The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book Part 7

How many women, if they look into their bureau drawers, will not find them cluttered with accessories which either are not used or, if worn, spoil the elegance and tidy distinction of their costumes? Buying wisely is an art, but it requires no special talent--only a willingness to learn--and there are any number of books and magazine articles available that will help you to be better buyers. There are a few general recommendations, however, which may be made.

For example, don't buy without asking yourself in each instance: "Do I need this?" and "Will it fit in with other things I now have, or will it require further buying?" Thus a brown coat, no matter how cheap, is no bargain if all your accessories are black.

Another important principle of good buying is: Be sure you know what you want; then buy the best you can afford. The best is usually the cheapest in the long run. It means fewer replacements, longer use, and better appearance from the start. a.n.a.logous to wasting money on second-grade goods is the purchase of imitations of articles you can't afford.

Don't buy things that require expensive upkeep. Was.h.i.+ng is cheaper than dry-cleaning, and if you have washable clothes and furnis.h.i.+ngs that can be handled at home, you will not be stranded in a period when you have to cut costs by doing the work yourself.

Buy from well-established merchants. Their reputation is valuable, to you and to them alike. Avoid the fly-by-night shop and its vaunted "bargains."

I have known brides who spent their meager food allowances on useless tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs. Such ignorance is inexcusable; no woman these days need go without competent advice on food purchases. She has only to consult her favorite magazine.

Most budgets allow something for the theatre, social affairs, weekends, vacation, and travel for pleasure. The proportion of your income to be spent on recreation is a matter about which we must not be dogmatic. You must figure out what you want most. In the first place, recreation requires the allotment of time and money to do things which you most enjoy, and these will differ for every couple. We may easily overemphasize the kind of recreation for which we pay money. It is true that theatre tickets, phonograph records, and the like are expensive and offer a pa.s.sive form of entertainment, more appropriate for older people. When you are young and trying to be happy on little money, it is foolish to believe that you have to buy your fun. Whether or not you have a good time depends not on how much money you spend but on whether you and your husband are fundamentally good companions.

Have you the spirit of play and the ability to enjoy things together?

Then you have one of life's most precious gifts. Preserve it by exercise. Wherever you live, there are inexpensive ways of getting into the woods, picnicking together, walking, swimming, and enjoying all sorts of outdoor sports at very little cost. Such recreation is good for you physically, and great fun besides.

Many young couples spend so much emotional energy on their children that they lose the invaluable habit of running off to play together. Wherever you cut expenses, do not neglect to go off together frequently as you did when you were engaged. No money is better spent than the small fee for hiring a person to look after the children while husband and wife take a picnic lunch together, a long walk, or do whatever it is they most enjoy.

Too common today are people like Mary and Jim, who, in their eagerness to do all that books and lectures recommend for little Peter, got so involved in his welfare that they lost all their sense of fun. They are today thoroughly dull people, no longer interesting socially. Jim has failed to rise in his business, for he mislaid the spark of enthusiasm which made him an a.s.set to his employer. Most unhappy is poor Peter, who has become a genuine problem child.

Entertaining may seem important to you, but young couples are not expected to engage in any sort of formal social activity. Avoid expensive dinner parties and subst.i.tute informal gatherings where both the preparation and the cost of food will be slight. If you are original and vivacious hosts, your guests will have a jolly time.

Your budget should provide something for medical service. Remember that the largest dental bill comes after a period of neglect. You should not have to spend much in fees for the family doctor. Select one with care and talk over your circ.u.mstances with him in a friendly way. Don't be afraid to ask him what his fee will be. It is a false kind of pride that leads one to hesitate in discussing professional fees frankly and fully.

Investigate the three-cents-a-day hospital plan in your community.

No more serious question of expense will confront you than the cost of children. The direct expense for hospital and medical care incidental to the arrival of a baby varies in different parts of the country, but it is safe to say that in cities it will be somewhere between $100 and $200 as a minimum.

