Radiant Motherhood

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or is shut. Oh, grant me my prayer that I may never lose

: Gita

with every helpful, tender, encouraging, supporting thing that he can do, how little is his share during all these months in the burden of the coming parenthood. If, through sympathy, he feels each pang his wife may feel; if, through sympathy, he curtails his activity to rest with her, nevertheless it is a voluntary abnegation, and if it became intolerable at any moment he could escape; he could

rity, although the distress be mingled with other and joyous feelings. To pretend that it is not so, to say that the joy of coming parenthood should and does wipe out all such under-currents of thought is merely to be callous or silly. To repress an intense feeling, to pretend that it is not there, may give an apparent surface bravery or brightness. But such repression is ultimately destructive to the consciou

n is not there. I know, for instance, one man who fainted at the time his wife gave birth to their child, and who, under no consideration, would allow her to have a second child, although he had intensely desired and looked forward to the fatherhood of a large family before he knew the actual physical experiences which it entailed. Such a man, in my opinion, was a good father wasted by an excess of emotion made all the more intensely destructive to himself by the endeavour to mai

he open and honourable expression of such feeling, and thus to avoid that almost neurotic and destructive effect of the suppression of such intense feeling as warped the father mentioned above. Because, if the wife avails herself of the advice I give in this book, and if the time for parenthood is chosen rightly and wisely in relation to her general he

gh the father's feelings should be intense and poignant on behalf of his wife and though she may go through searching experiences, yet the gladness should so preponderatingly weigh in the balance in ex

ng man may have the intense distress of being unable to provide all that his wife not only wishes but really ought to have. Recent years, for instance, were times of extraordinary difficulty for all women who bore children, and who had a naturally healthy and proper desire to eat fruit. With oranges at a shilling each, as they were in the winter of 1918-19, how co

s bill for the mother, twenty pounds." A wise comment was made on this that, alas, it is by no means an unusual, indeed it is a usual experience that the coming child adversely affects the mother's teeth, and both for the health of the baby and the mother they should be attended to. Possibly, even her very life may depend on her teeth bein

vy expenses of a good nursing home, who yet had saved sufficient to allow the wife three weeks there, may have their plans quite dislocated by a delay of three weeks in the infant's appearance, resulting in the mother unexpectedly having to remain double the length of time for which they had saved the money for the nursing home. The young father is then faced by the sordid difficulty of finding the necessary money, and unless he is gifted in such a way as to make extra earning a possibility, is under a con

t of health. Though the prospective mother ought not to be in any way invalided, yet, alas, as things are, too

tude was unconsciously expressed by one of my correspondents in the following words: "Something must be done to prevent any more children; imagine what a wretched time I have with my wife sick every day for nine months." Perhaps the reader can scarcely restrain a smile at so callously self-centred an attit