<table> </table> Hands down, she is one of the most phenomenal women I have ever seen &#8212; even if it was only from my living room couch.</p><p>Clair Huxtable was a supermom, and week after week I hung on to her every word. How I longed to be a Cosby kid.</p><p>They may have had only five children on &#8220;The Cosby Show,&#8221; but Clair and Cliff helped raise a generation of kids.</p><p>Like that of many latchkey kids with single moms in the &#8217;80s, my life consisted of a few things when I got home from school &#8212; homework, microwave meals and television. Two of my favorite shows: &#8220;The Cosby Show&#8221; and &#8220;A Different World.&#8221;</p><p>I was just in elementary school when I told my mom I wanted to go to college, and it wasn&#8217;t because anyone told me I should. It was because I heard Cliff and Clair discussing the importance of education with their kids. I watched in awe as Sandra, Denise and Theo embarked on their journeys through higher education.</p><p>Growing up, I had no personal relationships with college graduates, lawyers, doctors or upper-middle class professionals like the Huxtables. No one where I came from lived the Cosby life, but I knew it was something one should aspire to.</p><p>I knew Clair was the kind of woman I wanted to become one day. (I&#8217;m still working on it.) She made everything seem possible &#8212; she won court cases, kissed boo-boos, cooked dinner and did it with class and beauty in half an hour.</p><p>A wonder woman, she defied stereotypes. She bent the angry, hypersexual, welfare image of the black woman in America, molding it into something classy and iconic.</p><p>Even my mom, who is much more like the cynical and charming Roseanne, admired the strength of Clair Huxtable. To my mother, Clair represented the fact that a woman could work, raise kids and still maintain independence within a relationship.</p><p>Clair has touched so many people that when TiVo recently did a survey ranking the top 20 TV moms of all time, she won with a whopping 58 percent of the votes.</p><p>&#8220;First of all, she was a real human being,&#8221; Phylicia Rashad said in a statement from TiVo. &#8220;She was a devoted wife and mother with a great sense of humor and a definite awareness of her own self,&#8221; said Rashad, the woman behind Clair Huxtable.</p><p>&#8220;People look to the mother as the embodiment of the family. She was the mother that children love, that husbands adore and that women want to be.&#8221;