TODAY

Drama Queen candidates
Bad mamas

Contestant No. 1
Contestant No. 2
Contestant No. 3

Vote now!

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TABLE TALK

Public vs. private schools: Does it make a difference in the end? Discuss education choices in the Mothers area of Table Talk

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RECENTLY

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By Kate Moses
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(06/09/98)

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By Janis Cooke Newman
Babyhood in a Russian orphanage
(06/08/98)

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Steven Levenkron's book "Cutting: Understanding and Overcoming Self-Mutilation" casts an eye on the emotional pains behind a dark adolescent practice
(06/05/98)

A kinder, gentler cowboy
By Polly Shulman
Reviving the latest endangered species: cowboys
(06/04/98)

African awakening
By Vivienne Walt
Senegal turns against the tyranny of female genital mutilation.
(06/03/98)

ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

[ CONTESTANT No. 2 ]

MY MOTHER, MY DIARY
By Morna McHargue
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When I was 16 my mother read intimate parts of my diary aloud at the supper table. She found it in my secret hiding place -- in the ceiling of the bedroom I shared with my sister. I was devastated, not only from having my most private thoughts aired over the Chef Boy-Ar-Dee spaghetti, but from discovering that my "perfect" hiding place was not so perfect after all. Previously, she had found my diary hidden under my mattress, and before that wedged behind the water heater. She had even broken the lock on it. What perverse motive had compelled her to give me the diary in the first place?

As she read from its pages, my mother took out a pack of Salems -- the forbidden cigarettes that had cost a good portion of my lunch money for the week and had been hidden in the ceiling with my diary. She lit one up and pulled the smoke in with a sneer, staring at me with cold and narrowed eyes. She was no Lauren Bacall.

I never wrote in my diary again, but placed it in the fire that Saturday when I burned the weekly trash. My smoking, on the other hand, increased.
SALON | June 10, 1998

Contestant No. 1 | Contestant No. 2 | Contestant No. 3 | Vote now!