Salon Mothers Who Think

E D I T O R ' S_N O T E

Look for excerpts from Anne Lamott's new book, "Traveling Mercies," on Fridays; Word by Word, Lamott's biweekly Thursday column, will return March 4.

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An appeal from the author Why you should become a Salon member. By Anne Lamott

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T A B L E_T A L K

Sick of being sneered at by those childless people with attitudes? Fight back in the Mothers area of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

Girly girl
By Mona Gable
If you spent your girlhood learning to toughen up, what happens when your daughter is the sensitive type who makes flower stews?
(01/21/99)

Better ead than uck
By Polly Shulman
New ABC books are breathing life into an old genre by making letters vanish, get lost and pop up in unexpected places
(01/20/99)

The bento chronicles
By Jane Singer
An expatriate mom in Japan learns that a dewhiskered Hello Kitty rice ball in her child's lunch could forever condemn her as a rotten mother
(01/19/99)

Great expectations
By Joanna Scott
Faced with the cruel suspense of an endangered pregnancy, a novelist found that her greatest comfort came from hearing stories, especially the scary ones
(01/18/99)

That one ridiculous palm
By Anne Lamott
Of Catholic friends, atheist parents and the lily pads of faith
(01/15/99)

BROWSE THE WORD BY WORD ARCHIVES

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

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Salon Columnists

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MOMCAT | PAGE 1, 2
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It was so strange to be with families where they prayed before leaving for school each day, before leaving for swim meets and work and tennis tournaments. Pammy would step over her mother on the way out the door and arrive at Shelly's house just as I did. At my house, no one had passed out on the floor, but my mom was scared and Dad was bored and my little brother was growing fat and my older brother was being called by the siren song of the counter-culture. Pammy and I would walk in together and find Lee with her brood piled like puppies on top of her, in her armchair, reading the Bible. And Lee would pray for us all.

Shelly's house was the only place I could really sleep. At my own, I'd try but would feel a threatening darkness hanging over the castle, as if my parents' bad marriage were casting shadows like giant wings -- shadows of alcoholism, shadows of people at my parents' frequent parties who necked in our rooms with people who were married to somebody else. If I told my mom or dad, they said, Oh, honey, stop, that's ridiculous, or they explained that everyone had had a lot to drink, as if what I'd seen didn't count since it had sprung from a kind of accidental overdose. At Christmas there were Fishhouse punches so alcoholic you could have sterilized needles in them, and on hot summer nights, blenders full of frappéed whiskey sours. The kids were given sips or short glasses of drinks, and we helped ourselves to more. By the age of 12, all three of us were drinking with some regularity. My mother did not drink very much and so was frappé herself a lot; she was trying to earn the money for law school, which was her dream, and trying to get my dad to want to stay, and she looked tired, scared, unhappy. But Pammy's mother made mine look like Julie Andrews in "The Sound of Music."

Many of the houses on the lagoon held children who by 13 were drinking and using pot, LSD, cocaine and heroin. Five children I knew well from school or the tennis courts died in the '60s -- three of overdose, one by hanging and the boy who lived directly across the lagoon drowned drunk in its cool waters.

I remember how disgusted my parents were whenever they heard that Lee had taken her kids in to see a practitioner, instead of an M.D., when they got sick, as if she had entrusted her kids to a leech specialist. They were hardly ever sick, though. I don't think they even got poison oak. I was sick much more often than Shelly was. My mother was always basting at least one of us kids with calamine lotion. I remember being sick with chest colds and croup, sitting on her lap on the toilet seat while hot water from the shower filled the room with steam, characters in a misty fairy tale, breathing together till I was better.

Pammy and I basked in Lee's love like lizards on rocks. Lee lay beside me in bed when I couldn't sleep and whispered the Twenty-third Psalm to me: "'The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want' -- I am not wanting for anything, Annie. Let's find a green pasture inside us to rest in. Let's find the still waters within." She lay quiet for a while beside me, and we listened to the tide of the lagoon lapping against the dock. Then she'd go on: "'Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,' Annie, not 'Yea, though I end up living forever in the valley ..."' And she prayed for the Good Shepherd to gather my thoughts like sheep. I did not quite believe in the power of her Mother-Father God, because my frightened lamby thoughts seemed to be stampeding toward a wall, piling up on each others' backs, bleating plaintively while their wild eyes darted around frantically. But I believed in Lee, and I felt her arms around me. I could hear Shelly's even breathing in the next bed, sense Lee's younger daughter and Pammy asleep in the next room, and the whole house would be so quiet, no shadows at all, and Lee would whisper me to sleep.
SALON | Jan. 22, 1999

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Next Friday, Part Three: At 16, giving up tennis, bringing home a B-plus and getting drunk -- and drunker.

Anne Lamott's regular column will return March 4.

Click here for information on Anne Lamott's book tour.