I WAS tired of washing dishes; I was tired of drudgery. I had always been so, and I was dissatisfied. I never sat down a moment to read, that Jamie didn’t want a cake, or a bit of paper to scribble on, or a bit of soap to make bubbles. I’d rather be in prison, I said one day, than have my life teased out so, as Jamie knocked my elbow when I was writing to a friend. But a moment came when I had one plate less to wash, one chair less to set away by the wall in the dining-room; when Jamie’s little crib was put away into the garret, and it has never come down since. I had been unusually fretful and discontented with him that damp May morning that he took the croup. Gloomy weather gave me the headache, and I had less patience then than at any other time. By and by he was singing in another room:—
“I want to be an angel,”
and presently rang out that metallic cough. I never hear those words since, that it doesn’t cut me to the heart, for the croup cough rings out with it. He grew worse toward night, when my husband came home and went for a doctor. At first he seemed to help him, but it merged into inflammatory croup and was soon over. “I ought to have been called sooner,” said the doctor.
I have a servant to wash dishes now; and when a visitor comes I can sit down and entertain her without having to work all the time. There is no little boy worrying me to open his jack-knife, and there are no shavings over the floor. The magazines are not soiled with looking at the pictures, but stand prim and neat on the reading-table, just as I have them.
“Your carpet never looks dirty,” say weary, worn mothers to me. But my life is as weary as theirs—wearily with sitting in my parlour at twilight, weary with watching for the little arms that used to twine around my neck, for the curls that brushed against my cheek, for the young laugh that rang out with mine, as we watched the hissing coal fire, or made rabbits with the shadows on the wall, waiting merrily together for papa’s coming home. I have the wealth and ease I once longed for, but at what price? And when I see other mothers with grown-up sons driving to town or church; and my hair silvered over with grey, I think what might have been had I murmured less at the providence of God. Reader—young mother you may be—had you heard this mother tell her story, you would have felt disposed to say with the writer, I will be more patient with my little ones—I will murmur less.—Home Magazine.