Moreover, where there are small children and where there is no trusty servant or some kindly relative or friend it seems impossible for the housewife to leave the home.  Her husband must work daily for their bread and unless they are willing to turn to the charitable organizations, it is necessary for the housewife to carry on, despite her fatigue.  So at the best she gets an hour or two extra rest a day, takes a “little tonic” from the family doctor and gets along with her pains, her aches, and moods as best she can.

But the sick do not always recover.  Fortunately, the average human being grieves a while over death, but the life struggle soon absorbs him, and the bereavement itself becomes a memory.  But now and then one meets mothers whose griefs and deprivations seem without end.  No religion, no philosophy can bring them back into continuity with their lives.  They go about in a sorrowful dream, hugging their affliction, resenting any effort to comfort or console; without interest in the daily task or in those whom they should love.  They offer the severest problem in readjustment, in reenergization, for they actively resent being helped.  Sometimes one believes their grief is an effort to atone for neglect real or fancied, a self-punishment which is not remitted until full atonement has been made.

Aside from the physical difficulties in the bearing and rearing of children, and in addition to the ordinary mental difficulties, such as judging what discipline to use, there are especial problems of some importance.  Men vary in character from the saint to the villain, in ability from the genius to the idiot.  The children they once were vary as much.  There are children who go through the worst of homes, the worst of environments, the worst of trainings,—­and come out pure gold, with characters all the better for the struggle.  There are others whom no amount of love, discipline, training, and benefits help; they are despicable from the ordinary viewpoint from the first of life to the last.  Some children, adversely situated as to poverty and health, become geniuses, and their reverse is in the poor child whom heredity, early disease, or some freak of nature dooms to feeble-mindedness.

The heart of the mother is in her child; she glories in its progress, and she refuses to see its defects until they glare too brightly to be overlooked.  Then she has a heartbreak all the more bitter for her maternal love.

It is the incorrigibly bad child and the mentally deficient child who evoke the severest, most neurasthenic reaction on the part of the housewife.  Not only is pride hurt, not only is the expanded self-love injured, but such children are a physical care and burden of such a nature as to outbalance that of three or four normal children.

The bad child, egoistic, undisciplinable, destructive, and quarrelsome, or the child who cannot be taught honesty, or the one who continually runs away, is an unending source of “nervousness” to his mother.  As time goes on and the difficulty is seen to be fundamental, a battle between hostility and love springs up in the mother’s breast that plays havoc with her strength and character.  The very worst cases of housewife neurosis are seen in such mothers; the most profound interference with mood, emotion, purpose, and energy results.