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

by Anne Lamott

doctor who examined me at Kaiser said I was only dilated two centimeters and couldn’t be admitted, although I was in real pain by then. I went into a terrible, fearful depression.

baby. I got the epidural immediately and decided that next time, if there is a next time, I will get the epidural upon registration. Lamaze is great and the classes totally educated Pammy and me about what to expect, but I never intended to have a natural childbirth. The moment that epidurals were mentioned in our class, Pammy and I had turned to each other and nodded. I had a few great hours of heavy but epiduralized labor.

on my chest for a bit and then cleaned him up, and then Pammy and Steve held him because I was too hurt and out of it. They walked around the room with him, explaining what various things were and that he would get used to the light. They’d bring him over to me every few minutes and then carry him around again when I was too preoccupied with the fever and the stitching. I felt like my heart was going to break from all the mixed-up feelings and because I couldn’t even really take care of my baby.

I’m crazy tired. I feel as stressed out by exhaustion as someone who spent time in Vietnam. Maybe mothers who have husbands or boyfriends do not get so savagely exhausted, but I doubt it. They probably end up with these eccentric babies plus Big Foot skulking around the house pissed off because the mom is too tired to balance his checkbook or give him a nice blow job.

Sam had a slight fever following his circumcision, and his pediatrician at Mount Zion had made me promise to take the baby’s temperature when I got home to make sure the fever was going down. I was scared that there would be terrible complications from the circumcision and that I had, after all, made the wrong decision and now he would get a brain fever and need emergency surgery on his wienie. Although about half of my family and friends had made circumcision seem about as humane as nipple piercing, it had been a relatively easy decision to make at the time. To begin with, I had read that penile cancer occurs almost exclusively in uncircumcised males, that uncircumcised men have much more frequent urinary tract infections, and that their female lovers have a much higher rate of cervical cancer. So there were those medical reasons, but there was also the matter of keeping the damn thing clean—you would have to cleanse the foreskin daily with, one supposes, Q-tips and 409. Who’s got the time? One of my best friends had had her baby circumcised ten years ago against much protest from her family. It then turned out that her son was terribly uncoordinated as a young boy. She told me that circumcision was the best decision she ever made: “I had a terrible time teaching him to wash his hands,” she said.

We slept for six straight hours and are up nursing now. There is milk everywhere. I go around looking like I’ve got a wet bathing suit on under my clothes.

stood for the first hymn feeling very adult—an actual mother, for God’s sake—only to discover that the doughnut seat was stuck to my bottom, and milk was absolutely pouring out of my breasts. I was not yet secure enough to hold the baby with one hand, so I was cradling him in my arms and couldn’t free up either hand to pull the doughnut seat off. So I stood there bent slightly forward, warbling away, with my butt jutting out and ringed by the plastic doughnut.

Being a mother is like having to navigate across a field covered with old car tires.) I was just hating Sam there for a while. I’m so goddamn fucking tired, so burnt beyond recognition that I didn’t know how I was going to get through to the morning. The baby was really colicky, kvetching, farting, weeping, and I couldn’t get him back to sleep.

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.

After Pammy went home, Sam and I played with his key chain for a long time, and it seemed to mesmerize him. He fell asleep and I finally got to eat a Häagen-Dazs bar with toasted almonds that Emmy and Big Sam had brought me earlier in the day. It made me feel that I was on the road to some small sense of normalcy. Then I broke every rule in the book by picking him up when he was sound asleep so that I could rock him in the rocking chair, holding him and smelling his clean hair and skin. I could not take my eyes off him. He didn’t wake.

I have never hurt him and don’t believe I will, but I have had to leave the room he was in, go somewhere else, and just breathe for a while, or cry, clenching and unclenching my fists. I have four friends who had babies right around the time I did, all very eccentric and powerful women, and I do not believe that any of them are having these awful thoughts. Of course, I know they’re not all being Donna Reed either, but 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.

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.

I remembered that Dad gave Mom a small and certain amount of money every month for groceries and household expenses. Because there was none extra, she couldn’t blow a couple of bucks on Band-Aids, especially since little kids love them so much and use them at every opportunity, like to accessorize. So when I was small, and got a cut or scraped knee or stubbed toe, and went to get a Band-Aid, there’d often be only those little tiny ones that are almost big enough to bandage a bee. It was one of the small things that made me grow up feeling scared, like I wasn’t being protected very well and I better not fall. I realized during that session that I wanted Sam to grow up with the sense that it’s safe to fall, that there’s enough of the important stuff in the world for him, including Band-Aids. I still secretly worry that there isn’t enough love, or money, or acclaim, and I have to do all I can to make sure I get my fair share.

