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TOPIC: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks on Home Ideals (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 29. The Birth of a Home.
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The Birth of a Home.
The real genius of the home spirit, the love spirit, is shown in every new home-birth. The making of the home always has in it the element of sacrifice and of pain. Therein lies the secret of its astonishing vitality. It comes into being only by the transfusion of rich, ripe, human blood. Love is the corner-stone of the home; and that stone can be set securely in place only in red mortar. The crisis of a human birth always means pain, a pain mingled with greatest joy and quite overborne by the joy, and yet a real, biting pain.
The birth of a home means the same under-cutting of secret pain in the midst of music and rejoicing. For two other homes give out of their life that this new home may come into its life. Some mother has parted with her son, that another woman may have him all to herself. She gave her own very life that life might come to him. He is a bit of her life, and a big bit of her heart. For long years she was the one woman of all the world to him. Now, it is a bit of his maturing life, in which his mother rejoices, and which is a crowning of her years of toil, that another woman comes to occupy the inner chamber of his heart where once she reigned as queen.
And while she rejoices with great gladness over his joy, and over the new higher life awaiting him, there is the secret tear that will steal its way down her cheek. Yet the minor is the sweetest music. It has more of the heart in it. No music is perfect, or is true in its answering rhythm to the human heart, that has no minor strain in its undertone.
And yet that's only half the story. Some father has had the experience of having another man come in and take that first place in his daughter's heart that he has had all her life. She had, time and again, taken his heart by storm all anew, as perchance he had seen the marvel of his own early love reproduced in her face and spirit. He has given the best of his life-strength through years and hard struggles, for her, and of the strength of his presence to her. He has been the one man among men to her through those growing years. And if he has done well his part as father, he has held that place through all those years.
Now another quietly steps in past him into that one place. And he rejoices that it is so, for it spells out the perfecting of life's character and joys and mission for her. But the form of the man stepping in past him casts a shadow over his own path. Yet he knows it is well, and right. For there must needs be shade as well as sun to make a perfect day. Every home has its birth in thoughtful, sacrificial love.