In the spring of 1969 I was 31 years old, home with a newborn, a two-year-old and a five-year-old, in a house that needed vacuuming, in a town where I knew four people. My husband Norm left for the plant at 6:30 in the morning and came home at 5:15. Between those hours I talked to three children who could not talk back and one who could only say "no."

My mother-in-law, who was a wiser woman than I gave her credit for at the time, came by one afternoon while the baby was down and turned the set on to a program she followed. There was an organ, and a woman in a very good coat, and a conversation that was clearly the middle of something. My mother-in-law explained who everybody was and what they had done to each other, and I remember thinking it was ridiculous. The next afternoon I turned it on by myself to see what happened. That was thirty years ago this April.

I want to say clearly that I was not a lonely woman being fooled by a television. I was a smart woman with a college degree and three babies, and for a half hour every afternoon there were adults in my living room having adult problems, and they came back the next day. That's all it was. That's all it has ever been. It has been quite a lot.

Continuity. A prime-time show gives you 22 hours a year and then goes away for the summer. A daytime drama gives you an hour a day, five days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, and it does not go away. Ever. Some of these programs have been on the air, every weekday, since before I was married. There is nothing else on television, or in any other art form I can think of, that asks you to follow a story for forty years. The novel doesn't. The theater doesn't. It's a strange thing and I think it's a wonderful thing.

You grow old with them. There are characters I have watched since they were children on the program, and the actors playing them have been the same actors for twenty-five years, and now those characters have grandchildren. When a performer who's been on a show for thirty years passes away, and the show writes it into the story, and the other characters grieve, the audience grieves with them, and it is not foolish. You have spent more hours with that face than with most of your relatives. That's simply true.

They were talking about things before anybody else was. In the 1970s and '80s the daytime dramas had stories about abortion, alcoholism, rape, interracial marriage, AIDS and breast cancer, in the afternoon, to an audience of housewives, years before the evening programs would touch them. They did it clumsily sometimes. They did it.

It's a women's form. It was created for women, mostly written by women, and watched mostly by women, and I think that has a great deal to do with why it gets laughed at. More on that below.

The organ. I miss the organ. They all have real music now. I understand why. I still miss it.

I am not going to tell you what happened on any of them. If you watch, you know; if you don't, it would take a week. These are the programs and what they have been to me.

For sixteen years, from 1969 to 1985, I arranged my afternoons around the television. I am not ashamed of it, but I will admit it. Dentist appointments were made for the morning. The grocery store was Tuesday at 10. When the children were in school I took a part-time job at the library, and I took the morning shift, and I told the head librarian it was so I could be home when the children got off the bus, which was true, and also a bit of a lie.

In March of 1985 Norm bought a VHS video cassette recorder at the appliance store on the highway. It cost more than our first car. He bought it to record ball games. He recorded exactly two ball games. The rest of that machine's long life, and it lived until 1996, was spent recording my programs while I was at work, and I do not think Norm ever watched one of those tapes, and I know he never complained.

Here is what the VCR did: it gave me my days back without taking my stories away. I went full time at the library that fall. I came home at 5:30, started supper, and watched two hours of daytime at 6 with the sound low while the potatoes boiled, fast-forwarding through the commercials, which is a pleasure I would not have believed possible in 1969. I have owned four VCRs since. The current one is a four-head hi-fi with a timer that I can program a week in advance, and I do, on Sunday night, the way other people do the crossword.

There is a second VCR in the bedroom, because two programs I follow are on at the same time. My daughter thinks this is funny. My daughter also calls me every Friday to ask what happened on hers that week, because her office doesn't allow it. So.

I retired from the library in 1997, so in theory I could watch everything live. In practice I still tape most of it, because the timer doesn't need a nap and I do. Broadcast times vary by station, so I'll spare you the clock and give you the routine.

That's roughly five hours of daytime drama a day, and I can hear you. I have raised three children, worked twenty-three years, buried both my parents, and I read forty books a year. I have earned my afternoons. Which brings me to:

My son-in-law, who is a nice man, watches a football game every Sunday for three and a half hours, and on Monday night he watches another one, and in the fall he watches college games on Saturday too. He reads about the players in the paper. He knows their salaries and their injuries and what they did in 1994. He has strong opinions about men he has never met. Nobody in my family has ever once suggested that this is a waste of his time, or that he is being manipulated, or that he ought to be doing something more improving.

I watch the same number of hours of television a week. Mine has women in it, and love, and families, and a story that continues. And I have been hearing about it for thirty years. From newspaper columnists. From comedians. From a doctor, once, who asked what I did with my afternoons and then said "oh, the soaps" in a voice I have not forgotten. From my own children, lovingly, for years, until they got old enough to have a program of their own they couldn't miss, at which point the joking stopped.

Here is my theory, and I'll keep it short. The soap opera is the one kind of television made for women, about the things women were expected to care about, in the hours when women were home. It was named after the soap companies that sponsored it on the radio, because they wanted to sell soap to housewives. Everything about it was designed to be beneath notice, and so it has been beneath notice, and it has gone right on being watched by tens of millions of people, every day, for sixty years, while the things that were supposed to be important came and went.

The people who make it work harder than anyone in show business. An hour of television a day. Not a week. A day. The actors learn forty pages of dialogue overnight and do it in one take because there's no time for two. The writers keep a story going for decades with the same characters, and if they kill somebody off, they have to live with it. It is not easy to make something that people will come back to five thousand times.

So. You may not like it. That is fine. You are not required to like anything. But before you make the joke, ask yourself when you last followed anything for thirty years, and whether you'd have the patience, and whether the thing you'd choose to follow would be any wiser than mine. Then go ahead and make the joke. I've heard it. I'll be in the good chair.

May: The Emmy. Nineteen nominations. I said it above and I'll say it again. Norm brought me a glass of wine without being asked, which tells you he understood.

June 25: The last Another World. Thirty-five years. I know people who watched it from the first week in 1964, and I got there in 1971, and it does not seem possible that there is simply no more of it. The tape is in the drawer with the important papers. I mean that literally.

July: Passions arrives in its place. I'm watching. I'm reserving judgment. I'm 61 and I've seen programs come and go, and I've learned to give a new one a year before I decide, because the ones I loved best mostly started out strange.

Ongoing: My granddaughter, who is 14, has started watching one of mine with me on days she's here after school, and asks questions, and I answer them, the way my mother-in-law answered mine. There's a young woman here on GeoCities who keeps a page about the TV listings, and a fellow with a page about Saturday morning cartoons, and I've enjoyed both, and I thought: I've been at this longer than either of them, I may as well write it down.

Coming: I'd like to add a page of the organists and theme songs I remember, if I can find out the names, and a page about the magazines (I have every issue since 1977, in the basement, in boxes Norm has stopped mentioning). My grandson says he'll show me how to make a second page in October.