by Anne Lamott
Sam has this great roar now, like maybe he’s about to cry, but then it turns out that he just feels like roaring because that’s the kind of guy he is—he’s a roaring kind of guy—and because he’s coming into his own, like “I am baby, hear me roar, in numbers too big to ignore.…” Then he burns his diaper.
Half the time I’m completely winging this motherhood business. I get so afraid because we are running out of money. We have enough to live on for maybe two more months. Also, I just had no idea I had so much rage trapped inside me. I’ve never had a temper before. I’ve always been able to be mellow or make jokes. But we went through a difficult patch this evening when Sam was being hard to please, whiny and imperious and obviously feeling very sorry for himself, and at first I could kind of roll with it, shaking my head and thinking, It’s because he’s a male, he’s having an episode, this is very familiar stuff to me, he’s already got testosterone poisoning. But I couldn’t get him to stop, and it wore me down. It was one of those times when I desperately needed to be able to hand him over to someone, like, say hypothetically, a mate, and there wasn’t anyone. So suddenly all this bile and old fear of men and abandonment stuff were activated in my head. All these furious thoughts about Sam’s father. Sam was so exasperating that I could feel fury coursing through my system, up my arms into my hands, like charged blood. I made myself leave the room, just left him crying in his bassinet in the living room, which is what Bill Rankin said to do once before. I went to the tiny bedroom in the back, and breathed, and prayed for major help. The next thing I knew, I had decided to take him for a walk in the stroller in the dark.
It was warm and the stars were just coming out; the sky seemed unusually deep. I said to God, I really need help tonight, I need you to pull a rabbit out of your hat. One minute later Bill and Emmy and Big Sam came walking along the road toward us. So we stopped to talk for a few minutes. Big Sam is such a brilliant and gentle little guy, so artistic and tender with the baby that it helped me to breathe again. I felt completely back in the saddle by the time we all said good-bye.
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.
I nursed him for a long time tonight. He’s so beautiful it can make me teary. I told him I was sorry for thinking such sexist stuff about his people. He listened quietly and nursed and stared up into my face. I wanted to justify it, tell him about all the brilliant but truly crummy men out there, and let’s not even get started on the government, but then I began humming some songs for him until he fell asleep. Then it was perfectly quiet.
OCTOBER 25
He’s very brilliant, this much is clear. He’s learned to comfort himself without the pacifier by sucking on his hands and fists, like a lion with a bone. I wish I could sit in public places slobbering away on my own fist. It looks very comforting. The colic is gone. I am still wheat-and-dairy-free. Also, mostly shit-free, bullshit-free. I am finally saying no when I mean no, which is a lot of the time, especially when people want me to come to their house for a party. People have been inviting me and Sam to their parties lately, for God knows what reason. Everyone knows I don’t do parties or dinners. Everyone knows I don’t do “do’s.” It’s just torture for me. “Why is that?” people have always asked, and all I can do is shrug. I think it’s either that I’m not remotely well enough for that sort of thing or because I’ve gotten too well. Who knows, but I would honestly rather spend an hour getting my teeth cleaned than an hour mingling. I am absolutely serious about this. I get so nervous that I actually skulk, and then I get into this weird shuffling-lurk mode. It’s very unattractive. I look like a horse who can count, pawing the ground with one hoof. I don’t know why people would even bother inviting me.
But in the old days I used to get sucked in and say yes to everybody and be there for them, showing up at their parties, helping them move, or staying on the phone with them too long. I’d try to entertain or help or fix, nurse them back to health or set them straight. Now I do the counting-horse shuffle and shake my head and say I just can’t do it, can’t come to the party, can’t do the favor, can’t stay on the phone. I want Sam to understand when he grows up that “No” is a complete sentence. It’s given me this tremendous sense of power. I’m a little bit drunk on it. I ended up saying no to a couple of things I really wanted to do with friends, then had to call them up and beg, “Take me back, take me back.”
Also, it’s great to be so taken up by Sam that I don’t have to deal with men. It’s like that beautiful old movie by Vittorio de Sica, A Brief Vacation. I have had a lot of men do stuff to me over the years, and I sanctioned it, but I did not want it. I have listened so attentively to the most boring, narcissistic men so that they would like me or need me. I’d sit there with my head cocked sweetly like the puppy on the RCA logo. On the inside I would feel like that old poem by Philip Levine, about waiting until you can feel your skin wrinkling and your hair growing long and tangling in the winds. It was like these men held me hostage. I’d think about chewing my arm off to get out of the trap so I could rush home and hang myself, but at the same time I’d need them to think well of me. Now I all but say, Oh, I’m so sorry, but I’m on this new shit-free diet. Now there’s Sam, me, Uncle Jesus, Pammy, Steve, a few friends, a few relatives, and the kitty.