However, you need not expect to enjoy the frills of a private room and special nurses and think the doctor will take care of you for a nominal fee; there is no reason why he should. Having a baby is not a disease, and you will not need to have fussy care.

You should, however, put something aside for those extra expenses which are almost certain to occur. During the baby's first year, regular medical care should be provided. Your doctor may suggest a contract under which you would pay him a specified amount to keep baby well and receive his services whenever you need them during that period. Under such a plan you may pay anywhere from $50 to $300 a year. If you prefer to pay by the visit, you take the risk; it may cost more, or it may amount to less in the course of a year than it would under the terms of a definite contract.

It is easy to be extravagant in buying unnecessary clothes and toys for the child. Remember that a baby is happiest in the simplest surroundings and that the only two things you can give your child which are of permanent value are good health and an acceptable social att.i.tude. If you have the sort of home which leads him to develop a friendly, happy disposition and teaches him the necessity of living honestly and sincerely with no attempt to conceal mistakes, you will give him as much as any parent can give any child. It is for yourself and not for your possessions that your children may "arise up, and call you blessed."

It is important to you both to keep up your appearance in order to be as attractive physically and mentally as before you were married. But you may have to be very ingenious in devising short cuts to this end when the permanent wave you planned for or the new suit you hoped to buy is deferred by the need to put some more money into your husband's preparation for his business or profession or by any other emergency which might arise. The pluck with which you meet these disappointments is a measure of your fitness for marriage.

In my own observation, among the young business and professional group I have seen less genuine lack of money than fretful stupidity which was expressed in poor management. A lack of imagination and resourcefulness often paves the way to tragedy. We are living in a fascinating age, but under a complex economy that makes many demands on our spirit of pioneering and adventure.

It was picturesque--daring, perhaps--to leave comfortable homes and settled communities as our great-grandparents did, adventuring into new country. It sounds romantic to live in a sodhouse and wrestle with nature. The truth is that they pretty well had to do these things to carve out a niche for themselves in their economic system.

We young married people may have to live in a walk-up in an unfas.h.i.+onable part of town, but the same spirit of daring adventure and the identical will to make a go of things animates us. If you have that spirit, you can afford to get married, and I can a.s.sure you that the rewards of facing your problems and seeing them through together are high. Such a marriage is firmly rooted, and when its buoyant young love matures, its flower is an enduring happiness that nothing else can equal.

_Jessie Marshall, M.D._

CHAPTER SEVEN

_Children? Of Course!_

Nowadays we hear much about planning--town planning, city planning, nation planning. The elder and younger statesmen are going to see to it that we are well-housed, well-fed, suitably employed according to our abilities, and provided for in our old age. Good. This, as I understand it, has always been the American plan. I am sure that no American who is willing to work deserves less than the fullness of the earth. And I shall a.s.sume that this country is going to be well enough planned to enable you to raise a family--with suitable planning. For family planning is the most important planning. Indeed, the whole point of national planning is to enable us in turn to plan the nation. The nation rests on the family. Your family rests on you and your mate. What are you planning to do about it? How, when, and why?

In our children we live over our own childhood and project ourselves into the future. Until our own children come along we tend to forget that the world, to which we are now so thoroughly and sometimes wearisomely accustomed, once struck us as a thing of mysterious glamour, promising an endless opening vista of keen excitement.

And yet, if life is to continue worth the living, we must continue to hold onto that early att.i.tude. We must continue to find ecstasy in simple sources. And often it is our children--easily yet deeply pleased, ceaselessly busy with their paints and blocks and animals, ready for every new adventure, never jaded, never dull--who must remind us, their elders, how to get the most out of life. In their love for flowers and animals, paints and song, we may rediscover the submerged or forgotten purpose of our own lives. Or our talent may be for building happy lives from the ground up, in which case the children themselves are the answer to our search for pure-hearted, never flagging excitement.

