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.

  Then there was the matter of aesthetics. I mean to cast no aspersions on the presentability of anybody’s wing-wang, and I certainly don’t mean to imply that all uncut males look like they’re from Enid, Oklahoma, but I’ve got to say that I prefer the look of the circumcised unit. The uncircumcised ones look sort of marsupial, or like little rodents stuck in garden hoses. And the feel of the uncut ones is a little disconcerting, with all that skin to peel back and then the worry that it won’t stay, that it will swallow the missile head right back up. Women’s nerves aren’t bad enough as it is? So for any number of reasons, it seemed obvious to me that circumcision was a great invention—as my friend Donna put it, “It pretty much restores one’s faith in Judaism, doesn’t it?” And while I had not thrust my baby into the doctor’s arms, urging, “Cut! Cut!,” I had with a trembling bottom lip handed him over.

  So there we were, me and my feverish little baby, with Pammy and Peg puttering around the house putting things away. I put Sam facedown on my lap and took off his diaper and even his little T-shirt, so he looked very sweet and vulnerable, like a chicken. Right then the kitty ran into the house and straight through the living room into the kitchen, very deliberately keeping her eyes off Sam and me. I was putting petroleum jelly on the thermometer when she tore from the kitchen, back through the living room, and out the front door, still with her eyes averted, as if she had little blinders on. A minute later, I inserted the thermometer into Sam’s rectum. I think it surprised him a little bit, and right at that exact second the kitty tore back into the house and ran up to the couch to check out the new arrival. In the next few seconds, with the kitty’s eyes on us, shit began spouting volcanically out of the baby’s bum, and I started calling for help. The shit just poured voluminously out of Sam while the kitty looked up at me with total horror and disgust, like “You have got to be kidding, Annie, this one’s broken.” Like she had put her trust in me to pick one up at the pound, and this was the best I could do.

  For the next few hours, she avoided him, as though the image of the shit storm were too painful and disgusting for her to forget, but by that night, she was butting her head against his and licking his ears. We all slept together on the big queen-sized futon in the living room, where it’s warmer.

  SEPTEMBER 16, 5:30 A.M.

  We slept for six straight hours and are up nursing now. There is milk everywhere. I go around looking like I’ve got a wet bathing suit on under my clothes. When Sam was six days old, I took him to my little black church in Marin City, the church where I’ve been hanging out for four years now. I wandered in one day the year before I stopped drinking, because it was right next to the most fabulous flea market on earth, where I liked to spend time when I had terrible hangovers. I got into the habit of stopping by the church on Sundays but staying in the back, in this tense, lurky way, and leaving before the service was over because I didn’t want people to touch me, or hug me, or try to make me feel better about myself. I had always pretty much believed in God, and I just naturally fell into worshiping and singing with them. Then after I got sober and started to feel okay about myself, I could stay to the end and get hugged. Now I show up and position myself near the door, and everyone has to give me a huge hug—it’s like trying to get past the border patrol. 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. He said he thought I ought to change my name to Exhibit A.

  Anyway, the first Sunday after Sam’s birth, I kind of limped in with Peg beside me. I was holding Sam and she was holding my little inflated doughnut seat, and everyone was staring joyfully and almost brokenheartedly at us because they love us so much. I walked, like a ship about to go down, to a seat in the back. But the pastor said, Whoa, whoa, not so fast—you come up here and introduce him to his new family. So I limped up to the little communion table in the front of the half circle of folding chairs where we sit, and I turned to face everyone. The pain and joy were just overwhelming. I tried to stammer, “This is my son,” but my lip was trembling, my whole face was trembling, and everyone was crying. When I’d first started coming to the church, I couldn’t even stand up for half the songs because I’d be so sick from cocaine and alcohol that my head would be spinning, but these people were so confused that they’d thought I was a child of God. Now they’ve seen me sober for three years, and they saw me through my pregnancy. Only one (white) man in the whole congregation asked me who the father was. Toward the end of my pregnancy, people were stuffing money into my pockets, even though a lot of them live on welfare and tiny pensions. They’d sidle up to me, slip a twenty into the pocket of my sweater, and dart away.

  Anyway, after I introduced Sam to them and sat down on my doughnut seat in the front row with Peg, I really got into the service. The baby was sound asleep in my arms, and I stood for the first hymn feeling very adult—an actual mother, for God’s sake—only to discover that the doughnut seat was stuck to my bottom, and milk was absolutely pouring out of my breasts. I was not yet secure enough to hold the baby with one hand, so I was cradling him in my arms and couldn’t free up either hand to pull the doughnut seat off. So I stood there bent slightly forward, warbling away, with my butt jutting out and ringed by the plastic doughnut.

