Radiant Motherhood/Chapter 8

A Garden enclosed is my spouse, a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.

Song of Solomon.

IT is said that men naturally have a more casual interest in fatherhood than women have in motherhood. It is sometimes even definitely said that men do not have a passion for fatherhood or care profoundly for young children. This is not my experience. A much larger number of men than are credited with it feel an intense desire for fatherhood, and take a great delight in young children. Though they should share the joy equally, yet the father often has a larger proportion of the pleasure of the little child, while to the mother comes a larger proportion of the burden and the difficulties. To the child itself, too, the father is often more precious than the mother. An accidental testimony to this effect was given by ​the little daughter of one of those "devoted wives and mothers" who thought woman's place was only the home, and a mother's duty only to care for her children. The child and I were chatting and the little one misunderstood something I said, and thought that I asked which of its parents it loved most. The child quickly answered, "Oh, I like father best, of course—mother is there every day and she washes us." The privilege of being a child's favourite is no small one, and, as this child shows us, a father may win it with unfair facility.

The conscious dream of parenthood, a parenthood which shall give the children the best possible chance in life undoubtedly lies behind the majority of marriages. Hence when the young man who has married with the desire, perhaps not for immediate, but for ultimate fatherhood, first learns the definite fact that he has already inaugurated the beginnings of his child's development he must experience an intense and unique wave of feeling, which, as in the early days of marriage, with all its freshness, and with the actual physical difficulties yet unfaced, must be one primarily of buoyant delight.

There is also in the earlier months, for the man of artistic perceptions, an unique experience in the appreciation of his wife's enhanced beauty. It is perhaps known that the most critical artistic ​view of woman claims the highest point of perfection in her form about the third month of her first period of motherhood. To a pair of lovers who have delighted in their bodily beauty, as all natural and healthy and well formed young people should do, this period, when the loveliness of the woman is at its very height, and when the man can feel that he has contributed to its perfection, must be a time of very special entrancement. That it is something from within his most sacred being that has added this glow and radiance in perfecting the rounded form of the body that he adored in its virginal grace, must give a man with artistic and poetie potentialities an all too brief but never to be forgotten experience. The young father-to-be should not lose a day of these swiftly passing weeks, for this phase, like all human developments, but even more intensely so than most, is passing and transient, only to be immortalized in the permanence of a perceptive memory.

When, as is inevitable, it has passed, and is followed within another month or two by a phase so acutely, perhaps agonizingly its reverse, the crucifixion of the mother's sensitive feelings which is entailed should be hallowed and elevated in both their minds by that deeper, less personal, and more profoundly racial delight, the picturing with each other of the radiance, the strength, ​the power, the purpose and passion of the life which they are creating. So tragically soon after the days when he has feasted his eyes and filled his memory with her beauty, she will, she must withdraw her body from him and for months to come he will be shut out entirely from all sight of her. The reward will be an inner experience of the mind.

A day will come when, for the first time, the father-to-be may lay his hand upon his wife below her waist and feel the sturdy little kicks of his future son or daughter, and can know that, though hidden from him, still there is beside him a vital and independent being whom he has wakened to life. The presence of this little creature whom he has not seen colours and permeates every hour of their joint existence, and links the family in an extraordinary unity, the full significance of which I will consider in Chapter XII.

When the later months pass, the father-to-be will have lost one of his most exquisite memories if he has not already talked and laughed with his future child, and if he and his wife and child together have not united in that most mystical union possible to human flesh.