The long and the short of it is that when I cut Sam’s finger today, I thought, “Aha! Finally after thirty-five years of waiting, I can put one of those eentsy Band-Aids to work, even though we have three full tins at our disposal.” But it was useless on Sam’s finger; it wouldn’t stick. There was no glue on the goddamn tape, and just because I’m so wasted and fragile, I got kind of weepy, because the six hundred big Band-Aids we have are too big for him. Sam watched me very intently, like his business is just to take it all in because at some point one of the bigheads is going to explain some of the rules and procedures to him.

It feels like I’m baby-sitting in the Twilight Zone. I keep waiting for the parents to show up because we are out of chips and Diet Cokes.

I am saying no to almost everything and everyone. This has become my specialty. 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.

Every night between 8:30 and 12:30 Sam cries and is miserable. I have tried everything that all the baby books suggest, and it is not getting better. I feel so badly for him—I keep thinking about how hard it is for him here, especially compared to how easy and warm and floaty it was where he used to live. It’s nuts. I’m so tired that I could easily go to sleep at 8:30 and sleep for twelve hours, but instead I walk the sobbing baby and think my evil thoughts—Lady Macbeth as a nanny.

Big day for Sam. He’s one month old. Pammy and Steve and I celebrated by giving him another real bath in his little plastic tub, which we set up in the living room, while listening to Toots and the Maytals on the boom box. He peed all over me and into his bathwater just as the kitty walked past. She began rubbernecking with the most shocked and horrified expression on her face, clearly thinking, “Oh, my God, now I’ve seen everything.” I think she had just begun to get over the trauma of witnessing the shit storm that poured out of Sam on his first day home, was just beginning to put her life back together.

Part of me does not want Sam to be like this at all, and part of me thinks that it’s right and important to scorn and revile the conservatives, because—well, because they’re bad, or at least they’re wrong.

we must try to look out at the world through quiet eyes.

Renata Adler’s wonderful line about how self-pity is maybe just sorrow in the pejorative.

had gone back to sleep on the futon on the living room floor, which is still our headquarters, I heard him begin to whimper, and I thought, “Go back to sleep, you little shit.” He kept whimpering, like a golden retriever whose feelings you’ve hurt, but he wasn’t really crying, so I didn’t wake up all the way. I kept shushing him and thinking, “You whiny little bugger.” Finally, at least ten minutes later, with total hostility and resentment, I roused myself enough to reach over to rub his back, which sometimes helps him a little—and he wasn’t there! I turned on the light, and he wasn’t anywhere on the bed! I actually thought he’d been kidnapped; or left. It turns out he had somehow scooted off the bed and landed on the floor between the head of the futon and the wall and had just lain there whimpering. I don’t think I can capture in words how I felt at that moment.

Sam is so much bigger every day, so much more alert. It’s mind-boggling that my body knows how to churn out this milk that he is growing on. The thought of what my body would produce if my mind had anything to do with it gives me the chill. It’s just too horrible to think about. It might be something frogs could spawn in, but it wouldn’t be good for anything else. I’ve had the secret fear of all mothers that my milk is not good enough, that it is nothing more than sock water, water that socks have been soaking in, but Sam seems to be thriving even though he’s a pretty skinny little guy. I’m going to have an awards banquet for my body when all of this is over.

It’s incredible to be this fucking tired and yet to have to go through the several hours of colic every night. It would be awful enough to deal with if you were feeling healthy and upbeat. It’s a bit much when you’re feeling like total dog shit. When he woke me up at 4:00 this morning to nurse, I felt like I was dying. I felt like getting up to pull down the shades and wave good-bye to all my people, but I was too tired.

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.

Have I mentioned how much I hate expressing milk? I do it nearly every day so there will be bottles of milk on hand for whoever comes by to take care of Sam, but I hate the fucking breast pump. It’s the ultimate bovine humiliation, and it hurts, the suction is so strong. You feel plugged into a medieval milking machine that turns your poor little gumdrop nipples into purple slugs with the texture of rhinoceros hide. You sit there furtively pumping away, producing nebbishy little sprays on the side of the pump bottle until finally you’ve got half a cup of milk and nipples six inches long. It’s so incredibly unsexy and secretive, definitely not something you could ever mention on “Wheel of Fortune,” nothing you’d ever find in a Cosmo piece about ten ways to turn on your lover—crotchless underpants and a breast pump. I sit there in the kitchen miserably pumping away, feeling like Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby, pumping out a bottle of milk for the little infant Antichrist. Yesterday the refrigerator wasn’t working, so after I produced a small bottle of breast milk, I had to store it in a wide-mouth thermos filled with ice, like it was a severed finger that I was about to rush to the hospital to have sewn back on. It was too ridiculous for words.

