by Anne Lamott
“Of course not,” she said.
“Wouldn’t you think having a governess would almost make up for his not having a father?” I asked.
“Yes, I would,” she said. We sat for a moment in silence.
“Can you teach the child French?” I asked.
“I can try,” she said.
Megan is very kind and exquisitely competent and laughs at all my jokes. Today we compared notes on how hard it was to be such strange sizes in seventh grade. She was nearly six feet tall already—now she is six-foot-two—and I was about four-foot-two. I heard this woman speak a couple of years ago who talked about our bodies being our little earth suits, and I asked Megan if she thought it would have made any difference if we’d been able to think that way at thirteen. She didn’t know. But it helped me to talk about earth suits out loud because I hadn’t thought of them in a while. It’s so easy to be mean to yourself when you’re fat and your thighs continue moving after you’ve come to a stop.
I’m trying to be extremely gentle and forgiving with myself today, having decided while I nursed Sam at dawn this morning that I’m probably just as good a mother as the next repressed, obsessive-compulsive paranoiac.
I think we’re all pretty crazy on this bus. I’m not sure I know anyone who’s got all the dots on his or her dice.
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.
NOVEMBER 1
Sam sort of played with a rattle today, but he kept whacking himself in the eye. He has huge round saucer eyes. They make me remember a Pauline Kael review years ago where she referred to someone’s eyes as big blue headlights. Megan suggested that I should get Sam little grates to cover them so that things don’t fall in.
Yesterday I didn’t have enough milk. I nursed him at 10:00 in the morning, and there wasn’t enough, he was crying for more. Julie from upstairs suggested we try a can of soy formula, and he guzzled it down like John Belushi. So I panicked and decided that all these weeks he’s been starving to death on my sock-watery milk and that his body has had to cannibalize itself for him to stay alive. Plus, he’s had another head cold recently, and of course the logical conclusion yesterday was that he is a sickly baby. Also, an addict: I’ve been giving him Robitussin as per the Kaiser nurse’s instructions, and he really likes it. I felt that if he could talk, he’d be saying, “Oops, oops, time for more,” even if it had only been an hour or so and that soon he would start lying in order to get it: “No, that wasn’t me you gave it to,” he’d say, “that was another baby.”
The La Leche League—they are breast-feeding specialists—saved the day yet again. They said simply to drink tons of fluids and nurse as often as possible, and today I’m a glorious Florentine fountain of milk, standing like a birdbath in the garden with milk spouting forth from every orifice.
I’m learning to call people all the time and ask for help, which is about the hardest thing I can think of doing. I’m always suggesting that other people do it, but it really is awful at first. I tell my writing students to get into the habit of calling one another, because writing is such a lonely, scary business, and if you’re not careful you can trip off into this Edgar Allan Poe feeling of otherness. It turns out that motherhood is much the same. I’m beginning to believe what I always tell my students, which is that someone, somewhere, is always well if you’re just willing to make enough phone calls.
He lies on his back for long stretches now, totally alert and totally spaced out at the same time, like he’s on acid or in the presence of God.
• • •
Last night he slept from 9:00 till 2:00, and we nursed for a while, and then he slept again until 6:30. He wakes up joyful and ready to go. Somehow he has gotten it into his head that we are busy, active people and need to get up early. I lie there nursing him with sand in my eyes, looking and feeling like a snake halfway through shedding her first skin.
Yesterday Mom and Aunt Pat took care of him for a few hours, and Mom asked how much he weighed. I didn’t know. So Sam and I got on Mom’s scale together, and when the scale weighed 149, I felt on the verge of hysterics because at Kaiser a week earlier I had only weighed 137. My mom said, really nicely, “But, honey, you’re still holding the baby,” which absolutely had not crossed my mind. I said, almost crying, “Mommy, I’m so tired.”
I wish I could get away with one or two glasses of wine or half a Valium, or even with getting to eat my body weight in Mexican food and chocolate every couple of days. I just desperately want to check out for a couple of hours now and then. I want a little relief. I have never been all that big on reality. I’ve had every single major disorder known to woman, from alcoholism to workaholism, anything to avoid having to feel my feelings. Everything in fact except gambling, which is probably right around the corner. Come to think of it, I’ve found myself getting overstimulated at the change machines in Laundromats. Sometimes I stand there compulsively putting in dollar bills, feeling a bit of a rush each time the four quarters shoot out.
If I weren’t nursing, if I weren’t dairy-free, I’d definitely take to bed with the Häagen-Dazs today.
