, Best Seller List. “Not a bad observation for a three-year-old,” he commented judicially, thereby confirming my own biased suspicions. “Not bad at all!”
I laughed too. Then, abruptly, I stopped. “Golly!” I gasped. “Just listen to us! Doting and bragging! Maybe it’s a good thing we’re having another baby before we wind up turning George into one of those terrible spoiled brats!”
A spoiled brat, I know, is a concept denied by many of our modern child psychologists in their current canonization of the young. Never one to quibble with terms, therefore, let me simply explain that my very unoriginal remark referred merely to the prevalent type of miniature, uninhibited, over-secure, under-civilized youngsters so often encountered in polite society nowadays. These creatures are a public menace and a private horror, easily recognizable for what they are, and always avoided like a labelled typhoid carrier.
In restaurants, theatres, and other unrestricted areas, they invariably can be found disturbing the general peace; breathing down the backs of people’s necks over the tops of restaurant booths; running up and down crowded or darkened aisles; spilling food and drink with abandon; and howling, whatever the time or place, at the slightest whim, or hint of curtailment of any of these endearing activities.
In the sanctity of their homes, moreover, there is little change of pace. There, equally undaunted, they can vomit astonishingly at the drop of one cross word; climb mercilessly over the furniture and whoever happens to be resting therein; whine sulkily and noisily if temporarily not the absolute center of attention; commandeer, egotistically, any grown-up conversations with innumerable interruptions, as well as pointed suggestions for topics of talk, like: “Come on, Mom. Now tell them what I did to the milkman yesterday!”; and they can shriek maddeningly if even mildly balked.
A great deal of this was obviously in John’s mind now as he repeated the two fatal words, “spoiled brats” and said: “Good Lord! Do you really think we’re glorifying George into one of those?” Then, after a moment’s silent reflection, he added quite seriously: “But I guess you do have a real point there, now that I think of it. And, as you said, a new baby ought to stabilize our attitude toward George. Only—honestly, darling—he is kind of extra especially cute, don’t you think?”
It was a purely rhetorical question, and instead of answering it, I only laughed. From past experience, I knew too well how difficult it always is to maintain balanced perspective in regard to one’s own children. For my money, let no man minimize the true, enduring wonders that God hath wrought: a first step, a first tooth, a first word in a growing child! If only for this reason (and there are many others), so few of us can ever accept the normal development of a normal child with normal calm. So many of us, instead, when faced with the most average accomplishments—such as walking, talking, reasoning, and other such expected outcomes of time and growth—prostrate ourselves in awe like primitive man before the ever-recurrent, mysterious glories of nature.
“Maybe it’s a good thing for George that we are having another baby,” I told John, when I stopped laughing.
“I guess so,” he said, smiling a little sheepishly. “Which reminds me, though,” he continued, “don’t you think we’d better tell the children about the baby before someone else does?”
He asked the question casually, almost conversationally, but just like that, in the space of one little simple sentence, I felt the cold breath of bare reality up against my neck.
It was only a vague feeling at first, a type of uneasy premonition that made me sit suddenly upright. “Oh John,” I exclaimed, without stopping to analyze or explain, “I don’t want to tell the children!”
“Don’t want to tell the children?” he repeated, sitting up too.
“Well—I mean, I couldn’t!” I was speaking the truth, but it was a truth I had never realized until that very moment when I said it.
“But why?” John demanded, obviously surprised.
“I don’t know,” I floundered. “I just feel sort of embarrassed about telling them.”
“Embarrassed!” he scoffed, ready to dismiss the whole case. “That’s silly. Just tell them!”
“But I can’t,” I insisted, and it was still true: apparently illogical, but nonetheless true. “It’s how I feel about it.”
Now John was sincerely puzzled. “How do you feel about it?” he asked. “And why?”
It was the “why” that was hard. Why should I have this unexpected urge to withdraw—this overwhelming sense of reluctance and fear? Why?
