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

by Anne Lamott

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.