We had another bad night. We finally slept for two hours at 7:00 A.M. What a joke. I feel like thin glass, like I might crack. I was very rough changing him at 4:00 when he wouldn’t stop crying. I totally understand child abuse now. I really do. He was really sobbing and the gas pain was obviously unbearable, and I felt helpless and in a rage and so tired and fucked up that I felt I should be in a home. I can’t stop crying. I cried all night, along with the baby. Pammy came over and brought two sacks of groceries, and put clean sheets on our bed, and helped us both have a bath, and just in general talked me down as if I were on a window ledge. The exhaustion, the sleep deprivation, make me feel like I’m in the bamboo cage under cold water in The Deer Hunter.

Now it’s midnight. I can’t believe I’m in such a good mood, because he has been screaming since 10:00 tonight. I am not speaking to him. He is on the futon having an episode. Every so often I pick him up and try to nurse him or walk him for a while until my yoni aches again, and then I put him back down on the futon. I’m annoyed with him. I don’t think he’s handling things very maturely.

One small difference in our reaction was that Julie, near tears, sat staring at the set, wondering out loud if her husband was still alive, while I was rather horrified to discover that I was worried about how this would affect sales of the book. This made me feel just great about myself, as you can imagine. So did my other main concern, which was that if the World Series had to be postponed, it would completely ruin my life, and when I got up to make Julie a cup of tea, I limped to the kitchen feeling like a medieval dwarf with a lot of small broken teeth. In the old days this feeling of loathsomeness would have lasted for days, would have triggered that old familiar fear that if people could really know me, they would discover that I make the Joan Collins character on “Dynasty” look like Helen Keller. But now I’m just too tired. I know Sam will grow up and have all these terrible secret thoughts, too. His self-centered, petty, envious, conniving mule-stupid side will haunt him; he will be plagued by terrible self-doubts and fear. I hope I can remember to tell him then that on the night of the 1989 earthquake, I was trying to figure out how distributors would be able to get copies of my book into the stores, what with the Bay Bridge down and all. I guess he’ll have to figure out someday that he is supposed to have this dark side, that it is part of what it means to be human, to have the darkness just as much as the light—that in fact the dark parts make the light visible;...

I notice I’m not so wildly surprised to find him alive every morning. In the earlier days, when I’d first hear his kvetchy little voice, I’d feel that it was proof enough that there was a God in heaven. Now when I hear him start to whimper, I feel just the merest bit testy. I try to con him into sucking on his pacifier for a while so I can sleep for a few more minutes.

Sam sleeps for four hours at a stretch now, which is one of the main reasons I’ve decided to keep him. Also, he lies by himself on the bed staring and kicking and cooing for fifteen to twenty minutes at a time. I had these fears late at night when I was pregnant that I wouldn’t be able to really love him, that there’s something missing in me, that half the time I’d feel about him like he was a Pet Rock and half the time I’d be wishing I never had him. So there must have been some kind of a miracle. I never ever wish I hadn’t had him.

Sam has this great roar now, like maybe he’s about to cry, but then it turns out that he just feels like roaring because that’s the kind of guy he is—he’s a roaring kind of guy—and because he’s coming into his own, like “I am baby, hear me roar, in numbers too big to ignore.…” Then he burns his diaper.

Half the time I’m completely winging this motherhood business. I get so afraid because we are running out of money. We have enough to live on for maybe two more months. Also, I just had no idea I had so much rage trapped inside me. I’ve never had a temper before. I’ve always been able to be mellow or make jokes. But we went through a difficult patch this evening when Sam was being hard to please, whiny and imperious and obviously feeling very sorry for himself, and at first I could kind of roll with it, shaking my head and thinking, It’s because he’s a male, he’s having an episode, this is very familiar stuff to me, he’s already got testosterone poisoning. But I couldn’t get him to stop, and it wore me down. It was one of those times when I desperately needed to be able to hand him over to someone, like, say hypothetically, a mate, and there wasn’t anyone.