As for projecting ourselves into the future through our children, reaching ahead through them in order to affect, if possible, generation after generation of people yet unborn--this is a kind of immortality s.n.a.t.c.hed from death and a satisfaction, though composed entirely of hope, that parents prize. Strong-souled people feel that their personalities are worth perpetuating, especially in conjunction with their beloveds'! In proportion to their love of life, to the strength of their joy and the clarity of vision of even better things, people find one lifetime all too short to fulfill the expanding urges within them.

In their children they see human beings who may carry on their work, or at any rate transmit their traits to grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Just at present people who have found life good, the ideal parents, feel the need of entrusting the future to people like themselves, the desperate need to keep power from falling into the hands of morbid madmen who, under the pretext of enlarging life, precipitate horrible wars precisely because they themselves, starved, oppressed, or humiliated from the cradle, have never found life good. Yes, our children can make all the difference between a life full of hope for the future of the race and one of pessimism and despair. It is this sense of children as carrying something of ourselves, our tempers, our hopes, into the future which is at the bottom of what we call the eugenic urge--the desire, that is, to beget good stock and pa.s.s on only the best in us.

About the obvious pleasures that children bring, the fascination of seeing their characters unfold, the happiness of festivals like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter, which without children lose half their charm, it is not necessary to speak.

For our purposes, however, the point is that there are literally dozens of reasons why nearly all of us want children. The problem is when to have them and in what numbers. For modern man likes to know what he is about in this world and to direct and control his destiny in the light of other knowledge and experience.

The time for the first baby is a question of readiness on the parents'

part. Are they ready physically, psychologically, economically? These are not, of course, three separate ways of being ready; they are interdependent ways, but they offer suitable heads under which to discuss the subject.

Economic readiness is of utmost importance. Insecurity of employment, insufficient means to provide the mother and baby with medical supervision and good food, or looming debts are in themselves sufficient to prevent prospective parents from attaining the other kinds of readiness--physical and psychological. On the other hand, young people with steady incomes should not postpone having children merely because those incomes are not high. Three can live almost as cheaply as two, especially in the child's first years. It is the expense of hospitalization and doctor's care, during pregnancy and throughout the first year or two following the birth, that sometimes threatens to unbalance the family budget. This additional expense must be provided for. It need not be great--a matter of a few hundred dollars, often less in various parts of the country. The doctor's fee for pre-natal care and delivery will correspond roughly, unless he is a senior specialist of great reputation (by no means a necessity for healthy people), to the expense for hospitalization. The latter can frequently be obtained for a hundred dollars or less--though rarely, if ever, in a big city--making the total cost of getting the baby about two hundred dollars. In many parts of the country hospital schemes, into which you make a monthly or yearly payment, make it possible to get two weeks' hospitalization for mother and baby, with semi-private room, use of delivery room, and nursing care, for about ten dollars. This effects an obvious saving, and has done a great deal to bring children within the reach of all. During the first year or so the mother needs to be quite free to call on her doctor for service or advice whenever she wishes. Sometimes the doctor will be glad to arrange a flat charge for a year's attention, say a hundred dollars, or more or less, depending on the family income. Such an arrangement often does the parents a great deal of good, putting their minds at rest, for they feel they can call on the doctor in all reasonable emergencies, ask him all necessary questions, expect periodic visits to their baby, and receive all necessary vaccinations and immunizations for a fee they can afford. The sum may be paid in monthly or quarterly installments.

Money for the child may be saved out of monthly earnings. This well-known phenomenon is called saving for children. Very often the parents of the married couple are glad to help them with the extra expense involved in having their first child. I do not mean by loans--for it is not good for young people to be in debt, even to loving creditors--but by actually undertaking to pay the hospital and the physician. If people are ready for a baby in all other ways and only money keeps them from parenthood, the prospective grandparents often feel it their duty to help in this way. Dr. Josephine Hemenway Kenyon, director of the Health and Happiness Club of _Good Housekeeping_, has often made the wise suggestion that fathers give, in addition to any other wedding present, a $500 or $1000 bond, called "The Baby Bond," to be kept to meet the expenses of bringing the first baby into the world and protecting its first year of life. This idea appealed so strongly to some parents that Dr. Kenyon went even further, suggesting that young parents who can afford it take out a ten-year endowment policy of $1000 for their thirteen-year-old children, to be available when these children are twenty-three, if needed, to help them start their own families.

