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

by Anne Lamott

  MAY 8

  Pammy and I went next door to pay a visit on my neighbors this afternoon and got involved in a rather unpleasant ethical consultation. I’d never actually met them before. I am not much of a mingler. Both the husband and wife are strange, dour characters, and someone must have recently given them massive wind chimes, because I noticed them ringing last night when I was trying to sleep. By about 2:00 A.M., I felt I might have a complete nervous breakdown if they didn’t stop chiming, but then the wind died down. Halfway through my work this morning, as I was hurrying to get a book review written, the wind picked back up and the chiming began again. I know they are supposed to be very lovely and spiritual and soothing, but this is only the case when they are yours. Trying to work with them chiming away was like having Jimi Hendrix jamming over there on top of the roof. I felt very meek and apologetic and cringey about the whole thing, but I simply could not stand them. Luckily, Pammy came over in a bad mood, loaded for bear, angry and scared about everything and a little sick from the chemo. So we stormed over, and I let her do most of the talking. She was very adamant and kept mentioning that I am a writer and I need for things to be very quiet so that I can hear my characters speak. I felt like when you’re little and your parents are Standing there talking sternly to someone who has hurt or betrayed you and you just want to climb into the backseat of the car and lie down on the floor with your car coat pulled over you. Needless to say, the neighbors were not happy about our request. They were actually appalled, like I had asked them not to wear shoes around the house because their footsteps were too loud. But they did take down the chimes. Now it is very peaceful again here under the redwoods.

  I remember going to a party at Pammy’s house when I was six years old. I’ve known her since before Jesus left Chicago, and I don’t remember her ever even getting the flu.

  MAY 9

  Having a baby is a terrible drain on the resources. I had no idea. I’m not suggesting that he’s a deadbeat, but I must say he’s not bringing in any money on his own. Lately he sits around in his underwear all day playing the harmonica, which is great, I approve of his choice of instruments. I mean, I don’t want him to turn out to be Donovan. I want him to be able to play the blues. But still, it’s so expensive and time-consuming to have a baby, you might as well keep hothouse orchids. At least you can sell them.

  Today I’ve felt all day like we are the Joads. Everything we own is so cruddy-looking and secondhand. Even the cat is secondhand. My brother Steve and I found her wrapped in a plastic garbage bag by the side of the road on Christmas Eve three years ago. Someone had just chucked her out the window of a car. We heard a kitty crying and then walked past a Hefty bag sealed with rubber bands from which the sound was clearly emanating. “I don’t hear anything,” I said at first, putting my fingers in my ears. I did not want a cat, did not in fact want any dependents. I had been sober six months, and it was all I could do to take care of myself. “You don’t hear the cat crying in that Hefty bag?” my brother asked. I shook my head and then sighed. But she’s a great cat.

  All the other babies have beautiful little nurseries, and Sam just has the corner of my horrible hovel of a room. There are three feet of floor space between his crib and the platform where my mattress is, and that’s it. There’s a broken-down dresser with a thin foam pad on it that we use for the changing table. It’s too hideous for words. It’s Tobacco Road.

  People who write novels

  Often live in hovels.

  I’m sure someone else said that before me. I hate everything.

  We sat and watched Bush on the news tonight, full of his usual bombastic suckitude. Sam was cheering him on and I was crying out, “No, no, darling, this is the enemy,” but Sam was totally wild in his enthusiasm and support, like we were watching the Lakers beat the Celtics. A mother worries.

  My plans for molding him into the leader of the rebel forces do not seem to be going very well. I think of all those pacifists in the sixties and seventies whose children chewed their toast into the shape of guns. Sam will be one of those children. I can see it all now. He will probably be a Young Republican by the age of eight and want to spend his summers at camp with other little conservative boys and girls, singing patriotic songs in shorts and knee-high socks, holding his briefcase in his lap. He’ll pound the table jovially and cry out, “We’re table one and we want the salt!” and then help plot the forced internment of the left wing in America. Then he’ll come home from camp, and everywhere I go in our house, his eyes will seem to follow me, and when I notice this, he will give me thin smiles.

  MAY 10

  Pammy got through her first round of chemo fine. We had a wonderful talk about it late last night. She said she’s just going to do what her doctor says—no New Age crystal Cosmica Rama stuff, no dietary changes. She said that if one more person tells her that she probably shouldn’t have wine at night and that she should be eating a lot of broccoli, she is going to stick a pencil through her throat. “I am not going to eat broccoli,” she said. “I’m sorry, I’m just not. When they get their tumors, they can eat broccoli. I will go to their houses and steam it for them, but I will not be eating it.” She’s tiptoeing into the very beginning of some sort of relationship with God, or with a higher power, or something, but it is very hard for her to believe. “Look,” she said, “if you had parents like mine, if you grew up in a family as secretive and pathetic as mine, I don’t think you’d believe either.”

