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Show KATHLEEN NORMS Maternal Selfishness Released by WNU Features. By KATHLEEN NORMS HAS a girl the right to marry when that marriage mar-riage means the breaking up of her mother's home? That is the question that Louise Barton asks me. Louise is hardly a girl. She has passed her 29th birthday, and she has been engaged to her Douglas for seven years. When they first hoped to marry, Doug was in the navy. "But we didn't care, we were so happy," writes Louise. "There didn't seem any problem at all, then. If we had only gotten married, mar-ried, and told the family about it afterward, how different it all would have been! My father was living then, and Douglas' mother, too. My brother Peter got into the navy in the very last weeks of the war when he was 18. "Now I am 29 instead of 22, Peter is soberly at work In an insurance office, Douglas' mother moth-er is dead, his old home broken up through the housing emergency emer-gency into small apartments, and my mother a confirmed invalid. "She has diabetic complications, stomach ulcers, blinding headaches, and a troublesome sacroilliac; enough trouble to keep her nervous ind uncertain of herself. Some Mother said to wait. . . . weeks Mother can be about, go to church and club, and perhaps the next week she collapses utterly. Fears Mother's Attitude. "It breaks my heart to desert Peter, leave him to the domestic and financial burden, and yet it breaks my heart, too, to delay my marriage any longer. In fact," writes Louise, warming to rebellion as the letter goes on, "everything would be ideal for me if it were not for Mother's attitude. "She insists on going on in our old big uncomfortable house instead of selling it or renting part of it; she takes no account of the fact that Peter is engaged, and although his girl is handicapped now by the care of a paralytic father they have their hopes and plans, too. "Douglas has established himself most successfully in a town about a hundred miles away; that isn't a great distance, but it means I can do little for Mother and Peter. He has a lovely little house there, all furnished, fur-nished, and we would love to have Peter with us. "Why is it my duty? My mother says to wait, and that many girls do not marry nowadays nowa-days until they are older than I am. But many do, and all my friends are happily establishing their nurseries and coming to consider themselves old married women. And wait for what? I don't want to wait for my mother's moth-er's death, or count that in on my plans. What is your advice to a girl whose family claims are so heavy and yet who is so deeply in love?" My advice to you, Louise, is to get married at once, and never for one moment consider your mother's inexcusable in-excusable attitude. And my advice to Peter is the same. When she gets tired of playing sick, she will get well. When she gets tired of keeping keep-ing up a cumbersome old house, she will get rid of it. Injustice to Herself. To let her jeopardize your life's happiness now is not only an injustice injus-tice to you and your Douglas, but to herself, too. Whatever the sorrows, losses and disappointments of her life have been, and whatever her physical ills, they are strictly her personal property, and it is for her to handle them. You will have your own someday, and I hope you will remember then how you feel now. Few marriages can stand the strain of a discontented, sickly, critical old person, right in the home circle. Such old persons, if you dig into their own history as young married folk, were invariably invari-ably intolerant and critical when it came to their own old people, a generation gen-eration earlier. |