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Show KATHLEEN NORRIS When Marriage Begins To Pall pHE POPULAR THING- today is to get the jitters. You can get them over the simplest situation in the world: the everyday situation situa-tion of having not quite enough money, having just a little too much liquor, having a husband who sometimes some-times goes into an attack of bad temper, losing your purse downtown down-town and receiving a tart letter from your husband's mother. This is excellent material for the jitters, nerves, tears, bad sleep, hysteria, utter flat hopeless discouragement dis-couragement with the world. There are thousands of other good reasons. Almost any life will supply enough fatigue, doubt, em- barrassment, uncertainty and just plain dull monotony to send a woman wom-an to a psychiatrist. And once launched on that course her domestic domes-tic position is that of a nation at war; everything is excusable and nothing has to be explained. "Wanda is going to Doctor Mal-falcon," Mal-falcon," murmured Wanda's friends recently. "Oh, no," says the listener, lis-tener, shocked. "Yes, she's really bad," answers the first. "Ed was telling Joe. She got so nervous that if one of the children couldn't find a pair of socks she began to scream, and one day she took a full bottle of bourbon and smashed it in the fireplace." "For heavens sake, I wonder if she'll ever get over it," the listener gasps. A Contract And all this because Wanda, like the rest of us, wanted a beau when young parenthood, and it is all-important, all-important, but when the children get to school ages, then Wanda had better wake up and remember that her promise was to Ed, not to the children. Deadly Serions 2. Take that matter of school work and school manners with deadly dead-ly seriousness. It is deadly serious. Oversee the children's grubby pencils pen-cils and smeared books from the beginning. A good hour for this from four to five o'clock daily. With drinks of milk, cookies, washed faces and hands, settle them down steadily to work. Dad won't be home then, supper is making no demands, and if you start this practice early, it will not only be of inestimable advantage to the children, but it may save your marriage. But make it inexorably regular. No excuses that they are tired after school and these are lovely hours outdoors, out-doors, and you want to play bridge at Lorraine's. This is your job, and if you stick to it for a year or two of school days only about 200 times a year, after all, your children will finish the grammar grades with honors, without bothering both-ering you at all. 8. Have ' plans. Break up the monotony of the pattern. Plan hospitalities hos-pitalities and amusements for the children on Saturdays, but at other times jolt the man of the house with a plan that has enjoyment for you two as its object. Watch the incredulity and pleasure on his she was 20; wanted to get married; mar-ried; certainly intended to have a darling little baby or two, had great fun picking out wallpapers and kitchen things for the new house. And having contracted for all this suddenly she got sick of it all. Other women were having much more fun, and Wanda didn't see how she could get out of that same kitchen and away from those same babies and have fun, too. lace wnen yuu suggcm a iwu-aay escape into fishing country, or, if you are suburban folk, make the trip to the city, see a show, stay in all the luxury of a hotel, with breakfast upstairs, and live luxuriously luxuri-ously for a day. 4. Live inside your income. That alone is one of the most absorbing, and incidentally fascinating, of jobs. Indeed, it may become a game. A game of a man and a woman, their children safe asleep upstairs, writing writ-ing down figures, comparing papers, pa-pers, adding things up, and looking at each other with laughter. . . arguments with teachers . . So she went for nervous gloom at first, and dreary replies to Ed at breakfast, and angry arguments with the teachers who complained of Mary-Jo's arithmetic papers and Dickie's bad manners. And then 10 horrible things happened and Wanda just gave up, and had fits of indubitable trembling, sudden sweats, dreams from which she awakened screaming, and all the other symptoms that indicated that she must go to the warm, quiet office of a strange man and lie down on a couch and talk rapturously raptur-ously about herself, while he looked the other way. Now since this is really a sad situation, and is becoming a pretty prevalent one, here are just a few suggestions for wives between the ages of say 32 and 42. 1. Stop putting the children first, and put the husband first. He has played second fiddle long enough to their bottles and measles, mea-sles, their demands and unreasonableness. unreason-ableness. These things are part of |