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D R A M A++Q U E E N

Did your best friend steal your boyfriend? Send your tale to Drama Queen for a Day

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T A B L E++T A L K

A frustrated non-parent asks: Do parents deserve special treatment? Join the debate in Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

Are you a crystal vase?
By Joyce Millman
If you can answer these 20 questions, you've watched way too much of the Olympics
(02/18/98)

Addicted to day care
By Phaedra Hise
If it takes a village and you don't have one, a good child-care provider may be just what you need
(02/17/98)

Losing it
By Lori Liebowich
No lover but the first will ever know me as both a child and a woman
(02/13/98)

A Few Good Men
By Dawn MacKeen
Banking on poor women
(02/12/98)

Time for One Thing
By Beth Wolfensberger Singer
The jigsaw puzzle as marital aid
(02/11/98)

ARCHIVES

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

the wilderness

BY SALLIE TISDALE | I had a cup of tea with Donna the other day. She needed, she said with some embarrassment, to talk about her mid-life crisis, and she thought I'd understand.

I don't know her well. We are both in our early 40s, both in long-term relationships. We each have an adolescent daughter who plays soccer. We go to the same church and now and then bump into each other in the office there, where we both volunteer. But we live in different neighborhoods, work on different schedules and our daughters go to different schools and play on different soccer teams in different leagues. Any meeting, even for a simple cup of tea, must be arranged ahead of time. It must be constructed out of pieces, take place where the intersecting sets of our lives briefly meet.

Before meeting Donna, I spent two hours teaching at a nearby school and made a quick visit to the bank. The bank was still closed, so I bought tea from the espresso shop and waited with a dozen strangers for the big glass doors to open. When I arrived at Donna's office, a little late, she hurriedly introduced me to her colleagues, got a cup of coffee for herself and steered me to an empty room.

Donna sighed, and slowly talked about her struggle to let go of the lives she once thought she might live and did not. She talked about her inability to take the crucial step forward into one of the possible lives remaining to her. She was embarrassed because she knows how common this is, this crisis of intersecting sets of commitments -- of increasingly nonintersecting sets too, sets that seem to multiply and collide with no end in sight. She is embarrassed because she's written articles about intentional communities, intentional lives. And she feels as though she has no control over the hours of her days.

I tell her I know exactly how she feels.

Sisterhood is powerful. For the most part I find it in passing, in broken conversations and fleeting moments of recognition -- on the street, in public bathrooms, on the bus. Standing outside the bank, I watched a young woman holding a baby and vigilantly guarding two toddlers dancing around her feet. She spoke only in the repeated mantras of the cautious mother. Our eyes met now and then, and I remembered the terrible loneliness I sometimes felt when I had three small children, the bone-deep courage I needed to simply get through certain days. Sisterhood. It is powerful here, with Donna, over a hurried paper cup of tepid tea in a cold basement room -- a quickly snatched refuge, the place where we can abbreviate our explanations and know we will still be understood. The common complaint of too much is one we all share, women have always shared: too much to do, too little time, too many demands. So many choices is a modern detail -- and what is also modern, and peculiarly Western, is that women face these things alone. In our shared dilemma, that I live with a man and Donna lives with a woman is hardly relevant at all.

N E X T+P A G E: The tribe of women