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

by Anne Lamott

wish he could take longer naps in the afternoon. He falls asleep and I feel I could die of love when I watch him, and I think to myself that he is what angels look like. Then I doze off, too, and it’s like heaven, but sometimes only twenty minutes later he wakes up and begins to make his gritchy rodent noises, scanning the room wildly. I look blearily over at him in the bassinet, and think, with great hostility, Oh, God, he’s raising his loathsome reptilian head again. When I go over to the bassinet to pick him up, though, he looks up at me like I’m Coco the clown—he beams, and makes raspberries, and does frantic bicycle kicks like he’s doing his baby aerobics. Then I feel I can go on.

I don’t have any idea what I will tell Sam when he is old enough to ask about his father. I’ll say that everybody doesn’t have something and that he doesn’t have this one thing, but that we have each other and that is a lot. And that for a while his father was my friend.

I felt like I could hardly be nice to Sam because I was so tired and he was such a kvetchy little bundle of shitty diapers and bad attitude.

He can roll over to one side and no longer just says, Ah-goo. He does all these fabulous babbles and bellowings now. He’s so pretty that it’s sort of nuts. I’m sure he will be as gay as an Easter bonnet. My friend Larry gave him a naked Ken doll that Sam took a shine to one evening when my reading group met at Larry’s, and it’s totally Fire Island around here now. Sam licks and chews the naked Ken doll at every opportunity. I called Larry and said, “You’re trying to recruit my son,” and he said, “Look at it this way—in twenty years you won’t be losing a son; you’ll be gaining a son.”

Sam’s getting a lot of hand control. He can grasp the rattle if you touch the backs of his fingers with it. Before, you had to spread his fingers open and wedge the rattle in. It always made me think of those movies where the dead person is clutching a coin or a clue in their rigor-mortised hand and the detective has to pry the fingers open. But this morning I took this weird black elastic-Lego-bell contraption that looks like a molecular model and put it on Sam’s stomach. The next thing I knew he was banging himself euphorically in the face. It’s also National Sam Lamott Neck Control Day. We’re talking major, hard-core neck control. I changed our answering machine to say, “We’re apparently out celebrating National Sam Lamott Improved Neck Control Week, but operators are standing by to take your call …”

I’m always reminded of that wonderful Virginia Woolf line where she says she and her sister Vanessa would go to parties and end up sitting there like deaf-mutes waiting for the funeral to begin.

He always sleeps through the night now, and when he’s awake he lies around and makes raspberries and plays with his feet. He has even stuck them in his mouth twice now. Obviously he is an extremely gifted baby. He’s terribly drooly and may be teething. And also—this is almost too much to handle—when I hold him now, he puts an arm around my neck. It’s very casual. He just kind of slings his arm around me, like he’s Sam Shepard or something. It makes me woozy.

For instance, the car that almost hit us last month might not have managed to stop in time, and I’d be in a hospital with casts on all four limbs, IVs, cannulas up my nose, looking very thin and pale but sort of ethereally lovely, and I’d have to learn to walk all over again using computers and enormous force of character, and I’d be a really good sport about it all and get to be on “60 Minutes.” I used to have a lot of these fantasies, of being badly hurt but being loved back to health and being incredibly brave and spiritual about the whole thing, like Beth in Little Women. I think these fantasies were about trying to get people to see how hurt I was on the inside, even though my outsides looked okay.

Things are getting better now. They’ve been easier for a month. People kept telling me that I just had to hold on until the end of the third month and everything would get easier. I always thought they were patronizing me or trying to keep me from scrounging up cab fare to the bridge. But I remember a month ago, when he turned three months and one or two days—it was like the baby looked at his little watch calendar and said with a bit of surprise, “Oh, for Chrissakes, it’s been three months already—time to chill out a little.” He sleeps every night, and doesn’t cry or gritch very often, and just in general seems to be enjoying his stay a little bit more. It’s much better. I’m much better. This guy I know who is really nuts and really spiritual said the other day, “My mind is a bad neighborhood that I try not to go into alone.” That pretty much says it for me in the first three months. My friend Michelle calls the first three months the fourth trimester.

Sam eats rice cereal and carrots every day and makes bright orange poops. Feeding him is like filling a hole with putty—you get it in and then you sort of shave off all the excess around the hole and gob it back in, like you’re spackling.

Another birthday. He’s five months old. He can do all sorts of brilliant things now besides squealing and sucking his feet. His new thing is that he scratches absolutely everything with all the fingers of one hand at once—the material of the couch, my chest, the sheet of his bassinet, which, against the plastic-covered foam pad, sounds like “scritch scritch scritch.” It’s sort of spasmodic and eerie, because in the silence those tiny little fingers are the only things moving. It sounds like someone who has been buried alive and is scratching the top of a coffin. “Stop doing that,” I say, “it’s wearing on my nerves,” and he just looks at me placidly and goes scritch scritch scritch.

It would be intolerable to call a friend, a new mother, when you were really feeling down and for her to say some weird aggressive shit like “Little Phil slept through the night yesterday, isn’t that marvelous since he’s only eight weeks old, and guess what, I’m already fitting back into my prepregnancy clothes.” You’d really have no choice but to hope for disaster to rain down on such a person.

the more I think about it, the only reason various societies work is because we’re not all depressed at the same time.

