| Home Making |
Chapter 5 |
Page 2 |
The debt of children to a true home is one that never can be overpaid, or even fully discharged. It dates from the first moment of their being; it accumulates as the days and years pass on. There are the years of helpless infancy with their solicitudes, their broken nights and toilsome days, their unsleeping thoughtfulness and unselfish sacrifice, their gentle nursing and patient watching. There are the years of training and teaching, when the bodily powers are being developed, the feet taught to walk, the hands to handle, the tongue to speak; when the mental faculties are being drawn out, and when all the functions of life are being trained to their several uses. There are the times of sickness when the lamp never goes out in the room by night, and the pale, weary watcher accepts no relief till the danger is past. There are long years of anxieties, of prayers, of tears, of hopes, of disappointments, of sacrifices, of pains and toils. The best that a child can do for true parents will never repay them for what they done for him.
The question, therefore, “What is the children’s part in the home life?” is no unimportant one. They have a place in making the home joy. Dreary is the household life where no children ever come; very lonely and desolate is the home where they come and stay for a time and then go away. Unconsciously, the children have a most sacred and holy part in the home life from their earliest infancy. Then all along their years, while they remain under the old home roof and after they leave its shelter to set up homes of their own, they have duties to perform and obligations to render to those who gave them birth and watched over their helpless years.
The little wheels of a watch do not seem to be important, yet if one of them is broken, or if it is bent, or if it fails to perform its part, all the wheels will be arrested in their motion and the watch will stop. If the smallest wheel goes wrong, moves too fast or too slow, the hands on the dial likewise go wrong. There is no part of the delicate machinery of the watch so small that it makes no difference how it does its duty.
When the question is asked, “What part have the children in making the home life?” someone may answer, “The children cannot do anything, at least while they are small, to aid in making the home what it should be. They cannot help make money to buy bread. They cannot do the work. When they grow older they can be of use, but when they are young all they can do is to be rocked and petted while they are babies, and then as they grow larger go to school and eat and romp and wear out clothes. They cannot help in any way; they are only burdens.”
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