NOVEMBER 3
He laughed today for the first time, when Julie from upstairs was dangling her bracelets above his head while I was changing his diaper. His laughter was like little bells. Then there was the clearest silence, a hush, before total joyous pandemonium broke out between Julie and me. Then we both stared almost heartbrokenly into his face. I thought of Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” verse five:
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
NOVEMBER 4
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.
NOVEMBER 5
I got out the miniature Snickers that the little no-necks didn’t get on Halloween night, and I ate at least a dozen, even though they are not wheat-or-dairy-free. Looking back, I think it was an act of rebellion, some kind of subconscious “Fuck you” to Sam. At the time I was so busy getting stoned on the sugar that I didn’t stop to figure out what was going on. I just wanted not to feel everything so intensely. Every time I went to get another one, though, I’d feel that Sam was giving me the eye. “Honey,” I’d say, “you gotta eat them, or they go bad. Look, they have dates on them.” He can look very stern. The awful thing is that he was sick and colicky by dinner. It is a huge struggle tonight to treat myself like a beloved relative. I’m so sorry.
NOVEMBER 6
His arms and hands still have wills of their own. They float erratically above him, suddenly darting into his field of vision like snakes, causing him to do funny little Jack Benny double takes.
Yet at the same time, he can now hug. He really holds on when we walk or rock. And he’s very alert, constantly sizing up the world and then babbling away in his native Latvian.
He got his DPT shot Monday, and we both cried. It was a mean
trick, because he was in the best mood, kicking and making bubbles for me and Dr. James, and then some vicious, sociopathic nurse comes in and sticks needles into his leg. He was frantic. I wept and then said to the nurse, in a teary but jocular way, “Do most mothers cry the first time?” and she looked at me with puzzled condescension and said, “No.”
Pammy came over this afternoon with a soft Babar rattle for him. I heard her telling him conspiratorially, “I’m the one who didn’t take you in and make you get hurt.” She has confessed that she thinks of me as the womb who made it possible for them to be together. She and her husband have been trying for ten years to have a baby. I don’t know why I get to have Sam, but then, she gets to have her husband.
Sam cried a lot last night. I kept remembering my friend Michelle, who would go out in the field by her house and sit in a rocking chair while Dennis took care of their first baby, Katherine, who cried all the time. Michelle just sat out there in the field for hours, rocking miserably by herself, saying over and over, “This is not a good baby.”
• • •
No one ever tells you about the tedium. (A friend of mine says it’s because of the age difference.) And no one ever tells you how crazy you’ll be, how mind-numbingly wasted you’ll be all the time. I had no idea. None. But just like when my brothers and I were trying to take care of our dad, it turns out that you’ve already gone ahead and done it before you realize you couldn’t possibly do it, not in a million years.
NOVEMBER 16
He inches around the living room like a spy. He inched off the bed again and got wedged sideways between the bed and the wall. My friend Deirdre spent the night a few days ago and took care of us, and she watched him flailing around in his bassinet and said, “It’s so pathetic being a baby, wanting to walk and crawl and run,” and I said, “It’s like ‘Johnny Got His Gun,’ ” and we watched him together for a while. I sort of felt for a minute like I imagine women must feel when they and their husbands watch their baby together. It felt really great, and then I got really sad. Now as I watch he’s inching all over the place, obviously trying to implement his plans for world peace.
His eyes are turning brown. Pammy and I went for a walk along the salt marsh a few days ago. Everything was red with pickleweed, and even though his eyes mostly look blue, in the bright sunlight his pupils were so tiny that you could see that the ring of iris nearest the pupil was definitely turning brown. What a clever baby.
NOVEMBER 22
I 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’ve never been so up and down in my life, so erratic and wild. My body is slowly getting back to normal, except for my butt and thighs. I have to keep remembering the line about the little earth suits and that I am a feminist, because the thighs are just not doing all that well. I lay in the bathtub yesterday looking at them, thinking of entering that annual Hemingway write-alike contest with a piece called, “Thighs Like White Elephants.”
And then a part of me thinks, Hey, who fucking cares?
NOVEMBER 23
It’s been twenty-six years since John Kennedy was killed. I was in the fifth grade. I had a chopped-olive sandwich for lunch and two Hostess cupcakes. I can remember all that exactly, and yet a few days ago I got into the shower in my underpants. I feel so nostalgic for Kennedy today. We all know now that he had the moral life of a red-ass baboon, but, God almighty, compared to Bush, he’s like Desmond Tutu. I wish Sam didn’t have to grow up in such a violent scary world. There’s so much cancer, so much plague; there are so goddamn many child-snatchers, psychopaths, Republicans. It’s all so nuts these days. When did that happen?
