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

Did a gorilla ever spit on your videocam? Send your worst outing tales to dramaqueen
@salonmagazine.com.

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T A B L E++T A L K

Just throw pink stuff at it! Discuss children's ailments and the prevalent use of antibiotics in the Mothers area of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

Global baby warming
By Constance Matthiessen
Babies worldwide: a review of "Our Babies, Ourselves"
(07/08/98)

Mulan through the looking glass
By Katherine Kim and Andrea Quong
For young Asian-American women, Mulan is no mirror image, but at least she casts back a reflection
(07/07/98)

Boho/professional goddess seeks modern man
By Nicki Blake
A personal ad turns up a purple-haired sweetie
(07/03/98)

Your show of shows
By Karen Templer
Watching daytime television may be less about liking the shows than it is about claiming some undisputed territory
(07/02/98)

Drama Queen winners
Outings to hell and back
(07/02/98)

BROWSE THE SALLIE TISDALE ARCHIVES

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

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The demise of discipline: second of three parts
Read Part One: "Spoiled rotten"

SECOND THOUGHTS BY SALLIE TISDALE | I went to a wedding recently, in the highlands of Guatemala. It was a four-couple extravaganza at the city hall; the guests were largely rural people who'd come into the town for the big event. The Salon de Honor, the VIP hall in the municipal building on the main plaza, was packed with about 200 people. The women wore their best skirts and dressiest huipiles, with their hair finely coifed and braided and wrapped. The men wore suits and carried good hats. The room was a quiet, glittering sea of black hair and radiant color -- very quiet, but never still.

Each wedding lasted about 20 minutes and required a few dozen witnesses to join the bride and groom onstage. At the beginning of each ceremony, the celebrant called for witnesses to step forward, and one by one people who knew the couple would rise and join them on the stage until some magic number was reached and the ceremony could proceed. The audience was both attentive to the ceremonies and to itself; the guests whispered to each other, greeted each other with kisses, laughed quietly, walked across the aisles to see friends. To the Mayans, a wedding is a holiday, a family event -- a community event, important and meant to be shared by all of them because it affects all of them; it changes the community.

There were many children at this wedding. Women nursed their babies while toddlers played around their feet. Children over the age of 3 (each dressed in their best, glittering clothes) played with each other in the aisles, holding hands, dancing, whispering to each other. Three ran up the aisle, smiling broadly, and rolled around on the carpet and showed each other how high they could jump.

This sounds like chaos, but it was almost silent; the unamplified voices from the stage carried gently through the room. The Mayan people value reserve and self-containment -- by the time they can walk, children walk quietly. They were watched with benevolent attention every second, not only by their parents, but by everyone there. When one little girl finally went a little too far -- jumping off the stage itself, instead of just below -- the nearest adult stepped up to her instantly, whispered a correction and returned to his seat. The little girl immediately stopped without a word.

After a few weeks in Guatemala, my daughter said to me, "I just realized I haven't heard a baby cry the whole time we've been here." It was true -- babies rarely cry there. Why should they? From birth they are within reach of their parents and their needs are tended to immediately. Each baby is wanted, wanted very much. The Mayans value family, but decades of war and centuries of colonial thievery have left most of them devastatingly poor. In some parts of the country, half of their children die before the age of 5 from malnutrition and disease. Any child is a precious, fragile gift to them, but they don't spoil them. Why would you spoil -- ruin -- your greatest gift?

The kind of affectionate and extremely effective discipline one sees in rural places like this, places with strong and lasting cultural identities and clear community structures, may be almost impossible in our fragmented world. Certainly it often seems impossible. When we consider what is wrong with our lives, why we hurt so much and so often hurt in secret, the hardest thing is to imagine a wholly different way of life. We are bound inside the wound of our lives. I think, though, that this wound is not a single thing but a patchwork of many continual small choices, and each step we take outside each small choice makes a difference.

N E X T+P A G E: Keeping company -- with your kids