The question of the right age for parenthood is naturally of importance.

But it depends on many factors, chief among which, after the economic problem has been disposed of, are physical and psychological health.

Some time between twenty-three and twenty-eight seems to me to be a satisfactory time for a woman to bear her first baby; but any time up to thirty-five presents no difficulty, provided the physical and mental conditions are healthy and propitious. Plenty of women of forty and over have been known to go through first and subsequent pregnancies successfully, but there is no reason for postponing children to this age except failure to find the right mate earlier in life. People who have their first child when over thirty-five are themselves over fifty when the child goes through adolescence--an age which may make it difficult to help the child meet its crucial problems in the tone of one good friend to another. If you cannot have your children before thirty-five, you must make every effort to remain young enough for spiritual companions.h.i.+p with them. The best age for parenthood is to be determined, not in terms of years, but of physical and psychological health and happiness.

In marriage psychological health and happiness are largely dependent on love. It is of the utmost importance that every child should be a love child, in the best sense of the term. Love is a splendor that eludes definition, but it is characterized by an inexhaustible desire for the beloved's company and a steadily burning fire of enthusiasm and admiration. So-called disillusion in love comes from the failure of these emotions. Young lovers, through plenty of courting and companions.h.i.+p, should try to make sure of the lasting quality of their love. This is sometimes impossible, however, and for this reason and others I think it is just as well for married people to wait a year or even two before having their first child. In the happiest marriages there are many adjustments, unforeseen before the wedding, to be made.

And it may very well be that only in the continued intimacy of marriage can the strength of love be tested. Only there can love gutter out or prove itself stronger than death--so much stronger indeed, that, as it deepens and widens in fullness and power, it turns of its own accord directly toward the creation of more life.

In other words, the best time to have children is when the lovers, sure of themselves and of each other, feel an imperious need to stamp the gold of life with each other's images. I feel no hesitancy in urging married couples to take a year or so to make sure of their love, if only for the children's sake. Economic conditions being adequate, there is no reason to suppose that real lovers will put off having children until it is too late to obtain the best eugenic results. To paraphrase the poet, we may say that those who restrain their desire for children do so because their desire is weak enough to be restrained. Such people will probably not make good parents. True lovers will beget children after a year or two, nor will they mind making a few so-called sacrifices, as of parties and new automobiles, for the sake of having children. They recognize the distinction between entertainment and joy. Man may be a laughing animal, but he is more essentially a creative animal. His deepest pleasures are simply the by-products of his activity. In building a home around a family of children both men and women often find the deepest of all possible pleasures. And when it is in this spirit of vital affection that the child is begotten, we get, as the eugenists say, a vital fertilization. The chances are that children so begotten will themselves be capable of strong, sound, deep-seated feelings. As Dr. Kugelma.s.s says in _Growing Superior Children_, "The degree of emotional devotion of one parent to another is reflected dominantly in the transmission of the more vital elements in the const.i.tution of the progeny."

To the question of physical readiness for childbirth I come last, but not because it is of least importance. Without physical health the parents cannot expect to beget healthy children, nor indeed can they, in many cases, manage even to bear them. As everyone knows, women afflicted with tuberculosis, heart disease, and kidney changes should probably refrain from bearing children. But this is a matter for the doctor to decide. Such people, if their troubles are not severe, may safely bear at least one child, sometimes two. They should put themselves in the hands of a good physician and rely implicitly on his findings and advice. Sufferers from venereal diseases should not attempt to beget children till they have been given a clean bill of health. Nor should children be begotten when the body is weakened by temporary disease or during the stage of debilitating after-effects. For disease and fatigue affect s.e.x cells unfavorably. So do mental strain, depression and overexcitement. Unhealthy physical and mental states in the parents lead to debilitated or deficient offspring. They open the way to the operation of undesirable hereditary factors which generations of self-controlled parents have been driving into the background and attenuating to the point of disappearance. It is possible for the father, too, to weaken his vitality by excessive s.e.xual activity. In fine, the best time for conception to take place is when the lovers'

sense of well-being, physical as well as mental, is at its fullest.

