CHAPTER 35HOW NEIGHBORING MOTHERS CAN COOPERATE FOR THE DEVELOPMENT AND HAPPINESS OF THEMSELVES AND CHILDREN IS there no civic center in your city or town to which you can go for new ideas, friendly chat, and inspiration? If not, then start a little club of your own and invite your nearest neighbors to join. Meet once a week or once in two weeks. Elect one or two officers — just enough to run the club. Decide upon a little course of study, prepare your lessons at home, and then come together for general discussion and debate on the subject chosen. Nothing will so brighten your minds and distract and rest you from the every-day work.
If you and your friends are all mothers with children, then appoint a mother to act as nurse for all the children, while all the other mothers go to the club. Let the mothers alternate in this capacity, making a little club for the children. Let the mothers in turn devote their best energies to making the children's club meeting just as profitable and delightful for the children as the mothers' club is for the mothers.
The mothers should learn to tell stories to the children, and each mother in her turn should exercise her story-telling powers. Then when the children come together the next week let them retell last week's stories to the mother in charge, before she tells them any new ones.
Let them take turns in this retelling, all the children helping to recall forgotten details. Such exercise will develop observation, memory, and expression in children and mothers.
All the mothers should make a study of storytelling so that each may make the best use of her opportunities with the children.
A half dozen or so mothers can easily co-operate in this way to make club day a red-letter day, an inspiring day, a rest day for themselves and the children.
Let each child be properly fed before it is sent to the club, and let each mother give a solemn oath to the other mothers that she will feed nothing to the children unless directed to do so. Otherwise some of the mothers may be overgenerous enough to provide sweets and tummy-aches to be carried over into the next night.
By all means stir up your friends and yourself and provide some way to insure a day off once every week or two. Any mother who sticks in her four walls with her children is bound to become flat, stale, and unprofitable, no company for herself, her husband, or anybody else. It is up to her to take every-day life in hand and so organize it that she will be provided with sufficient vacation and pleasant association to keep her inspired and happy in her home work.
If there aren't half a dozen mothers who will cooperate in such a plan as I have outlined, then get one or two neighboring mothers to co-operate with you as kindergarten teachers and story-tellers to the children one day each week, while the other mothers take to the woods, or take a day off and go visiting or listen to lectures, music, or whatever diversions may offer themselves.
Every woman owes herself a day off each week, and there is no woman who cannot, if she will, use her own ingenuity and co-operate with others to provide herself with a day off from the regular routine — a day to be devoted to New Thoughts from any source which happens to be handy.
The time was when every woman was sufficient unto herself and her family. When her husband wanted a new suit she sheared the sheep, carded the wool, dyed it, spun the cloth, cut the clothes, sewed them up by hand, pressed them with a ten-pound "goose," and presented them to her man. When she wanted the washing done she did it. She cooked her own meals, made her own soap, raised her vegetables, pickled her own meat, and smoked the hams. In addition to this she washed the babies and fed them and looked after them.
If it were not for the co-operative intuition in human beings every family would continue to perform all the operations necessary for the care of that family. As it is we learn to help other people and let them help us. Our husbands' clothes are now the result of the co-operation of a thousand different people. The very bread we eat is the result of the co-operation of many people. We have learned that by working together we can provide ourselves and other people with better things and more of them, and at the same time we can relieve ourselves of much unnecessary work.
Why not extend this same principle of co-operation to the caring for our children and the providing of ourselves with education, social intercourse, change? Why don't I take care of my neighbor's children today while their mother goes pleasuring; and in return allow her to take care of my children next week while I take my day off?
It is all very simple. No money is needed to accomplish this, only a little extension of the great principle of co-operation which is making this world over into one big family, instead of continuing it along the old lines of ten thousand families, each one grabbing for himself and ignoring his neighbors.
Co-operation is very simple — if we let love and patience accomplish their perfect work in ourselves and our neighbors.
We have always been members one of another:
"All parts of one stupendous Whole, Whose body Nature is, and God the Soul."
In proportion as we recognize this we co-operate for the good of all.
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