  I said, “We all grew up in that family. I mean, this is America, honey.” I recommended that she think of all the women who have most adored her in her life and to come up with a sense of God based on that kind of love, on the sense of protectedness that it gives you to be loved by a really fine woman, a sense of some mysterious regenerative force at the center of things that is maybe just love. She said with great surprise, “I didn’t know you could do that,” and I said, “Oh, yeah, you can do anything you want,” and by this morning she’d found a picture of a big cat licking a little cat. She’s a great cat lover, and it stuck. So at the hospital this morning, as she sat in the doctor’s office getting the chemo IV, and then as she sat around at home all day waiting to become Linda Blair, she said she’d picture this big cat licking her gently and carrying her in its mouth to safer places.

  Well, the Joads had an okay day today, although now Sam screams loudly when he’s frustrated, like if he can’t open a certain drawer. I guess he’s developing will. I don’t think I like this in a baby. We drove up to see my therapist today, and I was listening to this sort of goopy Christian music on the radio, trying to check out because I’m just not feeling great these days. My stomach aches with anxiety about Pammy, and my self-esteem is about one notch lower than Kafka’s cockroach. We’re broke, and I’m fat and lonely. All of a sudden I tuned in to Sam, who was not paying any attention to me, chattering away in Serbo-Croatian, and I could hear suddenly that the song of life was playing and that Sam was singing it. So I turned off the radio and listened to Sam and got the spiritual hit I was starving for.

  He sounded like a bevy of drunken doves.

  MAY 12

  He continues to love the kitty more than life itself. He crawls or rushes over to her in his walker and then pulls at her face and ears passionately, while screaming in almost anguished love, like a Beatles fan at Candlestick Park.

  I’m very lonely. Neshama was talking today about her marriage with John, who is kind of a loner, very bright and eccentric. They’re both in their fifties, married twenty-five years, and she said, “We’re Rilke’s ‘Solitudes’ in motion. Maybe less and less in motion.…” That’s what I want so much.

  Pammy came by with strawberry sorbet and the new People magazine. I felt like God had reached down and touched me. She’s so incredibly kind to us. It would be much easier to think of losing her if she weren’t so goddamn kind. Maybe I will talk to her about this tomorrow.

  I remember how much her crazy drunken mother used to smoke when we were young, and I
wonder if that has anything to do with Pammy’s cancer. Her mother would blow smoke into your face, even when you were a little kid. She had this elaborate inhaling technique—I think it was French—where she’d take a hit and it would pour out over her top lip like a reverse waterfall. It was really quite beautiful. And then she’d blow it into our faces.

  Somehow, somewhere along the line, Pammy forgave her parents. I heard someone say once that forgiveness is having given up all hope of having had a better past. And this is why Pammy is so powerful.

  MAY 16

  Sam is recovering from a burn on his hand that he got at my friend Alice’s on Sunday night. Alice had been cooking a roast all afternoon and opened the oven door to take it out. Sam was in his walker, and in a flash, like a speed skater, he darted over and put his palms down flat on the opened door. Our friend Dennis rushed him to the sink and put his hands under cold water for the longest time, but there were blisters. Still, Sam seemed okay. He was sort of unattached to the pain. I was reminded of the time the kitty jumped onto a spike near the houseboat where we lived and had a huge hole in her chest, so big you could see her lungs, and how, after getting it stitched up, she was completely done with it.

  Now, me, if I’d had burnt palms, I’d milk them for all they were worth. I’d go about for weeks holding out my little paws as though they had been run over by a truck.

  Megan puts some New Age hippie aloe juice on Sam’s burns every day, but she really only does it for herself. I, the old addict, keep thinking he needs some heavy pharmaceuticals, when actually he seems to be just fine.

  Pammy came by today and feels so nauseated from the chemo that she can’t even drink tea anymore, only water. And it has to be room temperature. She said she wants me to help her write a chemo cookbook, that we could make a fortune off it, and I said, What would be in it? And she said, Smoothies, toast, and room temperature tap water. That’s all.

  MAY 18

  Sam and I sat out on the steps last night for a long time, and he fell asleep in my arms. It’s so easy to have religious awe when you’re outside at night. It’s even easier when you’re in the mountains, especially during a thunderstorm. Boy, do you feel like an aphid, and boy, are you glad there are other aphids around.

  MAY 20

  Pammy had her first, and maybe last, THC experience last night. Pot is supposed to help chemo-related nausea. I remember my dad using it a number of times during his chemo and not liking it at all, because it made him so aware of every single thing he was feeling, and he was feeling so bad. But yesterday Pammy took a capsule of Marinol, pharmaceutical marijuana, even though she hates being stoned. I called her around 5:00 because I was feeling sort of lost and sad, and she told me she had taken the Marinol and was just waiting for her husband to come home, somewhat high but really glad to listen. So I talked for a while, poured out all my sorrows and this quiet philosophical stream of consciousness, and she listened attentively and every so often at just the right moment said, “Mm-hmm.” It made me feel all choked up with wonder and gratitude for the intimacy and tenderness of our relationship. Then I’d say something that was a thinly veiled plea for some advice or a pep talk, and she’d just say, “Hmmmm,” like she knew I was going to be able to answer my own question in a moment. It seemed such a spiritually enlightened position to take. This went on for quite some time. It was so comforting. She was so present and so supportive, in a nonverbal way, and then I apologized for going on so long and said, “God, you’re such an incredible listener, Pammy. Were you able to follow all that?” and she didn’t answer for a moment. Then she said dreamily, “No, not really; I was just sort of vegging out on your voice tones.”