  • • •

  But what I wanted to record today was how gorgeous, how heartbreakingly beautiful Sam’s sounds are. He sounds like a baby dolphin. His breathing is so beautiful and hard. Pammy, who is here every day, says it’s his baby Lamaze.

  SEPTEMBER 17

  Sam was an angel today, no fussing, no colic, sweet and pretty as a movie baby, all eyes and thick dark hair. We went to church and a blissed-out Alma got to hold him almost the entire time. She keeps shaking her fist and saying, “This is our baby, our baby.” Alma is about eighty, very very black, about four-foot-two, and wears these amazing outfits and hats that are like polyester Coco Chanels. Our pastor Harrell showed a ten-minute movie that was one of the purest statements of faith I’ve ever seen. It was about a tall, sweet-looking, blind man running in the Dipsea race on the arm of his best friend, who could see. The Dipsea race goes over Mount Tamalpais and ends up in the Pacific Ocean at Stinson Beach; it is grueling beyond words, very steeply uphill and then equally steeply down, exquisitely beautiful to look at, all woods and redwoods and rich rich earth and millions of wild animals. The trail lies on rugged, rocky terrain; it is hard to hike up and down it, let alone run. I always end up feeling like Rose Kennedy after one of those hikes, incredibly old in the joints, especially in the knees, hobbling, panting, out of it. This movie tracks the two men amid the several thousand people who run the race every year, serious runners and King of Hearts types together, as they leave downtown Mill Valley and head up the s
teps that lead to the mountain path. The footage shows this landscape to be almost biblically beautiful and difficult, just like real life. I have come to believe more with every passing year that despite technological evidence to the contrary, it is still secretly an Old Testament world out there.

  The seeing man called out every root, every rock, holding the hand of his blind friend. They ran together joyfully, the seeing man calling, “Step, step, step, step, step,” as they went up and down eighty-degree steps and “Roots roots roots,” as they navigated trails laced with huge tree roots. They ran bobbingly, like football players stepping quickly in and out of tires during practice. “Good good, uh-oh rock,” the seeing man would say. They both tripped a bunch of times, and the blind guy fell once, but mostly they seemed connected and safe.

  I know it is odd to a lot of people that I am religious—I mean, it’s odd to me that I’m religious, I never meant to be. I don’t quite know how it happened: I think that at some point, a long time ago, I made a decision to believe, and then every step of the way, even through the worst of it, the two years my dad was sick with brain cancer, the last few years of my drinking, I could feel the presence of something I could turn to, something that would keep me company, give me courage, be there with me, like the seeing man in this movie. The movie so exactly captured how I feel these days, that Jesus is there with us everyplace Sam and I go.

  When people used to say shit like this to me, I’d look at them politely and think, Well, isn’t that special. Did we take our meds this morning? It was no different for me than listening to Scientologists babble about engrams and the space opera and having gotten cleared that morning. So I don’t quite know what to say. Still, when I feel like I’m coming apart like a two-dollar watch, it helps me beyond words to look at myself through the eyes of Mary, totally adoring and gentle, instead of through the critical eyes of the men at the Belvedere Tennis Club, which is how I’ve looked at myself nearly all my life.

  I don’t think the men at the Belvedere Tennis Club would look at this big exhausted weepy baggy mentally ill cellulite unit we call Annie Lamott and see a beautiful precious heroic child. But Mary does.

  SEPTEMBER 18, 5:00 A.M.

  I think that right now even Jesus and Mary are looking at each other and shaking their heads with a sort of disgusted wonder at my deterioration. (I keep trying to remember the seeing guy saying, “Roots roots roots.” Being a mother is like having to navigate across a field covered with old car tires.) I was just hating Sam there for a while. I’m so goddamn fucking tired, so burnt beyond recognition that I didn’t know how I was going to get through to the morning. The baby was really colicky, kvetching, farting, weeping, and I couldn’t get him back to sleep. Then the kitty starts in, choking like mad and barfing for a while and continuing to make retching sounds for a while longer, but curiously enough it all seemed to soothe Sam, who fell back to sleep.

  Much Later

  Yet another Sam, not the beautiful one-armed Sam and not my Sam, but Sam the nine-year-old son of my friends Bill and Emmy, who live just down the street, came by today with his mom, and a copy of Green Eggs and Ham for the baby. Big Sam lay on his stomach on the floor while Emmy walked my colicky baby and I lay there on the futon being teary and ragged but also unbelievably hospitable, like Julie Nixon coming off a bad three-day Methedrine run. Big Sam was drawing a picture of dolphins and whales and an octopus for baby Sam; then he looked up from his drawing and said, “Annie, I’d like to give you some advice. Start the baby off on fruits and vegetables. I’d hold off for a while on the protein.” As the morning progressed, he kept saying these odd nine-year-old boy things that really indicated how edgy he felt about old women. He must have made ten references to creepy things old women might conceivably do or that one should always be on the watch for. Finally Emmy confided to me that he had felt that way lately ever since reading “Hansel and Gretel.”

