The Ingalls Example
Posted by Arwen Mosher in Family on Saturday, August 30, 2008 9:59 PM
Inspired by our recent celebration of re-reading, I’m delving back into Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books. I enjoy these books but they’re not favorite re-reads of mine, and I’d guess it’s been nearly a decade since I last read through them. This means I’m looking at them through adult eyes for the first time.
From the beginning of Little House in the Big Woods, I was struck by the appealing way in which Wilder portrays the structure of the family. Pa goes out hunting or gathering food to provide for his family. Ma tends to the house, prepares meals for her family, and makes and repairs their clothing. The children help their mother and strive to be good children and obey their parents. Why do they work so hard? Certainly - on the parents’ part at least - there is an awareness of the basic need to survive, but it is clear in the text that their main motivator is love for one another. They work for their family because it is the center of their lives.
I especially noticed one scene in Little House in the Big Woods. Pa is telling Laura and Mary a nursery-rhyme tale about a man whose wife skimmed the milk so meanly that her poor husband got thin enough to blow away in the wind.
Then Pa looked at Ma and said, “Nobody’d starve to death when you were around, Caroline.”
“Well, no,” Ma said. “No, Charles, not if you were there to provide for us.”
Pa was pleased.
There’s a simple beauty in such a scene between a husband and wife, and it’s a good example for me.
Modern life is more complex than Little House life. When my husband goes out to work for the day, he doesn’t come home with meat he killed himself. It makes it easy for me to forget that he’s doing, in essence, the same basic thing that Pa Ingalls was doing when he strapped his gun on his back and went off to find game to shoot: providing for his family.
Though the substance is a little different, the act is exactly the same. And while I do appreciate what my husband does for us, I often fail to tell him so. I expect him to appreciate (and compliment) the meals I put on the table, but don’t mention that I appreciate his working for the money to buy the food in the first place. He deserves that thanks, just as much as if he’d shot the meat himself.
With Ma and Pa Ingalls as my examples, I hope to do better in the future.
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