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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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T A B L E_T A L K

Are infertility treatments worth the agony? Discuss forcing the hand ofnature in the Mothers areaof TableTalk

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Love Sallie Tisdale's "Second Thoughts"? Buy her books at BarnesandNoble.com!
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R E C E N T L Y

A dime bag for the schoolgirl
By Janet McDonald
I thought escaping Vassar to make Harlem drug runs meant I could be in the elite world, but not of it
(02/24/99)

A nose for things
By Debra Fay Holton
My mother was tidy and crisp, which is why Janine's vacant mother and messy house were just what I was looking for
(02/23/99)

It's a microbe's life
By Debra Ollivier
Land of the free, home of the clean freak -- the latest round ofmicrobial warfare has turned America into a paranoid hot zone
(02/22/99)

Flea market
By Anne Lamott
It turns out faith is like a little cat that you let in once and feed, and it stays forever
(02/19/99)

Let-r play
By Polly Shulman
Classic and iconoclastic books shake up the alphabet and take kids on a trip through the Dictionapolis of the written word
(02/18/99)

BROWSE THE SECOND THOUGHTS ARCHIVES

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Salon Columnists

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

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[ SECOND THOUGHTS | BY SALLIE TISDALE ]

It's easy to pretend that we are not who we once were, to treat ourpainful condition as an echo of someone else's mistakes. Reading my teenagejournals forced me to stop pretending.

A few years ago, writing a story, I needed to check the exact date ofsomething that happened when I was a teenager -- something that happened 25years ago, a lifetime ago. I first began keeping a journal in high school,and have done so ever since, erratically, with long gaps of weeks or monthsfollowed by intensive daily entries. Now I have many books filled -- handmadebooks, notebooks, blank books, blue books -- in a dusty box in the closet of mystudy. I hadn't read these very early pages for many years; I find them alittle embarrassing, so very young, full of looping script and experimentalpunctuation and drawings of flowers and sunrises sprinkled across the page.

I had trouble pinning down the date I wanted and kept reading. Ibegan tomark pages, make cautious notes about what I was finding -- until all of asudden patterns appeared, neon and naked. I saw especially the pattern ofseeking, the hunger for a steady ground on which to stand, played out in onefield after another. Within a few days, my reading had become a compulsion.

Writing is always partly the work of memory, a sometimes ruthlesswork. The seeds of stories appear without warning, often where they areleast expected. One learns to hunt where the hunting is good, to drop thefiner courtesies. I've learned that courtesy often hides truth; I know,even blushing, that embarrassment acts like a pointing dog. Here! theblush calls. Here be dragons.

I read on, ducking psychic blows, flinching a little here and there at thesilly self-importance, the endless insecurity, the rigid, rigid ideas andwords. But the girl who wrote these smudged notebooks is dead, long gone.The years and events of our past are our past lives. So often they remainbehind in ghostly form, haunting, hungry for one last farewell. Reading myjournals, I was getting to know a stranger, like a long-lost cousin, someoneI'd heard so much about but never met. She was a disconcertingly familiarstranger, so much like me, so strange at times. I didn't quite understandher. I didn't want to stop until her puzzling contradictions came into shapeand made some kind of sense.

I couldn't have done this a few years ago. I couldn't have borneit. Sheis so young, and her suffering is so plain, so clearly of her own confuseddevising. She has moments of insight, quickly lost; she learns lessons andinstantly forgets them, and slowly learns them again. She repeats and repeatsthe same mistakes; she has amnesia, she goes through life like a person tryingto find something stashed in the back of the kitchen drawer who opens the samedrawer again and again, forgetting in the act why she is standing there atall.

One entry brought me up short. When I was 17, I wrote: "Besatisfied with discontent. It is a road."

Be satisfied with discontent. She was 17 years old, with few truefriends -- driven, full of appetite, scared, aggressive in her fear. She wasfull of rage for what had been and passion for all that might come. Why? Somany mysteries. Before that strange young woman was a strange, lonesome,wondering child, a child who found joy in simple things and loss in everythingelse. That child wrote allegorical tales of injustice and revenge. Thatchild died somewhere in adolescence and gave birth to this difficultteenage girl, and the child's easy solitude turned into loneliness, and hersecret hopes were buried in thicker, murkier ones.

I vaguely remember the place and time where she discovered thisbrief truth,this mysterious relationship of pain and joy, discontent and satisfaction. Iremember a fog-bound hill, a winter's day, ghostly pines against the sky,distant singing voices and myself alone, running, suddenly expansive,unbound. And I remember that deeply felt bruise of coming adulthood. Iremember wearing world-weariness like a badge of honor even running freelyacross a dewy hill. I feel her ghostly presence in me now, the shadows of herbeliefs and experiences marbled through me. Me, not me. There are onlyfragments of her left, but the template of her life is stamped on mine.

N E X T+P A G E: Death of the child, birth of the new me