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

by Anne Lamott

Between the tears and the cooing and his crazy drunken-old-man smiles, it’s almost unbearable. There’s so much joy and pain and love and wonder in my chest and behind my eyes that it’s like The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It’s like Patsy Cline’s voice.

No one ever tells you about the tedium. (A friend of mine says it’s because of the age difference.) And no one ever tells you how crazy you’ll be, how mind-numbingly wasted you’ll be all the time. I had no idea. None. But just like when my brothers and I were trying to take care of our dad, it turns out that you’ve already gone ahead and done it before you realize you couldn’t possibly do it, not in a million years.

She says that we’re all so nuts amid so much beauty that it’s like we’re at the circus. In one ring is an amazing array of clowns and bears doing all this great stuff, and in the middle ring is a woman who does breathtaking tricks on horseback, and in the far ring are elephants or seals and maybe more clowns, and above us are trapeze artists, doing these death-defying precision feats, and we’re sitting in our seats looking around crabbily, going, “Where’s that damn peanut vendor? I want my goddamn peanuts!”—even when we’re not particularly hungry.

We all lean into him, soaking him up. It’s like he’s giving off a huge amount of energy because he hasn’t had to start putting up a lot of barriers around it to protect himself. He hasn’t had to start channeling it into managing the world and everybody’s emotions around him, so he’s a pure burning furnace of the stuff.

It’s like Sam opened this window for us, and all this grace flooded in.

One thing about Sam, one thing about having a baby, is that each step of the way you simply cannot imagine loving him any more than you already do, because you are bursting with love, loving as much as you are humanly capable of—and then you do, you love him even more.

Pammy said the other day that the thing happening in her body is so bizarre, so unthinkable, that trying to accept it is like being eight years old again with someone explaining to her that the light from the star she is staring at took twenty years to reach her. All she can do is to stand there staring at the star with a kind of fearful wonder,

waiting for the information to make sense.