Sam has a Big Brother now named Brian. He has come the last two Tuesdays to take care of him for a couple of hours. He is married to my good friend Diane, who is in her mid-forties and does not want children, whereas Brian is ten years younger and adores them. He signed on to be a Big Brother in Marin last year and got assigned a kid who thought he was a total dork and who was ashamed of Brian’s big land-boat Buick. They just couldn’t connect at all. So when I was about to deliver, Diane came to me and asked if Brian could be Sam’s formal and official Big Brother. Brian’s another sober alcoholic, very kind and funny. It’s been wonderful. He’s already learned to change diapers and feed Sam bottles of pre-pumped breast milk and bathe him, and he puts him in the Snugli or the stroller and takes him to the park down the street. They discuss guy stuff. Brian gets tears in his eyes when he talks about Sam because he is so grateful and surprised that they get to have each other. I sense that they will be together for life.
There are great men in Sam’s life, the best men the world produces. It’s another kind of miracle, that he has this devotion, that we both do, but still it will probably hurt beyond words someday that he doesn’t have his dad in his life. I’m just going to have to tell him that not everybody has a father. Look at me, I will tell him: I don’t have a father, and I don’t have a swimming pool, either. But Sam will have a tribe. You can’t help but believe that these other men will help Sam not have such a huge sense of loss. They’ll be his psychic Secret Service.
Our best family friends, Rex and Dudu, are perfect grandparents for Sam. They have been my parents’ best friends since my older brother John was a baby, before I was born. They lived half a mile away from us when we were growing up, and I always thought of them as our godparents, although they were called our aunt and uncle. Dudu’s real name is Gertrud; “Dudu” is what she called herself when she was a tiny girl in Germany. We’ve never called her anything else, and people have always looked at us strangely if we mention her, like we might also have an Uncle Piles and a cousin Weewee. But to me it is one of the most beautiful names I know because she has been a saint to my family. Rex fell in love with her after the war ended and brought her to America. I think there was a lot of prejudice against her when she first came to live here. They have a daughter who lives in Oregon, and a son who lives in L.A., and neither one intends to have children.
Dudu and Rex, like my father and my mother, were born to be grandparents. They are in their early seventies now, both of them gorgeous and fit. They still spend about a third of their time in the mountains, mostly at Yosemite, hiking and backpacking and skiing. I cannot keep up with them. I always end up lagging way behind, feeling like a person who is crawling over the sand toward a mirage, while they bound ahead pointing out wildflowers. They love John and Steve and me exactly as though we were their own children, and we love them like they are our other set of parents. They stayed with us around the clock at the cabin when my dad was dying, helped us keep him clean and okay those last few days, helped us take care of him. I know the whole thing broke their hearts. I don’t think you can ever really get over the death of the few people who matter most to you. It’s too big. Oh, you do, the badly broken leg does heal, and you walk again, but always with a limp.
I asked them to be Sam’s paternal grandparents when I was two months pregnant. I said then that it would need to be very formal and official; they would have to be actual blood grandparents, buying him expensive holiday outfits and taking him to Disneyland when he was old enough. They were overjoyed. Since he was born, they have been blown away with love for their baby grandson. Just blown away. Mom and Dudu compare grandmother notes every other day. I have been taking Sam over to their house the last few Wednesday nights so I can go to the movies with friends. It is just great to get away from Sam. At first. At first it makes me feel like Zorba the Greek. But then the jungle drums start beating and I feel like you do when you’re having a massive nicotine craving. This week, I sat alone in a theater watching this totally dumb movie, this warm perfumed poopoo, but happily overeating in the dark, totally happy to be away from Sam, for about twenty minutes. Then the longing to be with him again became so intense that I sat there hyperventilating. There was a ten-minute patch of time when I must have looked like I was doing Lamaze. I felt like I was totally decompensating. I finally had to leave, get an ice cream, and walk around town for a few minutes. The theater is not very far from where Rex and Dudu live. They have lived in the same home for forty years, in the town where I grew up. I killed as much time as was humanly possible, which turned out to be about an hour and a half, and then I drove up the hill to their house. They were sitting on the couch, side by side, Sam was in Rex’s arms, drinking his bottle, and Rex and Dudu both looked stoned. I’ve noticed this when I pick Sam up at my mother’s, too, when she and my Aunt Pat have taken him for a while. I always find them sitting side by side on the couch, sometimes with my Uncle Millard, taking turns holding the baby, giving him his bottle, cooing at him, looking stoned. All the older relatives, and in fact Pammy, too, end up looking like Woody Allen in Sleeper when he’s dressed up as the robot butler, and has taken way too many hits off the futuristic drug called the Orb, and is sitting slumped against the wall, clutching the Orb romantically to his chest, looking like he’s about to pass out,
I sent my agent a picture of me holding Sam in my lap, and she wrote back, “Your hands have become the hands of a mother.”
