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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

A Jew for baby Jesus
I can't help having myself a merry little Christmas.
By Amy Silverman
[12/22/99]

Mixing the holidays
A little cross-religious indulgence isn't going to damn anyone to an eternity in hell. Is it?
By Gentry Lane
[12/22/99]

A Christmas story starring Jane Russell
Her time with us was short, but we will never forget the comely tan-and-white terrier.
By Mickey Rathbun
[12/21/99]

Mom spam
The cyber-scourge of families everywhere.
By Phaedra Hise
[12/20/99]

Foreskin and several years from now
My husband has dedicated himself to the proposition that he can form a more perfect penis.
By Kim Lane
[12/17/99]

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The dentist is telling her to stop sucking her thumb. "You're a big girl now. Big girls don't need to do that," he insists, and launches into a litany of horrors that have befallen or will befall her -- from calloused skin to buck teeth to being teased -- if she doesn't end this wretched habit now.

I clutch the edges of the counter behind me. This man is threatening my daughter, and I am swimming so far out in bad memories that I cannot catch my breath long enough to protect her.

I sucked my thumb until I was 11. I sucked with passion, with devotion, and I adored every succulent moment. I sucked while watching television, while riding in the car, while lying under the covers at night, the forefinger and thumb of my other hand plucking soft tufts of flannel from my pajamas and rubbing them against my upper lip.

I needed to suck my thumb. Sucking soothed me, calmed me, focused me, gave me comfort in an anxious household electric with barely-contained panic. I would slip my thumb, worn in as a leather jacket, silken as a dog's ear, into my mouth, circling it with my lips as I tucked it between my tongue and top teeth. It fit tenderly there. I nudged it against my palate, creating a seal against the roof of my mouth. In that movement, the sucking closed a broken circle; it completed a loop; it tied a knot at the end of a rope that otherwise might have spooled out of control.

I never sucked in school. I worried too much about what people thought and was terrified of ridicule. And no photographs exist of me sucking. What I did, I did in private, purchasing an exquisite solitude I still crave today.

And I was told on.

"Ma," my brother would wail when he'd come upon me doing the deed. "Pammy's sucking her thumb!" Busted. Suddenly everything private went public; my inner world cracked open and I was exposed. I wanted my thumb and felt guilty about wanting it. I sucked my thumb but had to plot ways to do so in secret. The pleasure I derived was coupled with shame.

I don't blame my brother. He was conscripted by a task force of adults who had mounted a campaign against my behavior. As my mother tells it, everything started with Grandma Rose: "You were born with your thumb in your mouth. Grandma pulled it out; you put it back in; she pulled it out. And on it went for years."

But my parents kowtowing to others' authority made them just as responsible. They deferred to Rose's old-world view of controlling children. And they pawed the ground in front of the family dentist, a paternalistic warlord who extorted our time and money under the guise of doing what was best for us. (I went to the dentist so often as a kid, it was an activity like dance class, music lessons or religious school.)

By the time they were through with me I had been bribed ("We'll get you a dog;" "We'll pierce your ears"), warned ("Do you want the skin on your thumb to peel away permanently?" "Do you want to get married and still suck your thumb?"), spied on ("Ma, she's doing it again"), mutilated (Herr Dentist fitted me with a metal plate and fangs that hung down from the roof of my mouth), and poisoned (my finger was marinated in a sinister-tasting potion known as "Thumb"). Yet no amount of cajoling and manipulating made me stop. I stopped on my own, because I was ready and wanted to, right before I went to sleep-away camp for the first time.

Not surprisingly, both my daughters love their thumbs. Sonograms revealed them each sucking in utero. Long past infancy they arm themselves against the abyss, as I once did. In fact, they've improved on me: The 5-year-old walks around with her thumb in her mouth clutching a stuffed animal; the 2-year-old sports thumb, animal and blankie.

They sit together on a chair in front of the TV, entwined in one another, sucking. They sit on opposite ends of the sofa, a picture of glazed-over contemplation, one with the left thumb in her mouth, the other the right, enjoying self-imposed timeouts before tearing around the apartment again. They suck voraciously and have no compunction about sucking in public. I wouldn't dream of telling them to quit.

The rest of the world seems compelled to stop them.

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