Montessori mother - Kamelini Montessori

2 A MONTESSORI MOTHER
quailed at the haphazard way in which Fate has
pitchforked him into a profession greatly more important
and enormously more difficult? For it is not
quite fair to us to say that we chose the profession of
parent with our eyes open when we repeated the words
of the marriage service. It cannot be denied that
every pair of fiances know that probably they will
have children, but this knowledge has about the same
degree of first-hand vividness in their minds that the
knowledge of ultimate certain death has in the mind
of the average healthy young person: there is as
little conscious preparation for the coming
event in
the one case as in the other. No, we have some right
on our side, under the prevailing conditions of educa-
tion about the facts of life, in claiming that we are
tossed headlong by a force stronger than ourselves
into a profession and a terrifying responsibility which
many of us would never have had the presumption
to undertake in cold blood. We might conceivably
have undertaken to build railway bridges, even though
the lives of multitudes depended on them ; we might
have become lawyers and settled people's material af-
fairs for them or even, as doctors, settled the matter
of their physical life or death ; but to be responsible to
God, to society, and to the soul in question for the
health, happiness, moral growth, and usefulness of a
human soul, what reflective parent among the whole
army
of us has not had moments of heartsick terror
at the realization of what he has been set to do?
I say " moments " advisedly, for it must be ad-