  Sam can climb stairs now. I don’t think this is good news.

  Today at church he played with the kids in the back room for the first time. He was in his walker, and these little kids are possibly the most stunningly gorgeous people on earth. They adore him, and they push him hard in his walker from one person to the next, all the way across the room—it’s like a cross between curling and dwarf-tossing. All the little kids including Sam roar with laughter, like they’re all in love.

  MAY 31

  Sam was nine months old the other day. Steve brought him his first gun, all nicely wrapped up, but it turned out that he had just borrowed it from a friend’s kid in order to get a rise out of me. Steve is hypervigilant about not being made into a father figure. Every so often he calls me on this, on my secretly wishing he could be Sam’s surrogate father. I always lie at first and insinuate that this is all in his mind, but then I go into another room and all but snap my fingers, like “Rats! Foiled again.” Finally I end up confessing to Steve that maybe I do try to manipulate things along these lines, and I always end up crying because it makes me feel so vulnerable to be so pathetic and transparent. Steve pats me a lot, tenderly, and then he gives the baby a bath or in some other way pours on the avuncular love.

  I don’t remember who said this, but there really are places in the heart you don’t even know exist until you love a child. Sam’s been teaching me how to play again, at my ripe old age. His favorite thing right now is for me to hide a Cheerio in my mouth and then to let it peek out a tiny bit, and he goes in after it with this great frantic concentration, like it’s a diamond.

  JUNE 5

  We’re sick, for the second time in two weeks. I can’t believe it. I never used to get sick. These babies are all carriers. And then Pammy, who was all better from the cold she caught from us last week, came by with groceries, determined not to pick Sam up, just to drop off some supplies. But it was impossible for her not to hold him for a second, and of course he slimed her a few times, sucking on her nose. So she’s sick again, too, and needs more antibiotics. I feel completely responsible. But she said it was good that we figured out in her first month of chemo instead of, say, her fifth that we have to be extremely careful and to err on the side of caution. She also said that she liked sitting around with an illness with which she was familiar. It was like wearing an old worn, soft shirt, just to have a sore throat and head cold. She said she was sitting around almost savoring it, sitting in the rocking chair a lot, holding her imaginary piece of fishing line.

  JUNE 14

  We’re doing more or less okay. There are days when it feels like The Seventh Seal with diaper rash and milky bras, but right now we’re sort of lurching along. I am having to spend so much time trying to keep the faith. Otherwise I spin off into tremendous anxiety.

  Sam is growing so fast that it almost makes me lightheaded. It’s time-lapse photography speeded up. Maybe I shouldn’t feed him so much. I feel like he’s not even a baby anymore. He’s becoming a young adult.

  They get so smart so fast. For instance, there’s been another new development that I’m not sure I like. He seems to have picked up a memory somewhere. In the old days—in his youth—you could hide something you didn’t want him to have behind your back and that would be the end of it. He’d maybe look around for a split second with this benevolent look on his face, like “Well, for Chrissakes, that’s funny, it’s gone; oh, well, now I can’t even remember what it is that’s gone, but who cares.” Now he looks at me blankly when I first take something away, and then he lunges at me, like he’ll kick my teeth in to get it back.

  He has a frantic craving to be vertical. Every second he pulls himself up to a standing position again. You’d think he’d just spent six months in a body cast. 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.”

  When Sam’s having a hard time and being a total baby about the whole thing, I feel so much frustration and rage and self-doubt and worry that i
t’s like a mini-breakdown. I feel like my mind becomes a lake full of ugly fish and big clumps of algae and coral, of feelings and unhappy memories and rehearsals for future difficulties and failures. I paddle around in it like some crazy old dog, and then I remember that there’s a float in the middle of the lake and I can swim out to it and lie down in the sun. That float is about being loved, by my friends and by God and even sort of by me. And so I lie there and get warm and dry off, and I guess I get bored or else it is human nature because after a while I jump back into the lake, into all that crap. I guess the solution is just to keep trying to get back to the float.

  This morning Sam woke at 4:00, so I put him in bed with me, nursed him for a long time, and then fell back asleep in the dark with him nestled up against me. The only light came from this dimmer switch on the wall by my side of the bed. There is a foot of carpeted space between my mattress and the wall, and the dimmer switch is on the wall about two feet off the floor. It is lit so you can find it in the dark, but it’s underneath a beautiful piece of cloth I’ve hung there, white with the prettiest parrots on it, so the dimmer glows golden beneath the cloth like Tinkerbell’s light. Anyway, I kept hearing Sam scooting around next to me in the dark, and I kept saying, “Shh, shh, go back to sleep,” half-dozing. Then it became totally silent and I almost fell asleep, but I opened my eyes a crack and looked up to see Sam standing between the bed and the wall, with one hand on either side of the dimmer, his face a few inches away from it so that he was lit by its light. He looked like he was in joyful supplication, or an ecstatic trance, like the little boy in Close Encounters.