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

by Anne Lamott

She said something so funny just before she left that I’ve repeated it four or five times over the phone and laughed all over again each time. She’s such an entirely right-brain person—totally loving and intuitive, not in the least cerebral—and she’d just read an article somewhere involving new revelations about Hitler’s private life. She told me all about it while she was putting away our laundry, then shook her head angrily and said, “I’ve had it with Hitler.”

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.