Annie Laurie

San Francisco Examiner/August 5, 1906

CHICAGO census takers were paid one cent for every child’s name they gathered.

The men and women who were assigned to take the census in the fashionable parts of Chicago resigned. There were not children enough in the homes on the Lake Shore Drive to make it worthwhile to bother with them.

Poor Mrs. Lake Shore Drive, I wonder if you know that we are all sorry for you. So sorry for your poor lonesome empty-hearted life that we can’t even think of you without something almost like a foolish catch in the throat. What in the world do you think you live for?

Friends! Lose your money, and see how many of your kind of friends will be left to you.

Luxury—there’s no place on earth more lonesome as the great, big expensive museum full of bric-a-brac that you are stupid enough to call home.

Vanity—why, there is no massage artist in the world that can keep you from looking like sixty when you feel like sixty, no matter what she tells you when she sends in her little bill.

Display—why we wouldn’t change places with you, the little woman across the street, with a house full of babies and I, not for all the palaces, nor all the banks full of foolish yellow playthings in the world.

It’s all very well when you are eighteen, and all the world’s a popular song—you can do without children then. But what happens to you when you get along into the tiresome thirties?

What do you do?—you poor benighted thing, when your friends disappoint you, and you look into the glass and see the first white hair, and the man you love is a little too busy making money to stop and tell you that you are prettier with it than you were without it?

, When the sun that’s been shining in your path so long goes under the cloud of disillusion and heart-ache, just for a minute, what do you do then, you poor, lonesome, heart-hungry creatures?

I’ll tell you what we do—we, the mothers of children, we, the harbingers of happy harvests. Why, we just go into a little corner somewhere out in the garden, where the radish and lettuce are growing, and we catch one of the little blue-eyed rogues that is the core of our hearts, and take her away from the puppy for a minute, and we say to her, “Honey, tell me, do you love me, honest and true?” and Honey puts her little fat arms around the neck of the one who asks and laughs and hugs so tight that it is hard work to breathe, and says: “Honest and true, muvver, honest and true.” And what is there in the world that can cast a shadow over your happy heart after that?

What do you do when things begin to taste all alike to you, and you don’t care whether you have broiled chicken or squab or corned beef and cabbage for dinner, and you’re tired of the same old books, and the same old song, and the same old gossip, and the same old getting up In the morning, and going to bed at night, In the same old, dreary dull, treadmill of a world?

I’ll tell you what we do, we, the mothers of children.

We go out to the barn and call two or three youngsters down off the ridge pole, and say. “Come on, let’s go out to the park for a row,” and the whole stupid old world stands still for a minute, just to hear the whoop of rapture from the ridge pole dwellers, and oh, what a brand-new, shiny, just out of the mint world it is. We get right into the heart of it right then and there.

A world full of the most exciting things, queer bugs and ants, that we never heard of before or had forgotten all about. Birds that look like robins, “but yet they have a spot on them that ain’t just right for a robin, and who ever saw a robin hop like that?” No use trying to get any further till the conclave has decided just exactly what kind of a bird that is, and what his name ought to be if it isn’t.

“Gee, that’s a peach of a pony!” “Yes. but look at that queer looking sock he’s got.”—Nothing to be interested in? Why every foot along the way to the park, that same old park that you could hardly bear to think of, is full of something brand new and hugely exciting, and that row! Heavens, what an exciting thing that row turned out to be!

You aren’t a plain, middle aged woman, in a shirt waist suit and a fool of a sailor hat any longer, a woman with a heart that has known sorrow and a brain that’s just a little tired of worry and anxiety.

You’re a Bos’n in a pirate crew and you’d better obey orders and obey them quick, too, or your new hat. will be sprinkled before you know It. And then you’re not a Bos’n any longer, you’re a squaw and you are in the boat of a victorious crew coming home from a raid on the Modocs, and the Brave who’s shooting the canoe through the water looks at you with a pair of black eyes so full of life and love and laughter and courage and hope and the joy of living that you’ve got to cheer up or go somewhere and be a mummy and be done with it.

No children?!

A garden without flowers, a thorn without a rose, a life without love, the human heart without hope, that’s what life without children means, Mrs. Lake Shore Drive, and we who don’t always have all the money we want, or all the trips to Europe we’d like, or all the fine feathers that might make the other birds in the flock flutter a bit, wish you joy of such a life—poor, lonely, unhappy, sawdust-hearted, weary-brained Mrs. Lake Shore Drive.