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

by Anne Lamott

On bad days, I think straight white men are so poorly wired, so emotionally unenlightened and unconscious that you must approach each one as if he were some weird cross between a white supremacist and an incredibly depressing T. S. Eliot poem. I know they were very badly hurt and misled, but so was I, and I chose and am choosing to get well. I am sorry for how they were raised and for all the fears about their thinning hair and little penises, but I mean, bore me fucking later, try having been raised female in this culture. Most men shut down like sea anemones or bank vaults the moment things get too intimate or too dicey. I lived with a man who when he had hurt me enough—not that he meant to, but he always did—he would cry with fear that he would end up old and alone, never having really lived. And then I’d have to comfort him and nurse him back to health because he was so sad and I loved him so much, and I’d help him be able to reconnect with me again, but then two or three weeks later I’d look up and see that cold flat reptilian look in his eyes again. I am too old and tired and too well to do this anymore. Maybe.