T A B L E++T A L K

Parents discuss ways to shield their kids from mass Christmas consumerism in the Mothers area of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

Word by word
By Anne Lamott
When everything in your life goes wrong at once, something big and lovely is about to get born
(12/18/97)

Hot flash
By Ros Davison
Irradiating America's meat to make it safe is like destroying the village in order to save it, says an activist
(12/17/97)

Time for one thing
By Kate Moses
Getting sick
(12/16/97)

Confessions of a Lesbian Sperm Donor
By Hank Pellessier
In this case, it takes four
(12/15/97)

Wild Things
By Polly Shulman
Toy stories
(12/12/97)

ARCHIVES

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

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The reunion was held at our old grade school, now a parish community center. Crepe paper and balloons couldn't really dress it up. I imagined that in the cafeteria I could still smell stale milk, vomit and the sawdust they threw on the vomit to mop it up. I went with my best friend, Betsy, whom I hadn't seen in 18 years -- no time at all compared to the cousins, neighbors and teachers I hadn't seen in 30.

Unfortunately, our lone Puerto Rican classmate declined to show. That made the reunion totally white, which still surprised me. And there was another surprise: Four boys from our class turned out to be gay, and sadly, three of them had died of AIDS. My classmates grew up to be teachers, nurses, real estate agents, a TV cameraman, a Marine, a rental car clerk. There were lots of housewives. But most people talked less about what they did than about their spouses and kids. A few of us were divorced, and I don't usually feel ashamed of that, but I did there. I started to worry my dress was too short, my lipstick too bright, a syndrome I observed in some of my fellow divorcees.

Unlike high school, which you left as a proto-adult, in grade school you had barely reached adolescence, and at first it was hard to recognize these paunchy, middle-aged grownups as classmates. But then, after a short conversation, it was easy to see the sweet small face buried under the middle-aged jowls. Your mind would add the missing hair, subtract the wrinkles and suddenly it's 1972 again, and you're giggling about the time Sister Marie William lost her veil in a high wind and you got to see her hair.

It was all going well. And then it wasn't.

"You were mean to me, Joan Walsh!"

My friend Betsy, looking slightly terrified, was escorting an old classmate over to meet me, and the woman was weaving even though Betsy held her arm. Drunk, her lipstick on crooked, she stood unsteadily before me and let me have it.

"You teased me all the time, you and your friends. I was miserable for eight years. I didn't have one single friend. I don't know why I even came." I murmured apologies; she staggered back to the bar.

Betsy and I were devastated. Had we really been that mean? I remembered myself as the victim; was I a bully, too? We joined a crowd of classmates we'd been friendly with -- they hadn't been part of our clique, of course, but we remembered them as friends -- and a boy I'd had a crush on shook his head and laughed. "You teased me all the time," he recalled.

"You weren't that bad," said Laura, who always was kind. "It was mostly Debi." I talked about my own persecution in fifth grade, but nobody remembered that. "You had everything, Joan," Diane scoffed. "You were the first person with your hand up when the teacher asked a question. You knew all the answers. You were always popular."

Why didn't I remember that? And why had we been so mean? Betsy and I put our heads together later. "We were frustrated and unhappy," she ventured, and that was true. Her mother died in the fourth grade, mine got breast cancer in seventh grade; there was a lot of chaos and unhappiness in both our homes. But that was also how we were treated -- harshly, a lot of the time -- at home and in the classroom. I remember the nuns especially, red-faced and screaming at us, out of control, and they remind me of nobody more than my mother -- who, like the nuns, was left alone all day to raise unruly children mostly by herself. Now it seemed archetypal: The powerless female who finds power in cruelty. My girl gang and I had internalized that lesson, but I had forgotten it.

And yet the biggest surprise of the reunion was that, having worried I'd have nothing in common with anybody, I found I had a lot in common with one subgroup: the nuns who returned for the reunion. No longer red-faced and screaming, they were calm and sweet and doing interesting things with their lives. Most of them had retaken their own names -- Sister Patrick Kathleen was now Sister Kathleen Sullivan -- and wore regular clothes, not confining habits. Many were still teaching, now in urban schools, or working with low-income families, and they all had a sense of mission about their work. I write a lot about urban poverty issues and it turned out that we knew many of the same people working on these issues in New York. They were the only people at the party who asked me in any detail what I did.

"Maybe I should have been a nun," I mused to my cousin after we said goodbye to the still-sweet Sister Kathleen.

"Just one problem," he answered, grinning. "You've always liked men."

Alas. But I'm glad I went to the reunion. I realized that the late 1960s was a hard time to be a nun, a stay-at-home mother or a little girl. I also saw that I got my sense of social mission from going to Catholic school. As parochial and white and educationally mediocre as it was, it taught us to care about the world outside the walls, and I internalized that lesson too.

As for the cruelty, I saw that I'm going to have to forgive everybody, including myself.
SALON | Dec. 19, 1997

Joan Walsh is associate editor of Pacific News Service and a regular contributor to Salon.