‘HASDFy’

From the ASDF, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

DEAR MISS DIX: In yASDFof him.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

From the Jan. 16, 1936, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

DEAR MISS DIX: I am well and strong, well educated and equipped to hold down my job. I am in my forties. My work takes me here and there, keeps me keyed up and I enjoy it. I am a widow with an only child. She is married, and both she and her husband insist upon my coming to live with them.

My daughter is very unhappy because I refuse to do so. She thinks it is my duty, but I think that I am a far greater help to her by being able to assist her financially than I would be sitting in the chimney corner just being grandma and having to be supported myself. I don’t believe in mother going to live with their marred children. Besides, I like my own life and want to live it. What do I say? A MODERN MOTHER-IN-LAW.

ANSWER: Right you are, lady, and if there were more mothers like you, who had the grit and spunk to go out and make their own bread and butter and live their own lives instead of settling down on their children, it would do as much as any one thing to promote human happiness.

When mother goes to live with her children, grief walks in at the door. It is a toss-up which is the most miserable—the daughter or daughter-in-law or the mother. On the one side you have the young woman who has to put up with the whims and crotchets and fault-finding and complaining of an older woman who is dissatisfied because she has been taken out of her own environment and who interferes with everything because she is bored and has nothing to do.

On the other hand, you have a woman who finds that she has either to be a rubber stamp in her children’s houses, or else a firebrand; who finds the days endless because she has neither work nor interests with which to fill them; who is lonely and friendless because she knows no one but her daughter’s friends and she has nothing in common with them.

Of course, when Father dies, the children are actuated by the most affectionate motives when they beg Mother to give up the old home and come and live with them. And they pat themselves on the back when they tell Mother that she has worked long enough, and that they will support her and take care of her. But, in reality, they are doing the unkindest thing they could to Mother. She would be a million times happier if they would love her in her own home and in her own environment and get some old crony to bear her company.

No woman can be at the head of her own house for thirty or forty years and ever be content to play second fiddle in some other woman’s home. Nor can any idle woman ever be happy after spending a busy lifetime running her own home. The habit of work is too strong on her.

Of course, there are many cases where a woman is old and feeble when it is necessary for her to go to live with her children, but there are thousands upon thousands of women who are strong, healthy and capable of supporting themselves. It is a shame when they become parasites on children who are not able to support them and who have all they can do to provide for their own families. These women would be a thousand times happier if they struck out for themselves and supported themselves, had their own homes, and lived their own independent lives.

So I urge this correspondent not accept her daughter’s and son-in-law’s invitation to live with them. If she gives up her good job and settles down with them to be just a baby nurse and kitchen helper, she will be an old woman in a few years. She will find that between Mother who is a gay guest coming for an occasional visit and Mother who has become a household encumbrance—between Mother who has money to give and Mother who has to share son-in-law’s small salary—there is a great gulf fixed.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)