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

by Anne Lamott

  JUNE 16

  This memory thing is really interesting. Before, every time Sam went into a room—the bathroom, for instance—he would be almost beside himself with wonder and amazement, like it was his first trip to FAO Schwarz. Now he recognizes it. It’s not quite old-hat yet, but he sees the bathtub and he remembers that he loves it and he tries to thrust and squirm his way over to it. It’s funny that he loves the bathtub so much. He didn’t always. But mostly he loves to toss stuff into the tub when it’s empty, and then he loves to gaze endlessly down into it, with wonder, like it’s a garden in full bloom.

  He’s heavily into flinging things. He dismantles everything he can get his hands on, pulling every possible book and chotchke off every possible table and shelf and flinging them over his shoulder. It’s like living with a Hun, or Sonny Barger, the old leader of the Hell’s Angels. You can almost hear “RIDE HARD!” ringing through the chambers of his mind: “RIDE HARD! DIE FREE!”

  It’s gratuitous looting. He almost never actually takes anything and crawls away with it, but he’ll get to the coffee table and systematically, often without any expression, lift and then drop or fling every single magazine, book, cup, or whatever to the ground. His grim expression suggests he’s got a lot to do and just really doesn’t want to be bothered until he’s done.

  Pammy is pretty sick from the chemo. It’s so bizarre to write those words. It’s like saying, “Sam is having trouble with the metal plate in his head.” It’s something that simply can’t be happening. So it isn’t quite so scary and painful as it might be, since it doesn’t feel like it’s really happening a lot of the time. It makes me feel totally in the dark and about eight years old. I’m trying to keep my faith high, but I feel sort of disgusted and puzzled by God right now. It makes me think of Sam’s gratuitous looting; God standing there bored at his table, dropping, or letting people’s lives drop, to the floor. It’s like he doesn’t even care, isn’t even paying attention. It’s like James Joyce said: he’s doing his nails.

  I have a friend named Anne, this woman I’ve known my entire life, who took her two-year-old up to Tahoe during the summer. They were staying in a rented condominium by the lake. And of course, it’s such a hotbed of gambling that all the rooms are equipped with these curtains and shades that block out every speck of light so you can stay up all night in the casinos and then sleep all morning. One afternoon she put the baby to bed in his playpen in one of these rooms, in the pitch-dark, and went to do some work. A few minutes later she heard her baby knocking on the door from inside the room, and she got up, knowing he’d crawled out of his playpen. She went to put him down again, but when she got to the door, she found he’d locked it. He had somehow managed to push in the little button on the doorknob. So he was calling to her, “Mommy, Mommy,” and she was saying to him, “Jiggle the doorknob, darling,” and of course he didn’t speak much English—mostly he seemed to speak Urdu. After a moment, it became clear to him that his mother couldn’t open the door, and the panic set in. He began sobbing. So my friend ran around like crazy trying everything possible, like trying to get the front door key to work, calling the rental agency where she left a message on the machine, calling the manager of the condominium where she left another message, and running back to check in with her son every minute or so. And there he was in the dark, this terrified little child. Finally she did the only thing she could, which was to slide her fingers underneath the door, where there was a one-inch space. She kept telling him over and over to bend down and find her fingers. Finally somehow he did. So they stayed like that for a really long time, on the floor, him holding onto her fingers in the dark. He stopped crying. She kept wanting to go call the fire department or something, but she felt that contact was the most important thing. She started saying, “Why don’t you lie down, darling, and take a little nap on the floor?” and he was obviously like “Yeah, right, Mom, that’s a great idea, I’m feeling so nice and relaxed.” So she kept saying, “Open the door now,” and every so often he’d jiggle the knob, and eventually, after maybe half an hour, it popped open.

  I keep thinking of that story, how much it feels like I’m the two-year-old in the dark and God is the mother and I don’t speak the language. She could break down the door if that struck her as being the best way, and ride off with me on her charger. But instead, via my friends and my church and my shabby faith, I can just hold onto her fingers underneath the door. It isn’t enough, and it is.

  JUNE 18

  Peg came over with dinner tonight and told me about this dumb schmaltzy poem she heard someone read at an AA meeting. It got me thinking. It was about how while we are on earth, our limitations are such that we can only see the underside of the tapestry that God is weaving. God sees the topside, the whole evolving portrait and its amazing beauty, and uses us as the pieces of thread to weave the picture. We see the glorious colors and shadings, but we also see the knots and the threads hanging down, the thick lumpy patches, the tangles. But God and the people in heaven with him see how beautiful the portraits in the tapestry are. The poem says in this flowery way that faith is about the willingness to be used by God wherever and however he most needs you, most needs the piece of thread that is your life. You give him your life to put through his needle, to use as he sees fit. I hope Sam’s is a very long piece of thread. Please God let it be longer than mine.

  Pammy’s looks like it’s going to be too short. I wanted it to be longer than mine, too. But maybe hers is being used to do an exquisite bit of detailing—a tiny furled bud, requiring lots and lots of quick little stitches because you can’t convey the bud without all that convolution, can’t show how much life there is inside: a tiny leaf, the blossom.

