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

by Anne Lamott

I have tried everything in sometimes suicidally vast quantities—alcohol, drugs, work, food, excitement, good deeds, popularity, men, exercise, and just rampant compulsion and obsession—to avoid having to be in the same room with that sense of total aloneness. And I did pretty well, although I nearly died.

that horrible, hateful truth—that there wasn’t anything outside myself that could heal or fill me and that everything I had been running from and searching for all my life was within. So I sat with those things for a while, and the wounds began to heal.

When we got back to Kaiser, I was dilated enough for admission, but there were no birthing rooms available, and I got so incredibly depressed again that I felt about ten years old.

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.

Once I asked my priest friend, Bill Rankin, if he really believed in miracles, and he said that all I needed to do was to remember what my life used to be like and what it’s like now.

His key chain is made of five big plastic keys on a cord with a heart-shaped key ring. I hold up each color key for him to study, and I always say the exact same thing: “The blue one is the key to the sky, the green one is the key to the lawn, the yellow one is the key to the mustard, the red one is the key to the car, and the pink one is the key to my heart.”

I don’t really get it, how he can know that there is a child of his in the world and yet have absolutely nothing to do with him. Peg keeps reminding me of something that her alkie pals over in AA like to go around saying—more will be revealed.

whalebone, which look like small pebbles with a thousand tiny bright chambers, like a bee’s eyes.

There was some famous writer, I think it may have been Tolstoy, who said you must be wounded into writing but that you shouldn’t write until the wound has healed.

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.

He is losing his hair in a perfect ring that circles his head, like the ring of Saturn. He looks like either a very young or a very very old Buddhist monk.

His hands are like little stars.

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; without them, the light would disappear. But I guess he has to figure other stuff out first, like how to keep his neck from flopping all over the place and how to sit up.

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. I want to clean out some of these wounds, though, with my therapist, so Sam doesn’t get poisoned by all my fear and anger.

But once an old woman at my church said the secret is that God loves us exactly the way we are and that he loves us too much to let us stay like this, and I’m just trying to trust that.

I had a session over the phone with my therapist today. I have these secret pangs of shame about being single, like I wasn’t good enough to get a husband. Rita reminded me of something I’d told her once, about the five rules of the world as arrived at by this Catholic priest named Tom Weston. The first rule, he says, is that you must not have anything wrong with you or anything different. The second one is that if you do have something wrong with you, you must get over it as soon as possible. The third rule is that if you can’t get over it, you must pretend that you have. The fourth rule is that if you can’t even pretend that you have, you shouldn’t show up. You should stay home, because it’s hard for everyone else to have you around. And the fifth rule is that if you are going to insist on showing up, you should at least have the decency to feel ashamed. So Rita and I decided that the most subversive, revolutionary thing I could do was to show up for my life and not be ashamed.

I asked her if she had any thoughts on how to help Sam deal with not having a dad, and she repeated what her AA friends say, that more will be revealed, meaning that when the time comes, I will know what to do.

It’s so hard to keep my sticky little fingers off the controls of this spaceship, especially when I get scared, like now when God has not bothered to give me the specific details of his solution to our financial needs. I’m just a little edgy being in the dark about it. I don’t understand why he always has to be so goddamn weird about his plans.

I have a deep belief that I know what is best for me and now, by extension, what is best for Sam. The fact that I have spent my life proving that just the opposite is true does not keep me from acting like a schizophrenic traffic cop with a mission and a bullhorn. There’s something sort of poignantly ludicrous about it. 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. He said that when he sees little kids sitting in the backseat of cars, in those car seats that have steering wheels, with grim expressions of concentration on their faces, clearly convinced that their efforts are causing the car to do whatever it is doing, he thinks of himself and his relationship with God: God who drives along silently, gently amused, in the real driver’s seat.

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.

I wish I could tell my dad. It makes me remember the only lines from the Bible that I know for sure he loved, from Song of Solomon, chapter two, “For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.” My father would raise a fist, and beam.

All those years I just wanted a family that was okay (except for those times when I thought maybe I’d settle for a police dog instead). And now I have one, a family that is okay, a family of me, a baby boy, and a cat, and the people I love most, who love me and are helping me to raise Sam.

It’s great to feel better, to be back in the saddle again. And it’s so hard to let chaos swirl around without needing to manage or understand it. It’s so hard to get quiet enough, free enough of the bondage of self, to hear the voice in the whirlwind that Job heard. There’s always so much shouting going on in here. It’s a cacophony of sounds from my childhood—parents and relatives and teachers and preachers and voices distilled into what has become my conscience. But I don’t think the still small voice is my conscience. Maybe it’s God, maybe it’s the true unique essential me—and maybe those are the same thing. It’s so hard to hear it though, and sometimes when I think I hear something in my own true voice, I’m so nuts that I’m not sure if it’s me or someone pretending to be me. It seems like when it’s really you, the voice doesn’t even have to talk.

