T A B L E++T A L K

Can you be a wholesome mama and sexy broad at the same time? Join the "Madonnas and Whores" discussion in the Mothers area of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

Time For One Thing: Acupuncture
By Lisa Moskowitz
My muscles relax. My eyes close. There is no real pain, just the apprehension of pain
(10/14/98)

Wild Things: Strange brew
By Polly Shulman
Love and art are the twin redeemers for the hipster heroes and heroines of Francesca Lia Block's young adult novels
(10/13/98)

School girl
By Thylias Moss
I thought all girls -- regardless of color -- were heading toward vast opportunities. Then I learned the truth. An excerpt from "Tales of a Sky-blue Dress"
(10/12/98)

The gracefully aging boys of summer
By Joan Walsh
Is it merely a coincidence that the playing years of the major leaguer correspond to the period of peak fecundity of the American woman?
(10/08/98)

To spank or not to spank
By Albert Mobilio
A husband from the working class squares off with his gently bred wife
(10/07/98)

BROWSE THE WORD BY WORD ARCHIVES

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

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Salon Columnists

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T U R T L E__T I M E
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Editor's note: We are delighted to welcome back Anne Lamott to the pages of Salon, after a six-month hiatus. Her column will appear every other Thursday in our Mothers Who Think department.

BY ANNE LAMOTT | You know what they say: If you wait long enough, the same old broken-down trolley eventually comes rolling by again. So here I am. And it's nice to see you.

I'm sure you've noticed that I'm a little heavier than when we last spoke. Also, that I have less money, but more time, and I can tell that these are good things, because life seems more vivid these days. And the scales have fallen from my eyes. Or rather, some of them did. Two of them did.

The first scale to fall was that the world was coming to an end. I became convinced of this around the time Linda Tripp first appeared on the national radar. What a nightmare! And me with my bad nerves. She was so angry and scary, evil in its schlumpiest form, an overbred, overfed Airedale sicced on the American public. I barely held on. Then summer came and everyone else got happier with every home run Mark or Sammy hit, but I just felt odd, as if even the good things were now so exaggerated as to seem unreal. No one can hit 65 home runs; I mean, it was very disturbing. And things got worse -- the stock market, all those bombings. Then, hideously, a tie of 66 home runs. Sixty-six home runs! A tie! All of us codependents wanted to hang ourselves. Plus, it was so surreal, like the next thing you knew, the umpires would start letting batters have more than three strikes or something: "Hey, don't be so hard on yourselves! Orel, give him one more pitch." Still I sat glued to the TV in cobra hypnosis until late August, when I finally told a friend that the world might be coming to an end. He said that perhaps it was just the summer that was coming to an end. Also, that some of us would have made terrible cave men hysterics every night when the sun boiled back down into the sea.

He also reminded me of something Don Carpenter told me once, that we no longer had to try to figure out whether the sky was falling or not, because it had fallen long ago, during World World II. But even with the sky at our feet in shards, my concern is how we can best take care of each other. And once I remembered all this, I thought, Hey -- we've survived mad cow disease, we'll survive Linda Tripp.

But at any rate, I'm sorry for any confusion I may have caused.

Now, the second fallacy that I've recently dispelled is that most of your better people -- and here I include myself -- were letting themselves go. Duh -- it turns out that most of them are not going to seed at all, not getting fatter and less efficient. That was the sound of me going down the tubes.

But see, friends of both sexes told me they were gaining all this weight. "I weigh over 600 pounds now," one friend told me over the phone. Another said, "Not one thing I own fits anymore. I'm sitting here naked, wrapped in an old sheet." They also told me that maybe this was OK, because they'd figured out that they were not what they looked like. They were not their stomachs, or thighs. They were not what they had in the world, but what they gave, and who they loved. Right on! I thought.

Five years ago I already knew this was true, but I'd secretly have cut back on fats anyway, or started exercising more. This time I had a friend sew extra material into the waistbands of my jeans. I called them my panel pants. I'd wake up feeling fat, wondering if I'd accidentally put on a pair of the kitty's underwear, and then I'd ask myself, When you're 80 years old, are you going to wish you'd spent more time thinking about how fat your butt is? No. Just the opposite. So I prayed for knowledge of God's will for me, and I got my answer: I went and bought bigger underpants.

I have worn the same size for almost 10 years now, cute little bikinis like maybe Drew Barrymore wears. This time I bought the next size up, the kind that go all the way up to your waist. Boy, one size up is big. How did that happen? You could fit a pumpkin into these. The Gabor sisters could borrow them. I remember a young girl who was helping me fold laundry once, holding up a pair of my underwear and asking with horror, "Do they even make bigger underwear?" And those were the cute small ones.

Where is the woman who used to fit into them? Boy, you got me. I ain't seen her lately. Maybe she's doing her Pilates workout. Maybe she's getting spun.

N E X T_ P A G E: I'm going to be investigated by Kenneth Starr

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ILLUSTRATION BY CHARLIE POWELL