T A B L E++T A L K

Do you slave away in the kitchen every night or take the kids out to eat whenever possible? Discuss feeding the family in the Mothers area of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

Wax on
By Joan Walsh
A bikini-waxer muses on the fine line between pleasure and pain
(06/11/98)

Second Thoughts
By Sallie Tisdale
We are all criminals
(06/11/98)

Drama Queen Candidates
Mommy dearest -- not!
(06/10/98)

How to ruin your kids' summer vacation
By Kate Moses
Instead of schlepping your kids off to camp, let them do nothing
(06/09/98)

Someone to watch over me
By Janis Cooke Newman
Babyhood in a Russian orphanage
(06/08/98)

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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BY MACCABEE MONTANDON | I almost entered the world with the first name Windowsill. My father, deep in his psychiatric residency program at the time, read that his favorite poet considered it the most beautiful word in the English language. In the end, he would settle for giving me the middle name Blake, as in William.

In a sense, it helps me to think of someone else, a stranger with a funny name, suffering the charms of my bohemian childhood. It makes certain events more like fiction, and in that way more believable. There is Windowsill at supper, his father engaging him in the serial, existential topic of conversation: whether or not Dad, as father and life bearer, "owns" him. This is young Win's introduction to philosophy, justice, debate, the dexterity of the mind. His age: 7.

Next witness the youngster, though truly practiced in a life of imagination, becoming bored. The map may have been scribbled over by energetic, paint-splattered parents, but the child will always find his way to Boredsville. What does the child do in a household gripped by the latest Boho dietary chic, macrobiotics? A household bulging with thickly bound and impressive volumes, but empty and silent to the world of television? What does a kid do without things as fun to do, as say, eating Ho-Hos and watching Captain Kangaroo? When I wanted TV, my mother suggested I look out the window instead -- to see what was on "organic TV."

With advice like that I usually shuffled over to Ted Davis' house. God bless Ted Davis. From Friday night to Sunday morning, I left Ted's couch (and the soothing glow of "Happy Days" or "Welcome Back Kotter") only to smother my Bisquick pancakes in King's syrup. "Portrait of the Psycho as a Brand Deprived Youth" works nicely in explaining my state of mind while standing in the Davises' kitchen. Fritos, Skippy, Oreos, Coke. Coke! These were the magic words with which to open a boy's hitherto unenlivened jaws. At our household only organic graham crackers were served up. Our peanut butter was, well, just that.

In our suburban Baltimore home, words such as "Mork," "Tyco" and "J.R. Ewing" were never uttered. The lords of my manor weren't the icons so firmly entrenched in the pop cultural canon of the '80s, but instead were Prince Valiant and Tintin -- heroes of vividly illustrated cartoon novellas by Europeans. Mom sent us all to bed -- me, my brother, herself -- dreaming of Captain Haddock, Tintin's best mate. She invented a different voice for each character, giving straight-shooting Tintin sharp, Oxford English, while the bumbling detectives Thompson and Thompson were assigned a more stuttering and Cockney inflection. If Haddock was on a bender, and of course he often was, Mom would startle and delight us with a booming tirade: "Billions of blue blistering barnacles!" She really sounded like a drunk guy.

N E X T+P A G E: Shivering under the planet Pluto