Did I ever tell you about the day I was trying to make rice water, which is an old home cure for colic? You just boil rice in a lot of water and then strain the water off and put it in a bottle. But I was so wasted with exhaustion that I wasn’t vigilant enough, and the water kept getting absorbed and I’d end up with a huge pot of cooked rice, nice wet cooked rice and not one drop of rice water. So I’d try again, and the exact same thing would happen. Luckily Steve dropped by. He ate three or four massive bowls of the rice, with butter and teriyaki sauce. I never did get that rice water made.
OCTOBER 26
Sam’s forgotten how to suck on his hands. Now he just sort of licks them as they spastically pass by.
I gave Pammy the little baby bags with the rip cords at the bottom that Sam wore almost exclusively the first month, because she and her husband are planning to adopt a baby next year. Sam is her training baby. He needs things with legs in them, now that he’s a kicking guy. Pammy and I both got all teary. I felt like my son had become a man. Soon we’ll be having fights about the car, and he’ll say hurtful things about the music I like.
I think “Sam” was really the right name for him. You see all these kids running around these days named Sterling and Carleton, and they already look like little Sterlings and Carletons in their little Kennebunkport clothes.
OCTOBER 28
I got to talk to my therapist on the phone for half an hour today. All I wanted to do all day was eat—assault-eat, as someone put it. I can just barely tolerate the feelings I have on bad days. And Rita said that was fine, to stuff it down, if it gave me relief. There’s just one real fly in the ointment, though: after chowing down I feel even worse, full of remorse, fearful, stunned, and big as a house. Rita said, “The awful news is that you probably just have to go ahead and feel the feelings and grieve the grief.” I said, “I hate that shit. I’m not going to call you anymore.” I could hear her smiling over the phone. I started to laugh, too, and then I started to cry. Rita said we should probably hang up so I could really let go and cry, and I did, just sobbed while the baby slept, and when I was done, it was like coming out of a trance, and I didn’t feel like eating anymore.… Well, maybe just a little.
Luckily, Peg brought over the most amazing Chinese chicken salad for dinner, and a six-pack of Diet Cokes. She danced with Sam to Hoagy Carmichael while I took a long, hot bath. She and I used to do huge quantities of cocaine in North Beach, big oat bags of coke, but not share any with each other, just slip off to the bathroom with our vials alone, then meet at the bar, hammered out of our minds, waiting for each other to finish talking so it would be our turn to talk again. We were the personifications of that Fran Lebowitz line: there’s talking and there’s waiting. Both of our dads died of brain diseases after long lingering illnesses, hers of Alzheimer’s and mine of cancer, and after we’d had hundreds of drinks, we’d get into the big boo-hoo. She was a worse cokehead than I was, only because she had more money. I did a lot more Methedrine, because it was cheaper. Also, she drank in the morning, which I tried very hard not to do. She’d swill down a couple of shots first thing, just to get all the flies going in one direction, and I used to think, Boy, she’s really got a problem.
OCTOBER 29
He’s two months old today, quiet and happy and alert. Pammy is coming for a pool party this afternoon. Actually, we’re just going to give him a bath and then take turns holding him while we watch TV. Maybe it’s not much of a life, but it’s our life. It’s all so absolutely amazing. I don’t remember what Pammy and I used to talk about before that day, December 27 of last year, when I walked into the bathroom to find the results of an at-home pregnancy test and gasped out loud, there in the doorway, frozen for a while, just another woman staring fixedly at a blue-tipped stick.
OCTOBER 30
Emmy and Bill came by with some groceries. Big Sam asked with real concern, “Have you ever noticed how similar French and English are? Like ‘le drugstore’? ‘Le week-end’? ‘Le hot dog’?”
OCTOBER 31
We walked into town late this afternoon with Pammy, and it was strangely thrilling to see how many adults got dressed up for Halloween. It was touching to see all these people who usually walk around in carefully constructed disguises, doing very impressive impersonations of busy adults, but who on the inside are secretly divas and pirates, clowns and heroes. All the stuff in their heads found its way out onto the streets today—in the market, the banks, the drugstore. There were whiskers, glitter, slapshoes, blood. My head swam with wonderful memories of treasure hoarding and gluttony. The best thing is that you really feel that fall is here. There’s a tang in the air.
Sam was very funny all afternoon, so dignified and serious. “Dignity is very important, my darling,” I told him. “Second only to kindness.” He is so focused and attentive that one expects him to nod gravely. He struggles to get his thumb into his mouth, but it’s as though his arms were in a zero-
gravity atmosphere of their own; they go flying through his field of vision like unsecured things in a spaceship.
Megan took him to the park for a couple of hours today, and I got a little bit of work done, taking some notes for a novel, getting down some of the raw material. I don’t know if anything will come of it, but this is always how my novels start. A few small visions, and then the story and themes begin to emerge, like a Polaroid developing. We are slowly running out of money. I am just going to try to stay faithful and get my work done.
My breasts were bursting with milk by the time Megan and the baby returned. Sam nursed for forty-five minutes, like he was at his own private keg party, then belched and passed out.
“Do you mind if I tell people you’re his governess instead of his baby-sitter?” I asked Megan.