Domestic bliss

“ But the voice of adulation fell upon unheeding ears when sickness invaded the household and hastened the cherished wife and mother from her loved ones. Not even the ardent devotion, the deathless affection of the husband whose efforts in life had all been made for her, could stay the destroyer in his cruel work. For months she lay an invalid, tended by those who loved her more than life, and then sank into the grave a victim of consumption. ”

“ It is poisoning that fountain whence he hath a right to derive the sweetest and most innocent pleasure, the most cordial comfort, the most solid friendship, and most faithful assistance in all his affairs, wants, and distresses. It is the destruction of his peace of mind, and even of his reputation. The ruin of both wife and husband, and sometimes of the whole family, are the probable consequence of this fatal injury. Domestic happiness is the end of almost all our pursuits, and the common reward of all our pains. ”

“ But there are few social circles in which it is not known that some of its members are sad sufferers because of a husband's or a father's intemperance, and there are many, many families, alas! which have always in their homes the shadow of a sorrow that embitters everything. They hide it as best they can, and few know or dream of what they endure. ”

“ From small beginnings, breezes arise and gather into storms; at last, exhausted by their violence, they subside, and for a while love returns, and all its ardent affection. Such is the brief but sad history of many a matrimonial union,—but who can describe its baneful influence?—how much evil and misery are propagated! how much reason and principle, health and happiness, reputation and prosperity, are sacrificed in those families, whose parents thus suffer reason and understanding to be the victims of these opposite and alternate mental states! ”

“ Sometimes it is an illness which overtakes the husband or wife. Holding hands by the bedside, they stare into the face of Death, and again the trivialities of life, the pettiness of their previous desires, the folly of their selfishness, the stupidity of their little snobdom, are revealed by the whisperings of Death, and by its warnings. The truth of things stalks into the bedroom where the husband, or the wife, lies sleeping on the borderland. About the sick bed the weeping woman makes new vows, tears wash out her vanity, her self-conceit. ”

“ Fault Finding.—At a later date, when, in all probability, the wife will be the one whose conduct will incite trouble because of the worries incident to her more or less monotonous, domestic existence, much care will have to be exercised so that an unwitting fretfulness may not cause quarrels. When a man comes home at [Pg 351] night tired and hungry, longing for peace, and comfort, and pleasant conversation, it is worse than anarchy to not only get no greeting, but to note the discontent on his wife's face, and to listen to a tirade of fault finding. Your husband has troubles of his own. ”

“ The author of this work was led to attempt it, by discovering, in her extensive travels, the deplorable sufferings of multitudes of young wives and mothers, from the combined influence of poor health, poor domestics, and a defective domestic education. The number of young women whose health is crushed, ere the first few years of married life are past, would seem incredible to one who has not investigated this subject, and it would be vain to attempt to depict the sorrow, discouragement, and distress experienced in most families where the wife and mother is a perpetual invalid. ”

“ No one can wonder at this who considers how physical suffering irritates the temper, depresses energy, deadens hope, induces recklessness, and, in short, poisons life. The domestic affections, too, are apt to languish through disappointment in countries where the average of death is very high. There is least marriage in unhealthy countries, and most in healthy ones,—other circumstances being equal. ”

“ Yet all this suffering, anguish, crime and conscious degradation, you, the husband, have forced upon her, solely for the momentary, and, under the circumstances, most unnatural, gratification of your sensual passion,—a passion which, when controlled by manly love and wisdom, and held in abeyance to the health, purity, and happiness of your wife and children, would bring only honor to their hearts and to your home, but which, when thus indulged without regard to the wishes and conditions of your wife, and merely for your personal pleasure, spreads crime, pollution, misery and death, all around. ”

“ Neither you nor your wife intended to let it go that far, and she really doesn't intend to go home to her mother, nor do you really intend to drown your domestic griefs in drink. But with some provocations man gets peevish and woman irritable. ”

“ But in my husband’s house I should be full of terror, tasting joys to which I have no right.
“‘All this, monsieur, is not argument; it is the feeling of a soul made vast and hollow by seven years of suffering. Finally, must I make a horrible confession? I shall always feel at my bosom the lips of a child conceived in rapture and joy, and in the belief in happiness, of a child I nursed for seven months, that I shall bear in my womb all the days of my life. If other children should draw their nourishment from me, they would drink in tears mingling with the milk, and turning it sour. ”

“ We say that husband and wife should be reasonable—reasonable that they may be true in fact as well as in purpose. Feeling of itself, even when healthy, is a poor guide, sadly blind without reason. Whether it go with love or indifference, folly carries misery into the home. ”

“ Is it because, being cut off in a great measure by the nature of their employment from family ties and family pleasures, they feel a malicious delight in all family trials and vexations, and the ever-recurring breezes which disturb the domestic atmosphere? ”

“ With his arm about his wife he stumbled away to a corner of the room, dragging her with him, and while the neighbours sat silent and sympathetic, the women sobbing softly, the men grinding their rough knuckles into their palms, the husband and the wife, their foreheads against the wall, washed away in the first tears they had ever shed in a common woe all the wrack of the petty quarrels, the little heart-burnings, the frettings and the misunderstandings—all so mean and small in this shadow of the mightiest tragedy in their lives. ”

“ The claim is urgent in behalf of the unfortunate individual, whose life is a perpetual series of suffering and anxiety, who is not only subjected, perhaps, every six or eight months to the debilitating effect of excessive hemorrhage, but whose mind is oppressed by disappointment, arising out of domestic and conjugal relationships, even more heavily than by the influence of personal suffering. ”

