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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

Women are getting pregnant after finding out they're HIV positive? Talk about it in Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

Dreams of Bill
Monica Lewinsky wasn't the only woman in America getting hot and bothered about the President
(02/20/98)

Second thoughts
By Sallie Tisdale
Pondering the distance that separates women in my life
(02/19/98)

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)

ARCHIVES

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

BABY HUNGER | PAGE 2 OF 2

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For so long, I believed wholeheartedly that only the most exciting and important of lives could lie before me, and having babies had nothing to do with it. How could I have babies when I was going to write the great American novel, be a sculptress and redesign the country's social services programs? Motherhood seemed shockingly mundane. She just wants to settle down and have kids, my friends and I would say about girls we didn't like, girls who were beneath our scorn because of their lack of ambition or creativity or chutzpah. Wanting to be a mom, cooing over babies -- that kind of thing was just not for girls like me.

Oddly enough, I don't think that kind of thing was really for my mom either. The woman was pretty wild during my childhood. She used to throw huge parties where musicians from around the state would set up shop in our living room and play past the point their fingers began to bleed -- on into the morning, when she'd fix them breakfast. On special weekend afternoons she used to take me to dark sailor bars down by the waterfront where she went disco dancing and introduced me to bartenders who would fix me pink and blue drinks and let me practice my moves on the multicolored dance floor while they gossiped. Her friends were artists, filmmakers, musicians, and the only thing they didn't approve of was living a conventional life. "If anyone tries to marry you before you're 35," she used to say, "I'm coming after them with a shotgun."

She also used to say, though, that having my brother and me was the best thing she ever did. But I always thought it was just a happy coincidence that she liked us so much; it didn't occur to me there was anything innate about having children that brought the kind of joy she spoke of. I thought other moms were probably bored and boring, clearly at the end of their roads.

But, oh, what is this change that has come over me? A fundamental shift has taken place right before my eyes and beyond my control: babies, being a mom, buying those little no-spill cups, the whole thing suddenly seems cool to me. And even more important than that, it seems like something I could incorporate into who I am.

Perhaps it's biological, I think to myself. Although I consider myself so young, I'm a year older then my mother was when she started having kids, and I'm several years older than most moms of her generation were.

Or maybe, I think, I'm subconsciously picking up on a societal shift. Maybe the culture is going to begin revering taking care of children all of a sudden, and I'm just ahead of the curve.

Or who knows -- maybe I'm just not the bohemian rebel type after all. (I also find myself fantasizing about owning large quantities of thick, high-quality towels, if that means anything.)

What I do know is I find myself counting the years until I predict I'll be "ready" to handle the responsibilities of owning a baby. I watch young moms out of the corner of my eye, trying to imagine all the things they know, about which I haven't a clue. And I squirm with jealousy, thinking that every day they get to hear all those cute things babies say and every day they get to feel those tiny arms wrap confidently around their necks.

So for now, I'll stop in front of the Baby Gap windows and sigh at the tiny overalls and itsy button-down shirts, and I'll continue to drool over the babies sitting next to me on the bus, and I'll keep begging my friends to start having them, and I'll continue to wonder how a girl like me ended up aspiring to something like this.
SALON | Feb. 23, 1998

Heather Chaplin is a writer living in San Francisco.