Page 37 - Poetry-Family

A Fin-de-Siècle Mama

How pleasant is maternity in these enlightened days,
When we see great laws of nature in all the baby’s ways;
When science and philosophy we mothers who are wise
Find daily opportunity at home to utilize!
I’m thankful that I was not trained as woman was of yore,
For in those days the babe who set the household in a roar
A simple baby was to her, and it was nothing more.

Now when the baby shrieks and screams and keeps me up all night,
When his stomach and his supper are engaged in deadly fight,
While I’m waiting for hot peppermint to take benign effect,
The chemism of nutrition I fondly recollect.
And when at last he drops asleep, it gives me satisfaction
To take my pen and paper out and write down the reaction.

And when dear little Harry pulls his sister Lucy’s hair,
Or tumbles baby Harold down the steep and crooked stair,
The philosophy of history comes promptly to my mind,
And the savage age in Harry as in nations crude I find.
My scholastic soul is comforted because his aberration
In a larger view proves nothing but a step toward civilization.

When Mrs. Leonard’s baby at three months cuts a tooth,
When Laura Morton’s daughter writes poetry in youth,
My children, unprecocious in dentition and in brains,
But for Fiske’s “Evolution” might cause me many pains.
But now I smile, and calmly fix my mind on this great truth,
That “the higher up the animal, the longer is its youth.”

The baby’s first faint sputterings, his little “ma” and “goo,”
Thrill my soul with recognition of philology come true.
I know my babe’s a normal exponent of the race
As his stages of development I studiously trace.
I’m helping the psychologists, professors sage I aid,
By my notes on baby’s sense of smell, intelligently made.

So when my son secures a pot of Adam’s liquid glue
To oil his father’s bicycle in every nut and screw,
Or I find the newly calcimined and dainty parlor wall

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