, you can afford to get married, and I can assure you that the
rewards of facing your problems and seeing them through together are
high. Such a marriage is firmly rooted, and when its buoyant young love
matures, its flower is an enduring happiness that nothing else can
equal.

_Jessie Marshall, M.D._

CHAPTER SEVEN

_Children? Of Course!_

Nowadays we hear much about planning--town planning, city planning,
nation planning. The elder and younger statesmen are going to see to it
that we are well-housed, well-fed, suitably employed according to our
abilities, and provided for in our old age. Good. This, as I understand
it, has always been the American plan. I am sure that no American who is
willing to work deserves less than the fullness of the earth. And I
shall assume that this country is going to be well enough planned to
enable you to raise a family--with suitable planning. For family
planning is the most important planning. Indeed, the whole point of
national planning is to enable us in turn to plan the nation. The nation
rests on the family. Your family rests on you and your mate. What are
you planning to do about it? How, when, and why?

In our children we live over our own childhood and project ourselves
into the future. Until our own children come along we tend to forget
that the world, to which we are now so thoroughly and sometimes
wearisomely accustomed, once struck us as a thing of mysterious
glamour, promising an endless opening vista of keen excitement.

And yet, if life is to continue worth the living, we must continue to
hold onto that early attitude. We must continue to find ecstasy in
simple sources. And often it is our children--easily yet deeply pleased,
ceaselessly busy with their paints and blocks and animals, ready for
every new adventure, never jaded, never dull--who must remind us, their
elders, how to get the most out of life. In their love for flowers and
animals, paints and song, we may rediscover the submerged or forgotten
purpose of our own lives. Or our talent may be for building happy lives
from the ground up, in which case the children themselves are the answer
to our search for pure-hearted, never flagging excitement.

As for projecting ourselves into the future through our children,
reaching ahead through them in order to affect, if possible, generation
after generation of people yet unborn--this is a kind of immortality
snatched from death and a satisfaction, though com