Fatherlessness

“ I’m not a baby, am I? I’m a man, ain’t I? Disabuse yourself at once of the notion that I’m in leading-strings. I guess I can go as far as I like, and stay as long as I like, can’t I?”
“Yes, you can, of course,” soothed his sister. “But, if you really are a man, you’ve noticed how gray and worn father looks. How sick he looks! He’s been through a lot, you know; and he can’t help thinking that maybe something else dreadful is coming. He has to worry for himself and mother too, you know. Because just now everything is very critical on mother’s account. ”

“ And we would sooner vex a soul in heaven By coupling with it the dead body’s thought, It left behind it in a last month’s grave, Than, in my child, see other than ... my child. We only, never call him fatherless Who has God and his mother. O my babe, My pretty, pretty blossom, an ill-wind Once blew upon my breast! can any think I’d have another,—one called happier, A fathered child, with father’s love and race That’s worn as bold and open as a smile, To vex my darling when he’s asked his name And has no answer? ”

“ Where is the father so inhuman that he will demand of the stripling, the infirm, the feminine members of his family to procure the means of support, before he has exhausted every other effort that can be made by himself and his stalwart sons? ”

“ In our every-day thinking we take it for granted. The child, we maintain, inherits its father's bad temper just as it inherits its mother's good looks. We consider twice before we adopt the foundling, which may be of dull or vicious parentage. We shake our heads over the wayward son, remembering that his father "sowed his wild oats," and we observe "like father like son," or "blood will tell." We expect to find talent in the children of the gifted, thrift or dwarfed intellect or high purpose, according as these qualities are "bred in the bone." ”

“ Is it not the sweetest music ear of maker can hear?—except the word of perfect son, 'Lo, I come to do thy will, O God!' We, imperfect sons, shall learn to say the same words too: that we may grow capable and say them, and so enter into our birthright, yea, become partakers of the divine nature in its divinest element, that Son came to us—died for the slaying of our selfishness, the destruction of our mean hollow pride, the waking of our childhood. We are his father's debtors for our needs, our rights, our claims, and he will have us pay the uttermost farthing. ”

“ It shows too, that a father is not to be trusted for natural instincts towards his offspring; for the mother wept, and it needed the control of her own mother, and strong necessity, to induce the weak-minded and misguided girl to consent to part with her offspring. ”

“ All fathers are hypocrites and are never willing to confess that their own flesh and blood is very troublesome when it walks about on two legs, lays its dare-devil hands on everything, and is everywhere at once like a frisky pollywog. Your son barks, mews, and sings; he breaks, smashes and soils the furniture, and furniture is dear; he makes toys of everything, he scatters your papers, and he cuts paper dolls out of the morning’s newspaper before you have read it. ”

“ Is it not the duty of a father to preserve his only son from imbibing these dangerous and debasing errors, which will render him only one of a vile herd who are content to suffer, provided that they live? ”

“ First, my foster mother, then Vitalis, then another... Was it to be always so? Should I never find anyone that I could love and stay with always? Little by little I had grown attached to Vitalis. He seemed almost what I thought a father would be. Should I never have a father, have a family? Always alone in this great world! Nobody's boy! ”

“ If mother cannot go out in the automobile; if mother cannot play the piano; if mother cannot read to him, or tell him stories; if mother cannot come to the table for her meals;—the sight of this and the knowledge that he is the cause of it, will put a terrible tug on the heart-strings and the conscience. And in extreme cases, [Pg 269] if father has to be included in the punishment, and deprived of his pleasures, too, that makes the boy's feeling of guilty responsibility even more pronounced. ”

“ But what if a guilty husband and father could escape the dangers of disease, the detection by his wife, and could even escape the lashings of his own guilty conscience, which will smite with sevenfold force as the years advance, yet how terrible for him to remember that transmission is the law of heredity, and that a licentious father is the legitimate predecessor of a vicious child. Is it comforting for a father to anticipate with certainty that all the vices which have corrupted his life, blighted his home and debased his moral nature are to be transmitted to his offspring? ”

“ Well, child, having so many fatherless children of my own, it came natural to me to try to make a motherless girl comfortable; for, as I often says to myself, suppose my children had been motherless, for though it is bad enough to be fatherless, it is ten thousand times worse to be motherless, as every orphan child knows. So now, my dear, I think, as you are determined to finish your book before you go to bed, the sooner I go and leave you to do it the better. ”

“ But on the other hand, the father, from his distance, supports, protects, nourishes his child, and it is ultimately on the remote but powerful father-love that the infant rests, in a rest which is beyond mother-love. ”

“ A father ‘grumbling’ at the birth of a child! ‘Always ready to welcome each new child as it came!’—and this said by a wife of her husband, as the strongest testimony to his manliness and justice as a husband and father, and as the highest reason why she should love and honor him! What man so base, so ignoble, so fallen, and so deserving a dungeon or the gallows, as he who imparts the germ of a new life to his wife, to gratify his passion, and then ‘grumbles’ because a child is born, and thrusts it from him? Man can give no greater proof of the utter degradation and ruin of his moral nature. ”

“ When the human male did learn that he was a father, as his mate was a mother, it seems to have mentally intoxicated him, and led the way to many social vagaries. The grotesque comedy of the couvade, which proved a tragedy so often for the poor mother compelled by the custom to rise in her weakness and even neglect her new-born baby, in order to do double work and to tempt the appetite of her lord after his make-believe pangs of childbirth, was one sign that primitive consciousness found the new knowledge of double parentage very exciting. ”

“ That is a father—and that is a mother—whose gray hairs are coming with sorrow to the grave. That is a sister, weeping over evils which she cannot arrest; and there is the broken-hearted wife; and there are the children, hapless innocents, for whom their father has provided the inheritance only of dishonor, and nakedness and woe. ”