I stopped to think, and soon I found the answer. Without doubt, we are all living nowadays in an era of almost belligerent sophistication. Rape, Alcoholism, Murder, Sex—there are few forbidden topics any more that still linger in the privacy of out-houses or dark closets behind closed doors! On the contrary, twentieth-century emancipation has so firmly established them in the living and dining rooms across the country on an equal footing socially with even the time-honored Weather, that the force of this reformation (and much of it is!) has swept its way into every aspect of modern life from literature and ladies clubs and Kinsey to television, politics and parenthood.
Accordingly, in our home too, enlightenment is the strict order of the day. As well-intentioned, modern parents, therefore, John and I had long ago embarked upon a course in sex education for our children whenever the need arose. All pertinent questions along the way were answered honestly and adequately as soon as they were presented, until Lizzie and Martha, while not exactly Phi Beta Kappa material on the subject, were still more than sufficiently briefed.
Nor were their briefings remote and academic either! In keeping with John’s insistence on a more clinical approach, previous pregnancies of mine had always been used by both of us to exhibit the development of the child in utero. If, at times, moreover, I had begun to feel like a paramecium on a slide under a high powered microscope, I had nevertheless held my peace in the sacred interests of higher education. Even George, as an infant, during the rigmarole of diapering and bathing, had been dragged into the act as a practical, wholesome, perfectly natural demonstration of the Opposite Sex. In addition, since I have always deplored the fact that most sexology books and lectures are merely anatomical travelogues on the parts of the human body, we had not only eventually covered every query on the waterfront including the Break-the-Bank: “But how, Daddy?” but also had embarked on some of the moral and scientific considerations involved. “Graduate work too!” as John jokingly called it.
All of these proceedings and demonstrations, however, had invariably had a comfortable, impersonal flavor, much on a par with the birds and the bees and the flowers.
As I sat there, though, mulling this over, I suddenly realized that, actually, this pleasant, impersonal attitude had begun to disappear months before. Lizzie and Martha, without my even seeing it happen, were much more mature than they had been when George was born, and as much more curious. Their questions too, when I thought back to them, were sharp and frequent as they had never been then; and their comments—Good Lord, there was nothing abstract there! “Tell me, Mother,” Lizzie, for instance, had asked recently at the close of one impromptu sex-session, “do you like having a uterus?” And then, another time: “You know —this whole business we’ve been talking about? Well, I’m not at all sure I’d like hatching eggs!”
In addition, as if all this domestic indoctrination weren’t enough, I suddenly remembered in a brand-new, disconcerting way that Lizzie was enrolled in a Sex-Education class at school. Not, of course, that this class had proved particularly exciting to her after the preliminaries at home! In fact, after the initial lesson, she had returned in a state of deep disappointment.
“Golly, Mother,” she had said at dinner that first night. “Just the same old stuff about the human body—you know! Gee, was it dull!”
“Yup,” echoed Martha, who had evidently discussed it all with Lizzie already. “Was it dull!”
“Really!” I exclaimed, surprised. “Why, I was sure you’d find it very interesting. Tell me: how did it go? Exactly what did Mr. T. do?”
“Huh! Not a thing!” There was undisguised disgust in Lizzie’s voice. “Can you imagine? He just talked!”
To which John, who had been listening with as much amazement as I , declared incredulously after the children exited: “Good God! So he just talked! What on earth did she expect anyway—a practical demonstration?”
Is it any wonder, therefore, that I quailed mentally at the idea of now informing Lizzie, Martha and George that they were about to become brother and sisters again? That I was somewhat embarrassed to add my new information to their already disturbingly complete set of the Facts of Life; and afraid lest the present announcement, in their latest state of mind, personalize the whole issue still further?
“I do see what you’re driving at,” John admitted reluctantly, after I had explained as best I could. “But this thing gets more and more complicated by the minute! It was bad enough having to contend with every Tom, Dick and Harry’s unsolicited opinions on our sanity and fertility, but it’s absolutely preposterous to have to worry about our own children’s reactions too! For heaven’s sake, I never even thought of it before! And I can just imagine what they’re going to say—in their own special, inimitable, inquisitive way!”
“I can’t,” I replied, shuddering. “It’s far beyond my limited imagination—but you can bet it’ll be plenty direct and awkward!”
