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E D I T O R ' S_N O T E

Look for excerpts from Anne Lamott's new book, "Traveling Mercies," on Fridays; Word by Word, Lamott's biweekly Thursday column, will return March 4.

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T A B L E_T A L K

Sick of being sneered at by those childless people with attitudes? Fightback in theMothers area of Table Talk

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Search barnesandnoble.comfor books about parenting and the family
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R E C E N T L Y

Better ead than uck
By Polly Shulman
New ABC books are breathing life into an old genre by making letters vanish, get lost and pop up in unexpected places
(01/20/99)

The bento chronicles
By Jane Singer
An expatriate mom in Japan learns that a dewhiskered Hello Kitty rice ball in her child's lunch could forever condemn her as a rotten mother
(01/19/99)

Great expectations
By Joanna Scott
Faced with the cruel suspense of an endangered pregnancy, a novelist found that her greatest comfort came from hearing stories, especially the scary ones
(01/18/99)

That one ridiculous palm
By Anne Lamott
Of Catholic friends, atheist parents and the lily pads of faith
(01/15/99)

Second Thoughts: Earning credit in the straight world
By Sallie Tisdale
Twelve years after he graduated, Michael Backman lied his way backinto high school because he wanted to try again -- not atschool, but at everything wrong that followed
(01/14/99)

BROWSE THE MOTHERS WHO THINK FEATURE ARCHIVES

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

Girly girl

If you spent your girlhood learning to toughen up, what happens when your daughter is the sensitive type who makes flower stews?

BY MONA GABLE | My daughter is crying. It is the final day of kindergarten, Teddy Bear Picnic Day, and 52 children are talking, shrieking, engaged in frantic activity. I know there are 52 children because I just spent the last half hour frantically stuffing hundreds of green, white, red, yellow and orange gummy bears into 52 plastic bags. Now I'm helping eight 5-year-olds of wildly varying ability sort their bags by color and graph the results. So few gummies, so little time, as they say. This is not great fun, but at least I'm not stuck at the Teddy Bear Sandwich Center. That mother has to carve teeny-tiny bears out of white bread and slather them with peanut butter.

My daughter is supposed to be at the Teddy Bear Coloring Center. Instead, she is tugging on my skirt, tears sliding down her tiny freckled nose. She is the only child crying, as usual. I try to swallow my impatience.

"What's wrong?" I ask.

"Cameron won't let me use the red crayon!" she sniffs. Cameron is short and funny, with a face and personality not unlike Dennis the Menace.

"Did you ask him nicely if you could borrow it?" I ask.

"Yes, and he wouldn't give it to me!"

I can see she's not going to let me off easily, so I walk her back to her table to investigate. Sure enough, Cameron is madly scribbling away with a red crayon and as soon as he sees me he begins puffing up his chest, mightily defending himself. He explains that he's not yet done and that "she" tried to grab the crayon away from him, while she screams right back that she did not. The other children at the table look on, perplexed, their stubby crayons poised in mid-air. My head is spinning.

"Use another color," I tell her. "Cameron will give you the red one when he's done, won't you, Cameron?"

Cameron is noncommittal. Then Davis, slight cute Davis with a face the shape of a full moon, looks at my daughter and giggles. That's it. There's no hope for recovery now. She puts her head down on the table and sobs, big heaving sobs.

Instead of feeling empathy for her, feeling angry at the blond in short pants who has driven her to tears, I feel irritated at her. Why is she so damned helpless and thin-skinned? I think harshly. So sensitive? A child who makes flower stews, plays with Polly Pockets and keeps rolly pollies from harm. Sometimes I wish she would just deck someone. Why can't she be more tough, like me?

I was the last of four children. I was also the only girl. These two facts, I believe, shaped my destiny more than anything else. People often assume that because I was the only girl and the youngest, the baby as it were, I was hopelessly spoiled and protected. This always makes me laugh, it being so patently absurd as to make me wonder whether they've spent time around boys at all. Pummeled and ridiculed, yes. Spoiled, no.

Being a girl in our male-dominated household meant having the status of a slave. My brothers were the aggregate boss, a position of which they constantly reminded me. "Seniority rules!" my middle brother, Bill, the particularly mean one, would proclaim, shoving me out of whatever chair I was sitting in and planting himself there with an evil grin.

Females were, in a word, worthless. Giddy, foolish, obsessed with wimpy pursuits like books, cooking and dolls. They were especially dense when it came to appreciating the cosmic value of sports. No matter that this was in the bad old days before Title IX, when about the most strenuous activity girls were encouraged to engage in was paddle tennis, or at best traditional female sports like gymnastics. I was accused of being adopted several times because, among other obvious birth defects, I could not throw a football like my jock brothers.

Still, the worst crime in our middle-class, WASP family was to be sensitive. You could be lazy, you could be a jerk, you could even date a Jew, but if you showed a quivering lip, a tear, any sign of weakness, you were fair game. For a time my brothers could drive me to tears by looking at me. They could make me cry even harder by calling me the "s" word. "Mona iiii-ss sensitive!" they'd chime. Then I'd oblige them, of course, by behaving exactly as they intended. I'd flee to my room in tears, fling myself on the bed, my face burning with a terrible emotion I now recognize as shame.

I knew early on if I was going to fit in my family, feel a sense of belonging and power, I had one option. I was never going to be a boy, but I could act like one. So I did.

N E X T_ P A G E: "You finally got the girl you wanted"