It was crazy: marriage. You gave your whole life, your whole happiness, over to one other human being, even the best of them inept at times, prone to reach for some other fulfillment, some other pleasure.

It was a lot to carry out of a childhood--all those textured layers of thwarted dreams rumbling under the fifties patina--but a lot of us did it. In those manicured lives and choreographed marriages there was an often-pronounced loneliness, an emptiness that we would try to fill with our own accomplishments. And our role, the one we would have so much trouble trying to shed later, was simply to be the best little girls in the world, the high- achieving, make-no-waves, properly behaved little kittens.

It was crazy: marriage. You gave your whole life, your whole happiness, over to one other human being, even the best of them inept at times, prone to reach for some other fulfillment, some other pleasure.

You watched and you saw what happened and in the accumulation of episodes you saw the pattern: Daddy ruled the roost, called the shots, made the money, made the decisions, so you signed up on his side, and fifteen years later when the women's movement came along with its incendiary manifestos telling you to avoid marriage and motherhood, it was as if somebody put a match to a pile of dry kindling.

Let's just call what happened in the eighties the reclamation of motherhood . . . by women I knew and loved, hard-driving women with major careers who were after not just babies per se or motherhood per se, but after a reconciliation with their memories of their own mothers. So having a baby wasn't just having a baby. It became a major healing.

That, of course, was the thing about the fifties with all their patina of familial bliss: A lot of the memories were not happy, not mine, not my friends'. That's probably why the myth so endures, because of the dissonance in our lives between what actually went on at home and what went on up there on those TV screens where we were allegedly seeing ourselves reflected back.

We were the daughters of the post-World War II American dream, the daughters of those idealized fifties sitcom families in which father knew best and mother knew her place and a kind of disappointment, and tense, unspoken sexuality rattled around like ice cubes in their nightly cocktails.