There was a moment’s solemn silence during which we both paid tribute to those vast possibilities. A hundred years ago (or so it seemed!) I used to think that a baby in the house was the sure way to end all the inhibited niceties of our frustrated civilization. No man or woman alive, I had loudly proclaimed, could feed a baby, burp a baby, discuss its bowel habits with a physician, keep a general record of everyday, intimate physical details, and still maintain the fiction of proprietary shyness. For better or worse, one concentrated week of infant care sets our culture back thousands of years to the primitive basis from which it sprang.
This still holds true. However, after having emerged from these infancy stages with my own children, I now know that barefaced as this baby routine may be, it is actually as pornographic as an anatomy lesson in a hospital morgue, compared to the horrible frankness of the growing boy or girl. Alas, one can almost feel nostalgia for the simple, repetitious, never-ending, annoying “Why” and “What” of the toddler, when faced with the excruciatingly complex, constant analyses of the older child’s mind. For myself, I can only offer the sad conclusion that a mother needs the experience of Forever Amber, the audience “know-how” of Gypsy Rose Lee, the imperturbability of a stone Buddha, and the research staff of Time Magazine, in order to withstand the daily barrage—qualifications, I’m afraid, very few of us have, as we blush, faint and fail under the juvenile fire!
“Very well,” said John after the briefest of pauses, ready to concede all of this. “But what I can’t see is how come this angle of telling the children never occurred to us before.”
“Probably because we’ve never had a fourth baby before,” I answered seriously. “Don’t you see, darling? When children are younger, you don’t really discuss things with them—you just present them with a fait accompli. ‘Mother and Daddy are going to have a baby,’ you say. ‘Isn’t that nice?’ And to them, it’s something like the divine theory of kings. That’s how it was before this time. But not now! Honestly, John, I don’t know what to expect.”
“I guess I know what you mean.” John stood up and stretched as he spoke. Then he asked: “Want another log on, or should I bank the fire for the night? It’s getting late.”
“It is getting late,” I noticed with some surprise. The fire was nothing but a mass of smoldering ashes; there was a definite chill in the room; and as far as I was concerned, all of the beautiful coziness and peace had abruptly disappeared like the light of a candle in the gust of an angry wind. “Let’s go to bed.”
I followed John from room to room, locking up and turning off the lights. In the kitchen, by unspoken mutual agreement and long established custom, we stopped for some cold apple pie and milk.
“Well,” I said finally, through a mouthful of crumbs, returning to our discussion as if there had been no lapse of time, “what do we do?”
“Do?” John gulped, choking on his milk. “What is there to do? Tell them, of course—however you feel! You can’t keep a baby a secret forever—and who wants to!”
“Okay, okay!” I agreed, retreating. “When are you going to break the happy news?”
“Why me?” demanded John.
“Why me?” It was no idle echo on my part.
“Then both of us,” said John, and we both burst out laughing. Ever since we were first married, John and I had worked out a practical operating basis for all distasteful or difficult tasks: what can’t be endured must be shared. “Aren’t we being childish, though?” he asked as we quieted down. “And now, having settled the ‘who’ problem, what about the ‘when’? What say we tell them tomorrow?”
“Oh no!” Now I choked. “Why so soon? Let’s wait awhile and see.”
This type of procrastination was so completely out of character for me, that John stopped chewing and stared. He, who was a vigilant Paul Revere and Jack Dalton rolled into one where his medical practice was concerned, was “What you can do tomorrow, never do today” otherwise; while I functioned exclusively on the motto that, “A stitch in time leaves you free tomorrow.”
Every marriage, of course, has these deadlocked areas of personal temperamental differences which are uncompromisable. Usually, there is no adequate solution, and the result is a good-humored tug of war where the scorecard reads like a never-ending, heavyweight championship bout (“Both fighters are in the center of the ring exchanging hard body blows to the midsection!”)—but with no final decision. On and on the wrangling goes, inconclusively, naggingly—until it either undermines the very fundamentals of the marriage itself; or, as in our case, it evolves itself into the most cherished evidence of connubial bliss: a treasured idiosyncrasy, an accepted bulwark of family tradition, and an inexhaustible, hilarious sourcebook of clannish unity and legend!
In view of our history on this count, however, John was dearly delighted with my unprecedented request. “How the worm has turned!” he quoted happily. “Now who’s the dullard who wants to waste away and wait?”
