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.

What a scary, savage world Sam is going to—God willing—grow up in. I don’t know what I was thinking. This country is becoming a police state and six million American children go to bed hungry every night. I lay both things directly at the feet of the Republicans. Maybe Sam will grow up and be one of the people who can turn some of this stuff around. I will raise him to be the leader of the rebel forces.

I want him to grow up to have a lot of faith and to be a very gentle person, and also to be militantly on his own side, as I have come to be. I hope he grows up to be caring and amused and political, someone who does not give up on the ideals of peace and justice and mercy for everyone. Of course, on the other hand I am already actively and consciously poisoning his mind against the Republicans.

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.

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.

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.