T A B L E_ T A L K

Halloween is less than a month away. Discuss your plans, costumes and candy angst in Table Talk's Mother's area

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R E C E N T L Y

The gracefully aging boys of summer
By Joan Walsh
Is it merely a coincidence that the playing years of the major leaguer correspond to the period of peak fecundity of the American woman?
(10/08/98)

To spank or not to spank
By Albert Mobilio
A husband from the working class squares off with his gently bred wife
(10/07/98)

Spanking: A black mother's view
By Karen Grigsby Bates
The survival legacy of slavery taught blacks to spank more than whites -- and that's why you don't see as many black kids having public tantrums
(10/07/98)

Princess Monica
By Lori Leibovich
Why the Starr Report and the Tripp tapes make Jewish women cringe
(10/06/98)

Bed rest sucks
By Kristin Wiederholt
Excessive vomiting, boredom and the other joys of bed rest
(10/05/98)

BROWSE THE MOTHERS WHO THINK FEATURE ARCHIVES

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

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I thought all girls -- regardless
of color -- were heading toward
vast opportunities.
Then I learned the truth.

TALE OF A SKY BLUE DRESS
BY THYLIAS MOSS
AVON BOOKS
259 PAGES

BY THYLIAS MOSS | Louis Pasteur Elementary School was one of the kiosks of paradise in which I sought refuge. It was the place that offered me the profundity I craved, each semester expanding concentrically, the universe enlarging as my mind did, so that my knowledge of it never actually increased; in fact, its expansion rendered me practically invisible so that I could explore undetected, without upsetting the natural progress of events. That which is unseen is also unmolested.

What I loved to do was demanded of me at school. It was my natural habitat where language swelled and swirled cyclonically, careened and dazzled as words made sense of concepts and allowed me to put them into practice, linking everything, the roads infinite, the destinations accessed by those roads infinite. School gave me an idea of what was possible for myself, transformed my dreams, challenged me in ways that increased my delight; I raced through my classes, eager for something to learn, something else to enact and embrace; I wanted to be full yet never was, despite how ravenous I was for books and everything they contained.

When I began kindergarten, I was ready with an impressive juvenile library in my room; hundreds of books, one each week since I was a year old; now, in kindergarten, I was getting a library card and printing my name on a tracking card in the back of each book I borrowed; I surely signed all the books in the children's room, taking home seven, eight books at a time. Of my own books, the first to have lasting importance to me was "When They Were Girls," a perfect square, as I recall, five inches by five inches, in my possession when I was six.

I drew so much life from that book. "When They Were Girls" was about the childhoods of great women; their lives when they were like me. I used to rub the dark green cloth cover that distinguished it from the glossy cardboard covers of most of my juvenile books. It was not one of the "Little House" books or the Bobsey Twins books that I bought at the drugstore or at Woolworth's. Most likely it was a gift from one of the women my mother worked for, and I was meant, as I indeed was, to be encouraged by the mostly unspectacular beginnings of women who later became influential and autonomous. But since the women did not reconfigure their early lives themselves, certain dreams and thoughts, certain subjective and personal nuances were absent. And these distillations of experience into memory are what most interest me for their truth of how life is felt and perceived, for their revelation of the relationship with facts and not just facts themselves. It was a book written by someone who compiled facts, brief generalized chronologies, but who did not include the woman's own interpretation of her life, not the transformation of detail and subtlety into her daily poetry. The actual language of their lives was not there.

Even so, the facts themselves were stunning. In the book I found two mentors: Susan B. Anthony and Saint Maria Goretti. The book introduced me to many possibilities. I didn't think for one minute that little white girls and little black girls couldn't aspire to the same destiny and success. It didn't matter what culture the girls represented; I thought all girls shared something and that we were heading, all smiles and braids, to vast opportunities that we were free to imagine and reimagine. Nothing had told me otherwise. In my childhood, I was: Marie Curie, Sacajawea, Amelia Earhart, Sojourner Truth, Annie Oakley, Maria Goeppart Mayer, Margaret Mead, and Madam C. J. Walker.

I was so busy learning that I was not aware of my plainness, the unflattering way in which my hair hung of its own accord in crinkles and waves, often braids, a density of hair too great for such a narrow face, for which the eyes also were too large, the mouth too conspicuous, the forehead too high and prominent to ever appear without bangs. Yet cliffs that offer spectacular, breathtaking views jut out just that way. My parents treated me as if I comprised loveliness upon loveliness. Breathtaking view after breathtaking view. I was treated the same way in school by teachers like Mrs. Stupak, Miss Porter, Miss Matthews, and Mrs. Bullock, all women, all from Louis Pasteur Elementary School, all nurturing; they allowed children to flourish, gave us the room to grow and blossom unfettered in such an intensity of light, intensity of books and experiments. It was the ideal atmosphere for discovery. I did not feel judged. I did not have to compete. I was not given a ceiling.

Those teachers were extraordinary women for whom I shined because I was free to shine without my efforts toward shining judged. There were no obstacles. What if you had to build a castle? What would you do? How would you begin? Out of what would you build it? A castle of water? Of corn? How? What shape? Where would you build it? Why would you build a castle at all? How will you know that what you have built is a castle? In such an environment, everyone was smart, gifted, even those who eventually tested otherwise. These questions really asked: What if you had a dream? How would you realize it? How would you protect it?

N E X T_ P A G E: I lost my freedom when I transferred schools