7:54 p.m. Here, snatched right from the pages of the scrapbook my mother made for me when I was a little kid is a card in honor of my fourth anniversary online. Four incredible months. My life is totally changed, and for the better. I am writing again! Every single day. And I now, incontrovertibly, have real, live readers! I am so grateful, I can't tell you. Actually, I can -- and I will -- tell you.

You would think I would have picked up the subtle clues in this card all those many years ago. Lord knows I thumbed through this old scrapbook over and over and over again. Look at these two kids. The boy holds the all-important number four on his big bulky sailboat. The girl nurtures the duck. She looks on with unambiguous support, and believe me, she's got her hands full.

She is no threat to the little boy's plans of world domination. You can see it in his eyes. He's a schemer and a plotter and right this very minute he's across town at Le Dome, making a deal that will seal up the movie rights and lock in the foreign distribution for the next ten years. She's back home, with the duck.

I absorbed this picture. It's therefore no great surprise that I should end up complaining last night that the guy with the sailboat is getting all the attention in life. Even the yellow fowl on the ground looks up to him and thinks he's the center of the universe. This is how things are.

My mother worked at various jobs outside the house all the time she was raising her four kids, pretty much alone. And we were no bundles of joy, as I remember. We liked to dance and party all over the house and the furniture before she came home from work. We usually gave ourselves five, ten minutes tops, to set the table and pretend to be studying quietly when she walked in the back door and hung up her big black purse.

I always thought back then that her problem was that she wasn't all giggly and soft around men, and so of course she was left alone with the nightmare of four rampaging kids, some fifteen chickens, a dog, and no job security. She grew up on a farm, the second-youngest of sixteen, and so school and fancy job training was pretty much optional.

She didn't know how to play the game. She only knew how to work really really hard. Smarter, better, faster -- those were her secret weapons. But they were not very powerful weapons. If the guy who owned the hardware store wanted to let his son learn the business, my mom would just have to find another job. And after a few tense months, she always did.

I tried the giggly, soft routine. I had no role model in my mother, so I sort of had to go it alone. I didn't succeed. It only works if you're laughing with, not at the guy.

In today's newspaper there are stories about three different women: Libby Dole, who's dropping out of the presidential race, Martha Stewart, who's rolling her IPO or whatever it's called all up and down Wall Street, and Susan Faludi, who's got a boyfriend and a new book -- about men.

I read that Libby had tears in her eyes as she bowed out, and I saw that Martha had a drink in her hands as her fortunes rose and rose on the Street. Susan is supportive of her companion, but unsure of marriage and afraid of too many knickknacks in the home.

"My mother loves rubble," she said.

We each try to make our way in this world with whatever skills we inherit, or absorb, or learn from our mothers and from the women our mothers never became. Some of us giggle and some of us swear and some of us have joined the Teamsters.

And some of us have just recently gathered up the necessary courage required to stop giggling and fawning and to finally put down that damned duck.