  My friend Armistead called the other day. I said to Sam, so that Armistead could hear, “It’s your Uncle Armistead. I’m afraid he’s a bit of a homo.” He keeps testing negative somehow, but at least a third of his friends are dying of AIDS or are already dead. He said that when someone asks him how so-and-so is doing, he has to run through the Rolodex in his head to see if the guy is even still alive.

  What a scary, savage world Sam is going to—God willing—grow up in. I don’t know what I was thinking. This country is becoming a police state and six million American children go to bed hungry every night. I lay both things directly at the feet of the Republicans.

  Maybe Sam will grow up and be one of the people who can turn some of this stuff around. I will raise him to be the leader of the rebel forces.

  Pammy came by for tea this afternoon as she does almost every single day. We decided that giving Sam sponge baths makes him seem too much like an outpatient, so he had his first real bath today. He took it like a man. We still dress him almost exclusively in these baby bags, one-piece legless outfits with little rip cords at the bottom. It feels good to say “we,” even if that means me and my best friend, instead of me and a man. I could not have gone through with this, could not be doing it now, without Pammy. In the early evenings she returns to her husband, whom she adores, but she says she counts the time until she can be with Sam again. I’m never ready for her to leave. She’s my partner. In twenty-five years of friendship we’ve never even kissed on the lips, but in certain ways it feels like she’s my lover and she’s helping me raise my baby.

  After Pammy went home, Sam and I played with his key chain for a long time, and it seemed to mesmerize him. He fell asleep and I finally got to eat a Häagen-Dazs bar with toasted almonds that Emmy and Big Sam had brought me earlier in the day. It made me feel that I was on the road to some small sense of normalcy. Then I broke every rule in the book by picking him up when he was sound asleep so that I could rock him in the rocking chair, holding him and smelling his clean hair and skin. I could not take my eyes off him. He didn’t wake.

  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.”

  SEPTEMBER 19

  Sam’s three-week birthday is today. There’s a big party scheduled for this afternoon, with Pammy, my brother Steve, Julie, who lives in the apartment upstairs, Sam, the kitty, and me. I’m sure a fabulous time will be had by all.

  Sam’s so beautiful and I feel such a desperate love and protectiveness that my chest tightens with it.

  People kept trying to prepare me for how soft and mushy my stomach would be after I gave birth, but I secretly thought, Not this old buckerina. I think most people undergoing chemo secretly believe they won’t lose their hair.

  Oh, but my stomach, she is like a waterbed covered with flannel now. When I lie on my side in bed, my stomach lies politely beside me, like a puppy.

  We watched Mr. Rogers this morning. He was in an ebullient mood. When he was changing from his street shoes into his sneakers, he tossed the first one into the air with a much wilder sort of jauntiness than usual, and then caught it, and then acted so pleased with himself that he actually looked crazy. Pammy says he must have gotten laid.

  Sam and I sit around and stare at each other. I call it putting on the Sam channel. I talk to him constantly—I say, “A bunch of bigheads are coming over this afternoon to celebrate your birthday,” and he looks up into my face like maybe my freckles are forming themselves into familiar letters.

  He’s so fine all day, so alert and beautiful and good, and then the colic kicks in. I’m okay for the first hour, more or less, not happy about things but basically okay, and then I start to lose it as the colic continues. I end up incredibly frustrated and sad and angry. I have had some terrible visions lately, like of holding him by the ankle and whacking
him against the wall, the way you “cure” an octopus on the dock. I have gone so far as to ask him if he wants me to go get the stick with the nails, which is what my friend Kerry says to her dogs when they are being especially bad. I have never hurt him and don’t believe I will, but I have had to leave the room he was in, go somewhere else, and just breathe for a while, or cry, clenching and unclenching my fists. I have four friends who had babies right around the time I did, all very eccentric and powerful women, and I do not believe that any of them are having these awful thoughts. Of course, I know they’re not all being Donna Reed either, but one of the worst things about being a parent, for me, is the self-discovery, the being face to face with one’s secret insanity and brokenness and rage. Someone without children, who thinks of me as being deeply spiritual, said the other day that motherhood gave me the opportunity to dance with my feelings of inadequacy and anger, and my automatic response was to think, Oh, go fuck yourself, you New-Age Cosmica Rama dingdong head—go dance with that one.