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

by Anne Lamott

I have always known, or at least believed, that way down deep, way past being kind and religious and trying to take care of everyone, I was seething. Now it’s close to the surface. I feel it race from my center up into my arms and down into my hands, and it scares the shit out of me.

I can handle the crying for a long time, but then I feel like I’m going to fall over the precipice into total psychosis. Last night at midnight it occurred to me to leave him outside for the night, and if he survived, to bring him inside in the morning. Sort of an experiment in natural selection.

I sent my agent a picture of me holding Sam in my lap, and she wrote back, “Your hands have become the hands of a mother.”

I swear I have never felt so aware of God as I did walking on the beach with these people, who are atheists, with Sam on my back making raspberries. I know we all only talk about God in the most flat-footed way, but I suddenly had that Old Testament sense of God’s presence, a kind of weighty presence in the midst of all this tumultuous weather and surf. Even when the feeling was gone, I was left with the sense that something is here with us, something that is big and real and protective. I do sometimes feel intensely aware of a presence and a voice so pure that they just couldn’t have come from this world.

If I could have one wish, just one crummy little wish, it would be that Sam outlive me.

I’m tired and wired and fat and feeling about as feminine and spiritual as the late great Divine. I am also totally bored.

It’s great to feel better, to be back in the saddle again. And it’s so hard to let chaos swirl around without needing to manage or understand it. It’s so hard to get quiet enough, free enough of the bondage of self, to hear the voice in the whirlwind that Job heard.

Little by little I think I’m letting go of believing that I’m in charge, that I’m God’s assistant football coach. It’s so incredibly hard to let go of one’s passion for control. It seems like if you stop managing and controlling, everything will spin off into total pandemonium and it will be all your fault.

But I have a photograph on my wall of this ancient crucifix at a church over in Corte Madera, a tall splintering wooden Christ with his arms blown off in some war, under which someone long ago wrote, “Jesus has no arms but ours to do his work and to show his love,” and every time I read that, I always end up thinking that these are the only operating instructions I will ever need.

Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus: And if the earth has forgotten you Say to the still earth: I am flowing. To the rushing waters say: I am.

My friend Bonnie’s kids went to a kindergarten with a sign over the front door that said, “Start out slow, and taper off.” It’s so easy and natural to race around too much, letting days pass in a whirl of being busy and mildly irritated, getting fixed on solutions to things that turn out to have been just farts in the windstorm. Our culture encourages this kind of behavior. That’s why we call it the rat race.

Once my agent Abby said that if we’re not careful, we’ll spend our whole lives blowing on sparks and trying to turn them into embers, when all along they were sparks that should never have been ignited.

Life has got to be bigger than death, and love has got to be bigger than fear or this is all a total bust and we are all just going tourist class.

But I made myself show up, and it got me unstuck. Like they say, take the action and the insight will follow. There’s still real life going on out there, and it was such a nice break to take my extension cord and plug into it for a while.

The three of us women sat for long periods without talking, while Sam played in the sand. We would talk with great animation for a while and then be quiet again. My father and I could do this, too. It is so profoundly, comforting and beautiful, the minuet of old friendships.

In the morning, when he first wakes up and looks at me, it’s with such joy and amazement that it’s like someone had told him, before he went to sleep, that I had died.