“ She thought suddenly with a pitying horror of that poor woman down the street, who now could see neither husband nor children, her nerves and willpower gone beyond control, lapped around with every comfort into her writhing self, with a nullification of every joy, as well as care. ”

“ Long years of struggle and worry, continual mental strain that has prevented the full enjoyment of home life, a weakened physical condition, old age in advance of its time, and more, far more than all this, in at least one instance of which I have personal knowledge, and I presume there have been many others, the disruption of a family that would never have occurred had the husband given less time to his struggle for wealth and more to the wife whom he had vowed to love and cherish. ”

“ The misery and woe of home prompts to the pursuit of relief and excitement abroad; and the gay and light assembly, the oblivion of drink, the impure and licentious association, these are but too likely to attract those whose wretched dwellings furnish only for the eye cheerless desolation and squalid forms, and for the ear the sigh and bitter plaint of hunger. The heart is closed by deep and desperate suffering. The finer affections of our nature may be softened and refined by certain measures of grief, but if it be too intense and lasting, they are overwhelmed. ”

“ In most instances, ruined homes come principally from drink, idleness, bad temper, shiftlessness and thriftless habits, brutal husbands, slatternly wives and Christless living. Do your duty faithfully to your wife and your children, and then, if home and happiness are wrecked, the responsibility will not rest upon you. ”

“ In misery bodies draw more closely together, as in cold weather, but hearts are estranged. This woman, to all appearance, must have loved this man with the amount of love within her, but probably this had been extinguished in the daily and mutual reproaches of the frightful distress that pressed upon the whole family, and she now had only the ashes of affection for her husband within her. ”

“ Too often the misery is ended by a catastrophe, a rush towards the well; a plunge and then stillness.
And what then? Does any one care? Not in the least. Even the mother of the girl sheds no tear and makes no lamentation. The house is relieved of the presence of the ill-starred widow, a certain source of misfortune, and her removal is a blessing for which the gods are thanked.
One by one the company drifted away, some to depart at once for their homes, others to indulge in fragments of gossip in the back verandah. ”

“ It is hardly realized how much quarreling, how much of intense emotional violence goes on in many homes. Its isolation and the absence of the restraining influence of formality and courtesy bring the wills of the family members into sharp conflict. Words are used that elsewhere would bring the severest physical answer, or bring about the most complete disruption of friendly relations. Love and anger, duty and self-interest bring about intense inner conflict in the home, and the struggle between the two generations, the rising and the receding, is here at its height. ”

“ Illness, tropical rains, want of help, a scarcity of proper nourishment for the poor mother, with the uncertainty as to the moment when we might be assailed, and my liability to have to leave the sick household to go to my post at the pass, all constituted a strain upon the soul of one anxious mortal that I feel thankful does not often fall to the lot of a husband to endure. ”

“ But I am the mother of six children, the eldest a boy of fourteen, the youngest a baby. In deep humility, in bitter disappointment, my husband and myself have come to this conclusion: our boys and girls are exceptionally troublesome, or we are very bad managers. Our home-life is beset with disorder and discomfort, which is becoming intolerable. Well, can you, and will you, undertake the task of spending a day or two, more or less, as you think best, in our family? See for yourself where the fault lies, and act the part of a friend to us in the greatest emergency of our lives? ”

“ If men only knew how they hurt their own cause by this neglect and coldness, and how much brighter the world would be for them, if they cherished and sympathized with a wife as they ought, much of the misery of the household would be done away. ”

“ I myself, who am so hospitable, was in very great distress for a retreat for my family; a distracted family, frightful both to its friends and itself, and filling every place with horror where it attempted to settle, having to shift its abode so soon as any one's finger began but to ache; all diseases are then concluded to be the plague, and people do not stay to examine whether they are so or no. ”

“ Intense misery and loneliness, domestic drudgery and reproach, and a total renunciation of all earthly enjoyments, and of the simplest luxuries in food and clothing, are all summed up in the word widowhood. ”

“ And for what, may we ask, has the master of the household thus deserted his home?—the company of hollow friends, idle acquaintances, perhaps drunkards or gamblers, whose witless jocularity forms the temptation to abandon a good name, fortune, worldly respectability, and self-esteem. None but the wife who has endured trials of this nature can properly understand the horrors resulting from such a life of folly and dissipation. ”

“ All men and women, whatever be their shortcomings in other directions, have this impulse, this faculty, in a degree. It takes shape in family ties: makes clumsy and unfortunate work of them in perhaps two cases out of three,--wives tormenting husbands, husbands neglecting and humiliating wives, parents maltreating and ruining children, children disobeying and grieving parents, and brothers and sisters quarrelling to the point of proverbial mention; but under all this, in spite of all this, the love is there. A great trouble or a sudden emergency will bring it out. ”

“ And thus it is impossible to deny that an unsuspected source of discomfort, which in time may become disease, sometimes threatens the head of the household—a source which I would gladly pass over if duty did not compel me to notice it, owing as it is to the sedulous and tender care taken by the devoted, anxious partner of his life, who in secret has long noted and grieved over her lord's declining health and force. ”

“ For one so nervously overwrought many allowances must be made. She may have been conscious of not responding fully to my affection. That this feeling was strong enough to induce her to take her life is a source of unspeakable grief to me, but one for which you must find explanation, as I have so often said, in the terrors caused by the dread event at the Moore house, which recalled old tragedies and emphasized a most unhappy family tradition. ”