Sam is a happy person. He has this little Yoda smile. He is a poem. It seems like he’s turning out okay. It’s all these people who love him so much and take care of us both. Maybe it also helps that there is no angry dad stomping around. But that always hurts so much to think about, because it would also be great to have a kind and funny dad here with us, hanging out, maybe even helping a little. I take a long deep breath.

Little by little I think I’m letting go of believing that I’m in charge, that I’m God’s assistant football coach. It’s so incredibly hard to let go of one’s passion for control. It seems like if you stop managing and controlling, everything will spin off into total pandemonium and it will be all your fault.

It was something that M. F. K. Fisher wrote about in one of her books, of having a friend over for tea one day. The friend noticed out the kitchen window that Mary Frances’s cat was lying in a big mud puddle. Mary Frances said that it was hurt and trying to take care of itself, but the friend asked, Then shouldn’t we take it to the vet? Mary Frances said no, absolutely not, that if she did, the cat would die, that the cat knew exactly and intuitively what to do, knew that only time and lying in the mud would heal her. A few days later the cat was okay again. That’s how I felt after my dad died. I had to shut down almost entirely and just lie in the mud for months. I felt that the world was no longer safe if my young handsome lively father could be so suddenly dead. It felt like it was a shooting gallery out there. And I felt like my heart had been so thoroughly and irreparably broken that there could be no real joy again, that at best there might eventually be a little contentment. Everyone wanted me to get help and rejoin life, pick up the pieces and move on, and I tried to, I wanted to, but I just had to lie in the mud with my arms wrapped around myself, eyes closed, grieving, until I didn’t have to anymore. And then over time I became more or less okay: I did feel joy again, and I feel it now sometimes bigger than I ever thought possible. It’s so big inside me now with Sam that it’s like a secret that might make me burst, like when you’re in love.

Last year when I was obsessing over this married man whom I adore and who adores me and with whom I was trying to avoid having an affair, I talked about it with this older lesbian, a recovering alcoholic and addict. I was talking about how often I wanted to call him, and how, when we saw each other, I wanted to drop these erotically charged bombs into the conversation, and how high I’d get off all the adrenaline, and how it felt like it validated my parking ticket because he was so luscious and powerful. And the lesbian said, really nicely, “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?”

There was this East Indian Jesuit named Tony de Mello who used to tell this story about disciples gathered around their master, asking him endless questions about God. And the master said that anything we say about God is just words, because God is unknowable. One disciple asked, “Then why do you speak of him at all?” and the master replied, “Why does the bird sing?” She sings not because she has a statement but because she has a song.

I can’t give him a dad, I can’t give him a nuclear family. All I can do is to give him what I have, some absolutely wonderful men in our lives who loved him before he was born, who over the years will play with him, read and fish and walk with him, make him laugh and throw him up in the air until he is too big, men who will be his uncles and brothers and friends, and I have to believe that this will be a great consolation.

It would be one thing if I could leap into a disastrous romance and it would be just me who would suffer, but I can’t afford to get lost because Sam doesn’t have anyone else to fall back on. And I don’t have anyone else to fall back on, come to think of it. I can afford to wait for a good one, not get derailed by some total fixer-upper. 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.

like the little kid who finds his closet full of horse shit and thinks it means his parents bought him a pony,

He’s so mobile now, and I am so tired. I feel like I’m breaking my motherly balls trying to keep him safe.

I call myself Mama with Sam, as opposed to Mommy, whenever I refer to myself in the third person. It’s so Elvis, so Jimmy Carter.

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

It’s so easy to have religious awe when you’re outside at night.

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. Donna was saying the other day that she knows this two-year-old who’s really very together and wonderful a lot of the time, really the world’s best two-year-old, but then she added, “Of course, that’s like saying Albert Speer was the nicest Nazi. He was still a Nazi.”

I got out the Polaroid I took when I was pregnant, of the photographs of me pregnant and at seven years old and the sonogram photo of Sam, all under the arms of the cross, and I can still get that sense that we are a complete family unit, but sometimes I’m so hungry for a partner, a lover. One thing I know for sure, though, is that when you are hungry, it is an act of wisdom each time you turn down a spoonful if you know that the food is poisoned.

I was feeling very low, in quicksand, and like I wasn’t well enough to be out in public trying to be interesting. All I wanted to do was to stay home and sit on the couch necking with my fear and depression. But I made myself show up, and it got me unstuck. Like they say, take the action and the insight will follow. There’s still real life going on out there, and it was such a nice break to take my extension cord and plug into it for a while.

I just remembered the other day a weekend I spent with my family at our cabin in Bolinas when I was seven or eight and 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.

The mystery of this still leaves me scratching my head, that a baby was made in my body, grew on my milk, and lives here in the house with the kitty and me. It’s too big to comprehend:

When I held Sam alone for the first time, after Steve and Pammy had gone home the night that he was born, I was nursing him and feeling really spiritual, thinking, Please, please, God, help him be someone who feels compassion, who feels God’s presence loose in the world, who doesn’t give up on peace and justice and mercy for everyone. And then one second later I was begging, Okay, skip all that shit, forget it—just please, please let him outlive me.