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

Ever been stabbed in the back by your best friend? Send your tale to Drama Queen for a Day.

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T A B L E++T A L K

Circumcision: Are you foreskin or against it? Join the debate in Table Talk's Mothers

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R E C E N T L Y

Why I miss those loathsome "barney" kids
By Carol Snow
Unlike our own children, we could turn them off when they got really obnoxious
(02/10/98)

Chewing fat with the girls
By Elizabeth Rapoport
The Duchess of Pork and the Dershowitz of Dieting serve up this season's most fascinating diet books
(02/09/98)

Bitter Fame
By Jay Parini
"Birthday Letters" is a huge gift to readers that has cost Ted Hughes dearly
(02/06/98)

The good father
By Kate Moses
Now it's clear why Ted Hughes has been silent all these years: To protect his children
(02/06/98)

Second Thoughts
By Sallie Tisdale
Our children bring people in and out of our lives, just as they come and go
(02/05/98)

ARCHIVES

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

David and I, standing in an aisle of a Toys R Us in San Diego, were desperately -- and I do mean desperately -- searching for a holiday gift for his father when the 3-D puzzles caught our eyes. I shifted our 9-month-old son, Noah, onto my hip and pointed, but David's gaze was already fixed on the largest box, which contained a 718-piece model of the U.S. Capitol building.

"You think?" he said.

"Oh yeah," I agreed.

David's father is notoriously difficult to shop for, as he already has one or two of pretty much everything gift-worthy. But a 718-piece three-dimensional puzzle that formed a nearly three-foot-by-two-foot, highly detailed model of the U.S. Capitol building? We felt pretty confident he didn't have that.

Away to the cash register we hied, squirming boy and large box in our arms, neither of us suspecting that we had just stumbled upon a gift to ourselves as well. Or at least, the beginning of a gift.

What happened next was this: We flew to New Jersey, slightly crushing the puzzle box in our stuffed-to-the-seams suitcase, spent the morning after our arrival opening a mountain of gifts, watched his father unwrap the slightly crushed box, turn it over and over reading the copy ("The Fully Dimensional Puzzle with Sturdy, Foam-Backed Pieces") and finally smile. By that evening we were helping Mom and Dad separate and spread out all the foam-backed pieces, and by midnight it was pretty clear that the puzzle was a hit. I played on the floor with Noah while David helped his parents piece together the Capitol's roof and windows; when Noah napped, I helped, too. An almost comically wholesome scene, with just the right ratio of talk to comfortable silence. We were disappointed that we had to return to our life in Massachusetts before the U.S. Capitol had taken any sort of discernible shape.

So it was that, two weeks later, when David's birthday rolled around, we found ourselves back at a Toys R Us, staring at the 3-D puzzles once again.

"Do you think it's kind of pitiful for us to be buying me a puzzle from Toys R Us on the eve of my 32nd birthday?" David asked, as he examined the box that held the 3-D puzzle of Notre Dame.

"Yes," I said, "but we're too broke to buy the other gifts you want, and we know we'll enjoy this, so I think we should set 'pitiful' aside for the moment."

Plus, the assembled Notre Dame was going to look really cool and realistic, a near-perfect model of the actual cathedral. You had to build it up from the surrounding pale green stone walkway; it would eventually rise almost 16 inches in the air. It had buttresses and spires and rampant stained glass and tiny gargoyles and teeny monks or nuns -- viewed from above, hard to say which. With 952 pieces, it was labeled "Super Challenging," as opposed to the U.S. Capitol's mere "Challenging" status. We weren't at all sure we could finish it.

"I won't be able to help you with it very much when Noah's awake," I warned David. Noah had just learned to crawl around and gently pinch dangerous objects into his beautiful mouth. My paranoid new-mama eyes saw that what we were buying was basically a box of 952 choking hazards.

"That's OK," said David. "We'll work on it together when we can."

And that became the rule that made the gift greater than the sum of its parts.

N E X T+P A G E: Remembering how to play