Part of me loves and respects men so desperately, and part of me thinks they are so embarrassingly incompetent at life and in love. You have to teach them the very basics of emotional literacy. You have to teach them how to be there for you, and part of me feels tender toward them and gentle, and part of me is so afraid of them, afraid of any more violation.

But in the old days I used to get sucked in and say yes to everybody and be there for them, showing up at their parties, helping them move, or staying on the phone with them too long. I’d try to entertain or help or fix, nurse them back to health or set them straight. Now I do the counting-horse shuffle and shake my head and say I just can’t do it, can’t come to the party, can’t do the favor, can’t stay on the phone. I want Sam to understand when he grows up that “No” is a complete sentence. It’s given me this tremendous sense of power. I’m a little bit drunk on it. I ended up saying no to a couple of things I really wanted to do with friends, then had to call them up and beg, “Take me back, take me back.”

asked them to be Sam’s paternal grandparents when I was two months pregnant. I said then that it would need to be very formal and official; they would have to be actual blood grandparents, buying him expensive holiday outfits and taking him to Disneyland when he was old enough. They were overjoyed. Since he was born, they have been blown away with love for their baby grandson. Just blown away.

It is just great to get away from Sam. At first. At first it makes me feel like Zorba the Greek. But then the jungle drums start beating and I feel like you do when you’re having a massive nicotine craving. This week, I sat alone in a theater watching this totally dumb movie, this warm perfumed poopoo, but happily overeating in the dark, totally happy to be away from Sam, for about twenty minutes. Then the longing to be with him again became so intense that I sat there hyperventilating. There was a ten-minute patch of time when I must have looked like I was doing Lamaze.

Did I ever tell you about the day I was trying to make rice water, which is an old home cure for colic? You just boil rice in a lot of water and then strain the water off and put it in a bottle. But I was so wasted with exhaustion that I wasn’t vigilant enough, and the water kept getting absorbed and I’d end up with a huge pot of cooked rice, nice wet cooked rice and not one drop of rice water. So I’d try again, and the exact same thing would happen. Luckily Steve dropped by. He ate three or four massive bowls of the rice, with butter and teriyaki sauce. I never did get that rice water made.

Rita said, “The awful news is that you probably just have to go ahead and feel the feelings and grieve the grief.” I said, “I hate that shit. I’m not going to call you anymore.” I could hear her smiling over the phone. I started to laugh, too, and then I started to cry. Rita said we should probably hang up so I could really let go and cry, and I did, just sobbed while the baby slept, and when I was done, it was like coming out of a trance, and I didn’t feel like eating anymore.… Well, maybe just a little.

We were the personifications of that Fran Lebowitz line: there’s talking and there’s waiting.

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.

Sam nursed for forty-five minutes, like he was at his own private keg party, then belched and passed out.

It’s so easy to be mean to yourself when you’re fat and your thighs continue moving after you’ve come to a stop. I’m trying to be extremely gentle and forgiving with myself today, having decided while I nursed Sam at dawn this morning that I’m probably just as good a mother as the next repressed, obsessive-compulsive paranoiac. I think we’re all pretty crazy on this bus. I’m not sure I know anyone who’s got all the dots on his or her dice.

Sam sort of played with a rattle today, but he kept whacking himself in the eye.

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. It turns out that motherhood is much the same. I’m beginning to believe what I always tell my students, which is that someone, somewhere, is always well if you’re just willing to make enough phone calls.

He wakes up joyful and ready to go. Somehow he has gotten it into his head that we are busy, active people and need to get up early.

I thought of Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” verse five: I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after.

I got out the miniature Snickers that the little no-necks didn’t get on Halloween night, and I ate at least a dozen, even though they are not wheat-or-dairy-free. Looking back, I think it was an act of rebellion, some kind of subconscious “Fuck you” to Sam. At the time I was so busy getting stoned on the sugar that I didn’t stop to figure out what was going on. I just wanted not to feel everything so intensely. Every time I went to get another one, though, I’d feel that Sam was giving me the eye. “Honey,” I’d say, “you gotta eat them, or they go bad. Look, they have dates on them.” He can look very stern. The awful thing is that he was sick and colicky by dinner.

His arms and hands still have wills of their own. They float erratically above him, suddenly darting into his field of vision like snakes, causing him to do funny little Jack Benny double takes. Yet at the same time, he can now hug. He really holds on when we walk or rock. And he’s very alert, constantly sizing up the world and then babbling away in his native Latvian.

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.