“Which should convince you anyhow how sincerely bothered I am by this whole affair! And besides,” I tried to rationalize, “I don’t really want to wait—not exactly. I just want to find an opportune moment to speak my piece. Doesn’t that make better sense? No use just blurting it out.”
“That’s fine with me,” laughed John. “Remember me? I’m the original ten o’clock scholar who likes to come at noon. You take your own time, sweetie, only—don’t delay until the poor baby has to announce itself.”
Temporarily, that settled that. We finished up in the kitchen and marched to the bedroom, arm in arm, talking cheerfully of other things. When the lights were off, however, and we were comfortably settled for the night, I found it impossible to fall asleep. Not that some such difficulty was anything unusual! At best, I always have this kind of trouble, since for some mysterious reason my legal training unaccountably comes to a head at the bedtime hour and makes me hash and rehash the day’s events, like a courtroom summation, upon retiring. This night, particularly, with my strange new slant on things, I had plenty of food for worry, and it wasn’t long before my consideration of the whole matter hit a new low.
“John,” I whispered, sitting up in the dark, “I’ve just thought of something.”
John grunted.
“John!” I whispered again, shaking at his arm.
Poor John. A pair of pajamas and a comfortable bed always acted upon him like a chemical formula guaranteed to produce immediate somnolence. In two seconds, he was as overcome as a patient intravenously overdosed with morphine; and at this very moment, therefore, was already deep within the Elysian fields, understandably loath to return.
At my continued urging, though, he started groggily awake. “What’s the matter?” he mumbled almost incoherently. “What happened?”
“Nothing’s happened,” I answered quickly, trying to establish contact with his still unconscious mind. “I just happened to think of something else.”
“Oh.” He pulled the covers up again. “Can’t it wait ’til morning? Please?”
“No it can’t,” I said definitely. “Are you awake?”
“John!” I turned on the light and he obligingly opened one eye. “Are you listening?”
It was like pulling in a struggling, drowning man, but we finally made it. “I’m listening,” he said.
“Well, look here.” I sat up to explain. “Have you ever thought how it would be if the children didn’t like the idea of our having another baby? I mean, what if it turned out that they positively didn’t want one?”
“Nonsense,” said John, still only partially awake. “Why shouldn’t they like it? ‘All the world loves a lover’—I mean a baby. For heaven’s sake, darling, let’s get some sleep!”
“But John,” I persisted, “what if they really don’t like the idea?”
“That’s ridiculous!” He was getting ready to roll over again.
“Oh, is it?” I asked. “Well, tell me: do you remember what Lizzie said after George was born, right after I came home from the hospital? That very first day? You know—about another baby!”
It had been one of those epic, childish remarks that achieve immortality in parental history—one of those fine collector’s items for that long series of dramatic and amusing anecdotes that every family amasses through the years with much the same kind of reverence and care that historians record the story of a nation. This particular piece had emerged after an especially ample dinner, as all of us prepared to leave the table. I had stood up to stretch and perhaps exhale some of my increasing girth, when Lizzie, passing close by me had poked my abdomen and said: “Goodness, Mother, just look at your tummy! I hope you’re not hatching another baby in there again!”
At the time, after a stunned moment, John and I had burst into riotous laughter. Now, however, in view of the current event shaping up in our midst, the words took on a more ominous implication—and I could see from the fully awakened look on John’s face, that he grasped it too.
“Of course I remember what she said,” he told me slowly. Then, in an attempt to shrug it off, he went on: “But it doesn’t mean a thing! Children say all kinds of things and usually mean very little by them. You know that.”
“That’s true enough,” I admitted hopefully, anxious to shrug it off, too. “But . . .”
“But nothing!” John made it a flat statement, like an almanac statistic. “How could she possibly have meant anything specific or significant by it? It was just a meaningless, kid remark!”
Despite his show of authority, though, I was unimpressed. “I’m not at all sure,” I replied. “You never can tell with children, anyway—what they say and what they don’t say too. Isn’t that so?”
“Hmm.” John’s noncommittal sound was obviously meant to reserve judgment, but I had no doubts at all about his basic agreement with this idea.
