From Mother: Happiness in This Life

The following is an excerpt from the book Mother, by Kathleen Norris, one of the sweetest and most profound books about motherhood I’ve ever read.

Here is Margaret’s epiphany of her mother’s life-work–positively beautiful…Margaret, who had traveled abroad, found employment and witnessed a more “dainty life” than that of her mother who daily toiled, though joyfully, under the “burden and stress” of raising seven children, of which Margaret was one, finally realized what true living was:

“How happy we all were!” Margaret said; “and how she worked for us!” And suddenly theories and speculation ended, and she knew. She knew that faithful, self-forgetting service, and the love that spends itself over and over, only to be renewed again and again, are the secret of happiness. For another world, perhaps, leisure and beauty and luxury–but in this one, “Who loses his life shall gain it.” Margaret knew now that her mother was not only the truest, the finest, the most generous woman she had ever known, but the happiest as well…

All her old castles in the air seemed cheap and tinselled to-night, beside these tender dreams that had their roots in the real truths of life. Travel and position, gowns and motor-cars, yachts and country houses, these things were to be bought in all their perfection by the highest bidder, and always would be. But love and character and service, home and the wonderful charge of little lives,–the “pure religion breathing household laws” that guided and perfected the whole,–these were not to be bought, they were only to be prayed for, worked for, bravely won.

“God has been very good to me,” Margaret said to herself…From now on, she thought, with a fervor…she would be a very different woman. If joy came, she would share it as far as she could; if sorrow, she would show her mother that her daughter was not all unworthy of her….

Margaret had a sudden tender memory of the days when Theodore and Duncan and Rob were all babies in turn. Her mother would gather the little daily supply of fresh clothes from bureau and chest every morning, and carry the little bath-tub into the sunny nursery window, and sit there with only a bobbing downy head and waving pink angers visible from the great warm bundle of bath apron….

And she had sometimes wished, or half formed the wish, that she and Bruce bad been the only ones–! Yes, came the sudden thought, but it wouldn’t have been Bruce and Margaret, after all, it would have been Bruce and Charlie.

Good God! That was what women did, then, when they denied the right of life to the distant, unwanted, possible little person! Calmly, constantly, in all placid philosophy and self-justification, they kept from the world–not only the troublesome new baby, with his tears and his illnesses, his merciless exactions, his endless claim on mind and body and spirit–but perhaps the glowing beauty of a Rebecca, the buoyant indomitable spirit of a Ted, the sturdy charm of a small Robert, whose grip on life, whose energy and ambition were as strong as Margaret’s own!

Margaret stirred uneasily, frowned in the dark. It seemed perfectly incredible, it seemed perfectly impossible that if Mother had had only the two–and how many thousands of women didn’t have that!–she, Margaret, a pronounced and separate entity, travelled, ambitious, and to be the wife of one of the world’s great men, might not have been lying here in the summer night, rich in love and youth and beauty and her dreams!

It was all puzzling, all too big for her to understand. But she could do what Mother did, just take the nearest duty and fulfil it, and sleep well, and rise joyfully to fresh effort.”