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

by Anne Lamott

I just can’t get over how much babies cry. I really had no idea what I was getting into. To tell you the truth, I thought it would be more like getting a cat.

It was touching to see all these people who usually walk around in carefully constructed disguises, doing very impressive impersonations of busy adults, but who on the inside are secretly divas and pirates, clowns and heroes.

I’m learning to call people all the time and ask for help, which is about the hardest thing I can think of doing. I’m always suggesting that other people do it, but it really is awful at first. I tell my writing students to get into the habit of calling one another, because writing is such a lonely, scary business, and if you’re not careful you can trip off into this Edgar Allan Poe feeling of otherness.

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.

I heard this old man speak when I was pregnant, someone who had been sober for fifty years, a very prominent doctor. He said that he’d finally figured out a few years ago that his profound sense of control, in the world and over his life, is another addiction and a total illusion.

I was deeply aware of the worm inside of me and of the grim bits that I feed it. The secret envy inside me is maybe the worst thing about my life. I am the Saddam Hussein of jealousy. But the grace is that there are a couple of people I can tell it to without them staring at me as if I have fruit bats flying out of my nose, who just nod, and maybe laugh, and say, Yep, yep, I get it, I’m the same.

Steve said that meeting Sam was one of the best things that had ever happened to him but that another was having finally learned to swim at the age of thirty. “Life is really great sometimes,” he said.

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.

So we were driving over the mountain, and on our side it was blue and sunny, but as soon as we crested, I could see the thickest blanket of fog I’ve ever seen, so thick it was quilted with the setting sun shining upward from underneath it, and it shimmered with reds and roses, and above were radiant golden peach colors. I am not exaggerating this. I haven’t seen a sky so stunning and bejeweled and shimmering with sunset colors and white lights since the last time I took LSD, ten years ago. But do you want to know my very first thought upon seeing this? I thought, Oh, shit, the fog’s coming in—the ride home will be a pain in the neck. And then, right that second, I got it.

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.

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.

Peg’s friends over in AA say that the willingness comes from the pain, by which they mean the willingness to change; in other words, people don’t get sober when they are still having fun drinking.

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. In that capacity, I’ve looked like Neptune, cheeks filled with wind, blowing on the sea.

I recommended that she think of all the women who have most adored her in her life and to come up with a sense of God based on that kind of love, on the sense of protectedness that it gives you to be loved by a really fine woman, a sense of some mysterious regenerative force at the center of things that is maybe just love. She said with great surprise, “I didn’t know you could do that,” and I said, “Oh, yeah, you can do anything you want,” and by this morning she’d found a picture of a big cat licking a little cat. She’s a great cat lover, and it stuck. So at the hospital this morning, as she sat in the doctor’s office getting the chemo IV, and then as she sat around at home all day waiting to become Linda Blair, she said she’d picture this big cat licking her gently and carrying her in its mouth to safer places.

I heard someone say once that forgiveness is having given up all hope of having had a better past. And this is why Pammy is so powerful.

I keep thinking of that story, how much it feels like I’m the two-year-old in the dark and God is the mother and I don’t speak the language. She could break down the door if that struck her as being the best way, and ride off with me on her charger. But instead, via my friends and my church and my shabby faith, I can just hold onto her fingers underneath the door. It isn’t enough, and it is.

We see the glorious colors and shadings, but we also see the knots and the threads hanging down, the thick lumpy patches, the tangles. But God and the people in heaven with him see how beautiful the portraits in the tapestry are. The poem says in this flowery way that faith is about the willingness to be used by God wherever and however he most needs you, most needs the piece of thread that is your life. You give him your life to put through his needle, to use as he sees fit.

He had this huge report on birds due in school and hadn’t even started it, but he had tons of bird books around and binder paper and everything. He was just too overwhelmed, though. And I remember my dad sitting down with him at the dining table and putting his hands sternly on my brother’s shoulders and saying quietly, patiently, “Bird by bird, buddy; just take it bird by bird.” That is maybe the best writing advice I have ever heard.