Obviously there’s a downward spiral going on, that much is clear, and all kinds of good, lovely people keep getting caught in it, while all these shitheads thrive. For instance, Sam and I saw this woman today at the market who is wealthy and obviously doing fabulously well, and everyone toadies up to her and pretends she’s just the most marvelous creation, but the truth is that she’s got this worm inside of her. She has to keep feeding it grim bits, like mean gossip and bad news about other people. I actually don’t even know her name, but I’ve been pretending to know who she is for so long that I can’t possibly ask her. She knows who I am, though, because she has read my books and the articles about me in the local papers. Right after Sam was born, she became only the second person in history to ask who the baby’s father was. We talked to her for a few minutes at the butcher counter today, and it was obvious that she had just had her face done again. The startled look was gone, so she looked like a million dollars, but she can make you feel so bad and low with just a look or a few well-chosen words that you end up wanting to cup your hands protectively over your genitals and skulk back home.
The madness is that I always do this little dance for her, wanting to make a good impression. This is the effect that beautiful rich people have on me. I become subservient, all but bowing and scraping and wanting to give them neck rubs. It’s crazy. She’s just a mean snot. I believe that she’ll outlive us all, her family and portfolios will thrive, her pets will never be hit by cars. She’s in her late fifties, and her parents are still alive back East. She introduced me to them last year when they came out for a visit, and they look like aging movie stars. The father is as pleased and smarmy as can be, which is maybe the most galling thing of all, because my father, who was so kind, died so young in the world’s most terrible way. I don’t get it. What am I going to say to Sam when he first notices that things are so fucking unfair? I don’t know. Who was it who said that if something is fair, it’s probably just a coincidence? I don’t know. I think that way deep down I’m a little bit too much like this woman for comfort. My worm is not quite as big as hers, but maybe it will be with age. All I know is that I couldn’t wait to get home so I could call Pammy and we could gossip about the face-lift.
NOVEMBER 26
The kitty runs up and down Sam’s body all the time now, like she’s giving him a lomilomi massage. My older brother and I used to do them on our dad’s back when we were young. He’d seen them done in Tokyo when he was a child. I’m not sure how he could have seen people get a massage, since his missionary parents were morally opposed to almost everything having to do with bodily pleasure, but when my brother and I were small, my father would stretch out on the living room carpet, and we’d take turns walking on his back. This morning the kitty walked up and down Sam’s back slowly for quite some time, seductively, reverently, peering around at his face from time to time as though she were hearing “What Child Is This?” playing on the soundtrack of her tiny kitty mind.
NOVEMBER 28
Sam slept through the night. I don’t want to jinx things by saying it too loudly, but it is true. He slept through the night, from 11:30 until 7:00 this morning. It was very confusing at first. My initial thought was that he had died. Then I actually let out a whoop and have been moving joyfully around the house like Julie Andrews on the mountainside in The Sound of Music ever since.
People say he’s the loveliest baby they’ve ever seen, even though his hair is falling out. Of course, they also say this to babies who look like water ouzels. Sam really is handsome, with those huge moonbeam eyes and porno lips, but after bad nights I look at him with fear, as if when all his hair falls out, we might see sixes tattooed all over his head.
NOVEMBER 29
H
e is three months old today and has slept through the night for three nights in a row. He is definitely a keeper. He’s so big and talented compared to how he used to be, and I’d sort of like him to stay this size. On our daily walks, Pammy and I see all these toddlers tearing around. They look sort of unattractively huge and lunky, like loud screamy poopy variations on Diane Arbus’s “Jewish Giant.” Sam is so delicate.
We are almost completely broke. I don’t feel like writing, and I do not have anything to say. I’m trying to stay faithful, even though it makes me feel a little bit like a loser to be broke and fearful. I found myself having the nightmare vision again, where we end up living in the Tenderloin and I have to be a prostitute and walk the streets holding my stomach in, and the baby gets gnawed on by rats and we don’t even have a phone. What an incredible drug fear is. My friend Bettie, who goes to my church and is very black and very radical and about ten years older than me, suggested I try to keep my eyes on Jesus. Sometimes I remember to. Other times I’m not sure I really believe in God. It would be best not to overthink it. Otherwise I could become like that dyslexic agnostic in the old joke—the one who lies in bed and tries to figure out if his dog exists.
Movies played in my head today where I could see myself having a drink to wash away the fear of impending financial doom. I saw myself sipping a small and lovely glass of good Scotch. The problem is that I have never sipped a drink in my life. I’m more of a swiller. I did not sip beer at twelve years old, I did not sip drinks at twenty. I didn’t even sip the barium milkshake I had to take when I was thirty and getting an ulcer; I swilled it.