“ Yet to each parent comes an hour (Though fain he would the same delay) When other and resistless power Will steal the youthful heart away. And when a father here inquires For daughter lost; then, let him learn That daughters, though they love their sires, To other loves some day will turn; Nor convent rules nor home’s own charms, Will keep them from a lover’s arms. ”

“ Let the father look upon the dawning intelligence of the boy that prattles around his knee, the pride of his fond heart, and the hope and stay of his honest name; and then, if he can, let him picture him in distant bondage, the fountain of his affections dried up, the light of knowledge extinguished in his mind, his manly and upright spirit broken by oppression, and his free person and just proportions marred and lacerated by the incessant scourge. ”

“ Yet it is that father who has condemned her to a sickly infancy, a withering youth, and, if she should survive, to a life of isolation and misery, for she will never marry. Ah, no! I love her too well to expose her to the chance of one day's weeping over her own offspring, similarly smitten, as I weep over her. ”

“ Sir, there are fathers—indeed, I believe, most fathers living—who would rather see any child of theirs stretched and shrouded up in the grave than know them to be guilty of such a base and deliberate violation of all the sacred principles of truth as this. ”

“ I cannot tell else how the wretched mother can take, lovingly and patiently, to her heart another little one, when her failing strength is already tasked to the utmost to care for little brothers and sisters, who, having a father, are yet fatherless. ”

“ Does a man, simply because he chooses to pursue his pleasure, unmindful of results, acquire the right to fatherhood when he assumes no responsibility for his act?"
"Marcia, poor child, has life been so hard for you? Has nothing compensated for just living?" ”

“ This much is to be urged in favour of the unwillingness of fathers to incur the burden of children: that while the maternal instinct from the very first—nay, even in girlhood—makes the woman look forward with anticipative joy to the time of becoming a mother, the paternal instinct is seldom developed until the child is actually there to call it forth. ”

“ It must surely be man’s fault, not God’s, that she has to say to herself, “Soul, look another way—you have no part in this. Motherhood is beautiful, fatherhood is beautiful; but the dawn of fatherhood and motherhood is not beautiful.” ”

“ Fatherhood, no less than motherhood, has its duties and its pleasures. It is not only the father's duty, but it ought also to be his pleasure, to look after his own children. Some husbands speak of "the baby" as though it belonged wholly to the wife, and not to them. The thought of caring for or tending the child seems to be as foreign to their minds as though it were a child adopted by their wives from a foundling asylum. ”

“ Fatherless child! whose heart fails thee when thou dost miss from every familiar place the guide of thy youth, faint not nor be discouraged, though the way is rough, and the voice that ever spoke tenderly to thee is silent. Thou hast a father in heaven; and He who calls himself such understands better than thou what is implied in that sacred name. ”

“ The good Book says, the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children even unto the third and the fourth generation. But life to-day has taught me that the sins of the children are visited upon the fathers and the mothers—especially, the sweet, loving, trusting mothers! As I value my honor, Reginald Warren, or Count Rozi, I will see to it that your mother shall know every detail of the whole miserable career of her son. ”

“ Make them desire it by your continual importunity: for if they see you insisting upon it they certainly will desire it. Nay these things are a mere excuse and pretence. How many fathers at any rate are there here who have not their sons standing with them? Was it so difficult for thee to bring hither some of thy children? Whence it is clear that the absence of all the others who remain outside is due not only to their own indolence, but also to your neglect. ”

“ Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son? ”

“ In normal circumstances the special bonds which unite the mother to her children last for life, while the father, if all goes well, becomes simply the best friend of his growing children. It is time that fathers began to recognize these natural laws, instead of clinging so tenaciously to the historic and artificial prestige of a worm-eaten and unnatural patriarchal authority. ”

“ It is only an illegitimate child; and whether a miserable existence be terminated by the hangman, or by disease engendered by distress, is immaterial to the gentleman father! What becomes of the mother, is a matter of still less consideration with the seducer. ”

“ But it is natural that the father should yearn for the son, while the son's feeling for the father is of a very much weaker nature. ”

“ It is urged, then, that in the Swan-Maid group the father is either unmentioned or subordinate, the wife or mother is supreme, the family and not the father consent to or refuse the marriage, the hero is, as a rule, a fatherless child. ”

“ I would therefore warn those who desire to be fathers of notable sons, not to form connections with any kind of women, such as courtesans or mistresses: for those who either on the father or mother's side are ill-born have the disgrace of their origin all their life long irretrievably present with them, and offer a ready handle to abuse and vituperation. ”

“ Whatever else a man does, whether he lives by banking or burglary, ascends to the presidency or descends to the gutter, he is likely to be a father: they are as countless as the pebbles on a beach or the leaves in Vallombrosa, and the few who evade paternity evade also the purpose for which nature evidently created them, and go through life thumbing their noses, so to speak, at Divine Providence. ”

“ A stern or bullying father, a nagging or over anxious mother, will thus frequently produce a rebellious son or daughter, who will respect neither the advice or commands of the parents themselves nor those of their (mental) substitutes in later life. ”

“ And, then, how soon such unhappy men begin to see themselves reproduced and multiplied in their children. How many fathers see, with a secret bitterness of spirit that never can be told, their own worst vices of character and conduct reproduced and perpetuated in their children! ”

“ And there was something else, too, something deep-rooted that ascended from the innermost recesses of her being: a needment to have done with it all, to efface the paternity of the child by suppressing its father, a savage joy at the thought that she would emerge from the issue with her transgression amputated as it were, and as the one parent, the sole possessor of the child, whom henceforth she would share with no man. ”