Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year

by Anne Lamott

worse than just about anything else is the agonizing issue of how on earth anyone can bring a child into this world knowing full well that he or she is eventually going to have to go through the seventh and eighth grades.

one of the worst things about being a parent, for me, is the self-discovery, the being face to face with one’s secret insanity and brokenness and rage.

My therapist, Rita, has convinced me that every time I say yes when I mean no, I am abandoning myself, and I end up feeling used or resentful or frantic. But when I say no when I mean no, it’s so sane and healthy that it creates a little glade around me in which I can get the nourishment I need. Then I help and serve people from a place of real abundance and health, instead of from this martyred mentally ill position, this open space in a forest about a mile north of Chernobyl.

Now there is something that could happen that I could not survive: I could lose Sam. I look down into his staggeringly lovely little face, and I can hardly breathe sometimes. He is all I have ever wanted, and my heart is so huge with love that I feel like it is about to go off. At the same time I feel that he has completely ruined my life, because I just didn’t used to care all that much.

It’s so hard to keep my sticky little fingers off the controls of this spaceship, especially when I get scared, like now when God has not bothered to give me the specific details of his solution to our financial needs.

keep remembering a letter Simone Weil wrote to her mother in France, when the mother was panic-stricken because Simone was doing all this radical social-activist work with the poor, even though she (Simone) was very frail, very sick. Simone said to her mother something like “I love you, and if I had two lives, I would give you one. But I don’t.” The awful thing is that Sam will probably get hold of this line someday, too.

That’s why I like that line so much about my mind being a bad neighborhood I shouldn’t go into alone. It’s too often 4:00 A.M. in one’s mind, the hour of the black dogs, and there are so many muggers and drive-by shootings and piles of dog shit you step in just when you’re starting to feel better about things. One’s heart is the only safe place to be. There’s light there, there’s company, and quiet.

God, he’s so grown up. It goes so crazily fast that it’s no wonder we’re all just a little bit edgy.

All I wanted to do was to stay home and sit on the couch necking with my fear and depression.