Tonight Sam and I took a friend of ours out to dinner, a young man in his late twenties who is badly strung out on booze and Methedrine but who is also a very sweet, bright guy. We went to McDonald’s and got Quarter-Pounders and fries, and we were sitting in a booth with Sam on the table in his car seat, babbling. I was talking to the young man about recovery, which he was starved to hear about—I think it must have been like hearing about the sun during an ice age—and then Sam made a loud spluttering noise, so I said jokingly, “Shhh, honey, be patient, I know John plans to share his food with you,” and I went on blithely with my recovery pitch, eating at the same time, not particularly paying attention. Then I looked up and noticed that my friend had torn off about a third of his burger and was holding it tentatively in his left hand, and he said to me, “Is that about right?” and I said, “Is what about right?” and he held out the small piece of hamburger and said with exasperation, “I just really don’t have any idea how much he eats.” I mentioned this story to Pammy later, and she said, “Boy, scratch him off the baby-sitting list.”

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. This is my theory, anyway, that he radiates it; it’s probably affecting us all like a spray of negative ions, like being in a long hot shower or at the seashore.

He’s crawling inexorably away from the now. He’s crawling toward anticipated pleasures. Soon there will be scheming and manipulation, a dedication to certain outcomes, to attaining certain things and storing them for later. I’m trying so hard to learn to live in the now, to bring my mind back to the present, while Sam is learning to anticipate and plan, to want things that are far away.

Part of me wants my body back, wants to stop being a moo-cow, and part of me thinks about nursing him through kindergarten. I know a woman who nursed her daughter until the girl was almost four, and of course we all went around thinking that it was a bit much, too Last Emperor for our blood. But now when Sam and I are nursing, it crosses my mind that I will never ever be willing to give this up. It’ll be okay, I think to myself, we can get it to work, I’ll follow him to college but I’ll stay totally out of the way.… This the easiest, purest communication I’ve ever known.

Sam’s a good sleeper for the most part. I put him facedown in his crib, and he does a few baby push-ups. It’s this very manly little ritual he has. He turns to look joyfully at me, like it’s great that we’ve simply moved the party from the living room to the bedroom, but then he understands that I am going to turn off the light and leave him, and this look of terror and total betrayal crosses his face. Total betrayal; basset hound death. His lips tremble, and he weeps for a moment in this pitiful little-guy way. Then he goes to sleep, just like that.

Then all of a sudden I felt this psychotic need to be with Sam again—the jungle drums started beating, and I could hardly take in what anyone was saying. I couldn’t get home fast enough—my breasts were absolutely bursting with milk—and I rushed to the crib and woke Sam up, and he gave me this bewildered, derisive look, like “Don’t you have any friends?”

“Yeah, yeah, I get it, I’ve done it. But I think each step of the way you gotta ask yourself, Do I want the hit or do I want the serenity?”

“Start out slow, and taper off.” 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.

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.

He’s figuring out little concepts all the time these days, like that if something falls out of his hands, it is not instantly vaporized but just might be found somewhere on the floor. Even a week ago Sam was like some rich guy who drops some change and doesn’t even give it a second glance, but now when he drops something, he slowly cranes his neck and peers downward, as if the thing fell to the floor of a canyon.

He pulled himself into a standing position the other night. He’s so mobile now, and I am so tired. I feel like I’m breaking my motherly balls trying to keep him safe. Sometimes he’s the Dalai Lama, and sometimes he’s like a cross between a bad boyfriend and a high-strung puppy. And it never matters what my needs are. He never says, “Hey, babe, you’ve been working too hard—why don’t you take a couple of hours off? I’ll just lie here and read.”

I still have a lot of anxieties about fucking him up with my selfishness or because I cling too tightly to him. In his first days here, I’d think, Well, he won’t ever be able to get into college because I don’t flash black-and-white images at him so he can develop his vision. Now I look at how clingy and selfish I am, and how much I cry since Pammy got sick, and I worry that it’s wrecking him,

He pulls himself up on the little fence we erected around the floor heater to keep him from crawling on it. It is very secure, screwed into the wall. But he shakes it for ten minutes at a time like he’s trying to tear it down, like there’s not a jail in the land that can hold him. All he wants to do is to stand up; he falls down a lot, bumps his head, cries, and then wants to get right back up. He thinks I’m hilarious. We have a game where I ever so slowly scan the ceiling, like I’m watching for enemy planes, and he watches intently, getting increasingly more anxious as I lower my gaze, and then when I suddenly look right at him, he screams with joy and surprise like I just doused him with water. Then I do it again, slowly scanning the ceiling, and he gets very somber, and turns his eyes upward, and his mouth opens a little.…

I heard someone say once that forgiveness is having given up all hope of having had a better past.

He has a frantic craving to be vertical. Every second he pulls himself up to a standing position again. You’d think he’d just spent six months in a body cast. He is so full of energy and muscle, teething, ranting, crazed, but he’s the best baby you could ever hope for. Still a baby, though, which is to say, still periodically a pain in the neck.

It’s gratuitous looting. He almost never actually takes anything and crawls away with it, but he’ll get to the coffee table and systematically, often without any expression, lift and then drop or fling every single magazine, book, cup, or whatever to the ground. His grim expression suggests he’s got a lot to do and just really doesn’t want to be bothered until he’s done.

Earlier today he pulled a TV dinner table down on himself when I was doing something in the kitchen. He fell down on the carpet and lay there with this two-pound table on top of him, wild-eyed with the drama of it all, like he was Joe Ben in Sometimes a Great Notion who gets pinned under the log. He looked up at me, not crying but tortured, like “You ignorant incompetent slut—you did this to me; you’re supposed to be watching me, but nooooooo …”

Every so often Sam will be standing up, holding on to something, like the coffee table, for instance, and he will have finished his work there—that is, he will have already flung everything to the floor—and all of a sudden he’ll let go with both hands and stand there for a few seconds. It’s totally charged time, like the moments right before lightning. Then you can see concern cross his face, and on the inside he’s going, “Yo! Holy shit!” When he starts to wobble, he reaches for the table again to steady himself.

my older brother was nine or ten. 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.