Both he and I often had cause to deplore the fact that ferreting information out of any youngster can be as frustrating and futile a feat as trying to converse intelligently with a cocker spaniel. Apparently, from our own experiences, there must be some strange kind of mental block for logic and detail that transforms the average child’s mind. Inevitably, therefore, when the poor parent tries to do his prescribed duty of keeping abreast of juvenile events concerning his son or daughter, he remains instead, standing in mute, vain agony before the full facts that his child must surely remember and know, but that are as inaccessible to him as the goodies in the Bake Shop window are to the starving beggar.
On the other hand, though, even if children are overly remiss in this matter of supplying desired, complete accounts to their parents, still John and I also knew and were grateful that they are, at least, equally prone to dropping irrelevant, revealing remarks from unrelated time to time, which when pursued and investigated, do it for them. For instance, a careless “Jimmy’s a neat speller” over the morning cereal, can be tracked down with shrewd adult questioning into the story of a rivalry for classroom spelling honors that had been going on for two years. Or, a quick “Miss Sternal smells nice” can uncover a disciplinary visit to the assistant principal that took place about a month before.
Invariably, these little casual, disconnected utterances are hard pebbles of truth that are scattered Hansel and Gretel fashion, seemingly apropos of nothing, along the daily way. What’s more, they can usually be collected by the alert, conscientious mother and father, like the far-flung parts of a one-thousand-piece jig-saw puzzle, and put together at last into a comparatively satisfying picture of what, when, where, why and who else.
Of course, it is mostly like being on an endless, exhausting, compulsory kind of Treasure Hunt—but with clues likely to pop up any time, any place, I found it almost impossible to dismiss any of Lizzie’s remarks, particularly the ones in question, as easily as John was now suggesting.
“Good Lord!” I said. “How can we even begin to tell what she might have had in her mind then? Don’t forget, darling—Lizzie is a long way out of the irresponsible, gibberish stage. Maybe it was something in her subconscious expressing itself! Maybe she really doesn’t want any more babies in the family and was simply saying so in her own words. Maybe it’s just as simple as that!”
“Now, let’s be reasonable about this,” John answered, in a cold-sense, man-to-man manner. “Why on earth wouldn’t Lizzie want a new brother or sister? Why wouldn’t any child possibly want one?”
“I don’t know,” I confessed. “But then, I never thought of another baby from the children’s point of view before. Did you?”
“Well—I guess not,” he admitted. “I never even heard anyone else mention such a point of view either.”
As he said this, I realized it was absolutely true. Apparently, there is a great dearth of general comment on this aspect of family life. Surprisingly so, too, when one stops to think how over-much children are considered and consulted by grown-ups nowadays in all other family matters outside of this business of increasing the size of the clan. It would appear, therefore, that a “blessed event” is the one remaining arbitrary event in the modern child’s life. At most, there is usually only half-hearted rationalization after the accomplished act, like: “Another brother is just what Sister needs!”; and at best, there is often an afterthought-kind of attempt to make Junior an “accessory after the fact” by commanding him (“Isn’t it wonderful, dear!”) to join in the celebration.
Unquestionably, people are having greater numbers of children these days than they did in the period immediately preceding—a statement, however, that proves absolutely nothing but that parents (and parents only) are so inclined. In point, it might be wise to note also that relevant statistics definitely show a trend for children from large families to have small ones themselves when they marry, and vice versa; yet the significance of this pertinent observation, unfortunately (or perhaps “fortunately” is the better word!) rarely ever enters the minds of adults bent upon a reproductive career: even as John and I.
“Don’t you see?” I asked him, after elaborating on some of this for both our benefits. “Sure, we want another baby—but what about Lizzie and Martha, now they’re big enough for separate opinions: what if they prefer the status quo?”
John, however, was growing momentarily more bewildered and annoyed. “This is the craziest conversation I’ve ever heard!” he declared. “Whose baby is this, anyway? And who cares if they don’t like it! Since when do we need permission to exercise our individual rights? What are we—emancipated parents or mice?”