Full-bodied pa.s.sion, which we may think of as a kind of crisis of love and health, will give us offspring to be proud of. One thing we cannot plan, however, is the s.e.x of the child to come. Nor should we, in general, wish to. It was the limited sphere of feminine activities that once tended to make girls a debit, boys a credit. Nowadays girls have just as many opportunities of becoming interesting human beings as have boys. It is a favorite theory of my husband's that they may, and often do, become more interesting, because they can do not only everything that boys can do but one thing more--they can bear children, a humanizing experience of the greatest possible value.

Should you wish to know what are your chances of having twins, I must remind you that the tendency to give birth to them is an inherited trait, especially through the father. Twins are much more likely to be girls than boys, and to be born later rather than earlier in the mother's married life. Thus it is three times more likely that a woman of thirty-eight will give birth to twins than that a woman of twenty-four will do so. Should you fear that the unpredictable appearance of twins will unbalance your baby budget, you can, for a moderate sum, insure yourself against this chance with many of the larger insurance companies. The insurance must be taken out before the existence of twins in the uterus can be diagnosed--that is, in the first two or three months of gestation. One twin birth occurs to about 90 single births, one triple to about 8000, and one quadruple to about 650,000. In all medical literature only about 30 cases of quintuplets have been recorded. Multiple births are not only rare, but the babies are often so delicate that they are extremely difficult to rear. We can be well pleased if our first pregnancy eventuates in a single healthy baby of either s.e.x.

All the reasons for wanting the first child apply in the case of the second, and to them are added more. What was in the first instance simply a hope and a vague if powerful urge has now grown into a conscious desire, based on the self-knowledge and experience gained from loving and looking after the first child. We have had a real taste of the joys of home and family building, and now nothing short of economic catastrophe is likely to stop us from building higher. I a.s.sume, of course, that the mother did not encounter any severe difficulties in giving birth to her first child. If she was in good medical hands, she probably did not, though certain unusual formations of the pelvis may have made her labor longer than usual. I do not say more painful, because medical science has found ways of minimizing the pains of childbirth. Even if it was found necessary to deliver the first child by Caesarean operation, a woman in normal health can without danger bear at least two children by this method. And at the very least a family should include two children.

Quite apart from the parents' natural desire to go on expressing their mutual love by building a full-voiced home on the foundations laid by the first child, it soon becomes apparent that this first child, for the sake of its own social and moral development, needs a little brother or sister. It needs companions.h.i.+p. It needs to share its toys and its parents. Otherwise it will tend to grow self-centered. By being too much with grown-ups it may become moody and negative.

After the question, "Can you afford it?"--and I sincerely hope you can--the next question facing the mother who wants a second child is, "When can I bear it with the maximum amount of benefit to it, to my first child, and to myself?" Clearly, if it is to be a playmate for the first child, you will want to have it as soon as possible. But, in fairness to both the mother and the child-to-be, there should elapse a period of about two years between the birth of the first and the conception of the second offspring. Less time than that will seldom allow the mother, who put so much of her best blood and bone into building and nursing the first baby, to recover fully her maximal physical health and strength. All authorities are agreed on this point.

There may be exceptions, of course, and there are always mothers who, by reason of having married late, perhaps, are anxious to have as many babies as quickly as possible. But most women neither can nor will nor should produce children in this fas.h.i.+on. There is too much risk of weakening the mother's body and of begetting poor stock.