“Emancipated parents.” I couldn’t help laughing a little at his bravado and choice of phrase. Heaven knows that in an era when most mothers and fathers are enrolled in the psychologist-inspired Downtrodden Parents’ Brigade from the pre-natal state onward, it had been no mean feat for John and me to successfully maintain our family leadership. Unfortunately, there is no governmental totalitarianism anywhere on earth that can equal the social and procedural dictatorships that flourish unceasingly in the otherwise most democratic communities! Accordingly, it had meant heroic, daily resistance to snide attacks and shocked spectator comments, to be able to persevere in our chosen way of life; until now, after long, embattled years, we had become practically oblivious to the guerilla warfare that was still occasionally carried on about and over us. Gradually, finally, however, we had established the pleasant régime we now lived with and preferred to the currently popular, conventional one so heartily advocated by our well-meaning friends and relatives—a régime in which we enlightenedly solicited and honored the whims and opinions of our children whenever possible, but still were always free to exercise an undemocratic, “benevolent despot” right of control whenever the welfare of the entire group required it.
“We’re emancipated all right!” I went on after a moment. “But we do too care what the children think—you know what a close-knit family we’ve always been. Why, I just couldn’t bear it if anything—even a baby!—upset that good feeling now.”
“Nothing will,” John assured me promptly. “Honestly, sweetie, you’re just making a mountain out of a—a pebble! Those kids’ll be thrilled as can be over the whole idea when they find out!”
I made one last stand. “But, darling,” I persisted, “not all children feel that way. I’ll admit I didn’t think of it before, but I’ve been remembering some girls I went to college with, who always wished they’d been ‘only children’ so they could have had more of the things they wanted instead of having to share with brothers and sisters. And . . .”
“And I,” interrupted John firmly, “have known ‘only children’ who would have given their eye-teeth for a brother or a sister! Which proves the old business about the greener grass in the other yard; and that you can’t please everybody no matter how you try. So why not just relax and please ourselves like we’re doing!”
It was irresistible logic—and also the only opening out of my self-made labyrinth. “I guess you’re right at that,” I murmured wearily.
“Of course I am!” he agreed modestly. “Now, just find that opportune moment you mentioned and get the telling done with so we can settle down in peace again. Okay?” he asked, reaching over to turn off the lamp.
“Okay.” I lay down too. “It won’t be easy, but I’ll say when. I guess there’s nothing to do but face it anyway. And I’ll make it soon.”
“Fine. And another thing,” he said: “Please stop this worrying. After all, what are a few childish remarks after the heckling we’ve already endured? Look at it that way: a brief embarrassing period of time, and that’s the end of it. Good night.”
A quick kiss from John, followed by the immediate sound of his untroubled, regular breathing, assured me at once that any discussion from then on could be only in the form of a soliloquy on my part—yet there was so much more that I longed to say and ask! It wasn’t just the idea of telling the children, or being embarrassed by them, or even being harried by their possible reactions. It was more than that. It was this strange, new feeling of parental inadequacy that bothered me most—that confusing, guilty feeling of having been asleep while on sentry duty and waking, now, to find myself surrounded by enemy problems.
Why, I asked myself, had we never realized any of this until this very night? Why, oh why had we blindly been unable to visualize the children before, as the separate people they were already beginning to be and soon would wholly become? Where had we been when all this was happening?
“They grow up when you’re not even looking.” John’s voice out of the darkness startled me—not only because he seemed to be instinctively answering my unspoken questions, but because his being awake yet, at all, was such an unprecedented event.
“Aren’t you asleep?” I exclaimed incredulously. “I was sure you were!”
“Almost,” he said. Then he groggily completed his original thought. “They sort of sneak up on you in little baby steps you never notice until they’ve suddenly covered a giant’s stride. One day they’re infants, and the next they’re half-grown people. And the parents are always the last to know.”
His voice trailed off a bit at the end of this last sentence, and I knew that this time he was really off—but how unbelievably more comforting and encouraging was the darkness in which I now lay!
What if the waters that lay ahead and about me were as unfamiliar as they had been before John spoke! I had remembered that I was not alone.
Nor was there any longer a need for guilt, a reason to fear: we were caught up in a phenomenon that was as natural and as inevitable as the changing of the seasons, where there is never a sharp demarcation line between one and the other, only a sudden, wonderful knowledge that Spring is here!