  JUNE 20

  I swear Sam is a week away from walking. He crawls everywhere and climbs everything. Yesterday I was in the bathroom, and Megan was with him in the kitchen, letting him crawl around. She went to the front door to let the kitty out, and when she got back, Sam had climbed the four steps of the ladder to the loft and, as Megan reports, was sitting on the mattress like the Buddha, very pleased with himself in the most casual possible way, like “Hey, baby, just hanging out here on my mom’s bed. Come on up and have a beer!”

  Tonight at Rex and Dudu’s when I came to pick him up, he was playing catch with them, pushing a tennis ball across the coffee table to them, catching it when they would push it back, concentrating as hard as Nolan Ryan pitching another no-hitter.

  Earlier today he pulled a TV dinner table down on himself when I was doing something in the kitchen. He fell down on the carpet and lay there with this two-pound table on top of him, wild-eyed with the drama of it all, like he was Joe Ben in Sometimes a Great Notion who gets pinned under the log. He looked up at me, not crying but tortured, like “You ignorant incompetent slut—you did this to me; you’re supposed to be watching me, but nooooooo …”

  JUNE 21

  This boy can dance, Mama; he still can’t walk, but he pulls himself into a standing position, holds on to the couch or chair or leg or whatever is nearby, and begins to bounce and gyrate. This boy can rock and roll. It’s such a miracle. It seems that only yesterday he was so pupal, and now he’s Michael Jackson.

  The guy who loves George Bush and doesn’t give head called yesterday and also today. There’s a part of me that wants to go ahead and give him a whirl because he’s so smart and funny. But I know that he’s got a mean streak, that his girlfriends all end up feeling ripped off and shut out. Then when they break up with him, he loses his mind completely and throws himself at them and says all the right things and takes them for the romantic weekend sail on the delta. As my agent once said of another man, he has the soul of a trapped rat. The girlfriends always end up going back for a few more rounds, and the exact same pattern plays out. Who needs it? Peggy once gave me the best definition of insanity, something they apparently say in AA, that insanity is doing the same thing over and over, each time expecting a different result. So I’m trying to resist—he asked
me out on an actual date today and I made up an excuse—but I find myself craving the excitement, the danger. My life has become so mundane. The biggest thrill left for me, the only time I really feel I’m courting danger, is when I’m washing my hair and I step directly under the shower spray and let the water begin to stream down my forehead, but I wait a split second to close my eyes so that the shampoo gets dangerously close to blinding me. Whoa! What a rush!

  I got out the Polaroid I took when I was pregnant, of the photographs of me pregnant and at seven years old and the sonogram photo of Sam, all under the arms of the cross, and I can still get that sense that we are a complete family unit, but sometimes I’m so hungry for a partner, a lover. One thing I know for sure, though, is that when you are hungry, it is an act of wisdom each time you turn down a spoonful if you know that the food is poisoned.

  JUNE 22

  Sam got a tooth. I saw a little flash of white in his mouth way over to the right and didn’t think much of it because I was expecting his first teeth to be either the two top front ones or two bottom front ones. This one is way over to the east. I decided the whiteness was a sore, baby herpes or something even worse, because I couldn’t feel a sharp little point, but Pammy insisted it was a tooth. Then the two of us took him in to see the doctor for his regular checkup, and I mentioned it. I said he seemed to have a sore in his mouth. Pammy said it was a tooth, and Dr. James felt it for a nanosecond, looked up at Pammy, and they smiled conspiratorially at each other. Then they both looked at me and shook their heads. I’m so glad I didn’t share with James what I actually thought, which was that it was infant melanoma.

  The drool is immense. There are rivers of drool all day now, almost biblical, like the waters of Babylon, He has a drool rash on his chin. It made me think of his old baby-acne days when Steve used to call him Pizza Face. A friend of ours watched him drooling away like a Saint Bernard puppy and finally said to him, “Hey, kid? Get a lip.”

  I hope he gets his daddy’s teeth. Actually I have no idea what his daddy’s teeth look like, since he had almost all crowns, the result of a bad car accident a few years ago. For all I know, before the accident he used to look like an alligator gar or a moray eel. I also don’t know if his original teeth were strong or not, but they’ve got to be better than mine. Mine are like chalk. Little bits are breaking off all the time, and I’ve had more cavities in my life than anyone I know. I have so many crowns that I actually can’t fit them all in my mouth—I have to keep a bunch of them in the drawer by my bedside table. Of course, Sam’s growing up with fluoridated water. I taught a writing course at UC Davis one semester, and one afternoon we had some time to kill, so I asked my students to take out a piece of paper and write about some really horrible humiliating frightening thing they have to do periodically, like going to the dentist. They all looked at me like I had just started taking off my clothes, because it turned out that a good two-thirds of them had never even had a cavity. I mean, it was awful, and then they were all sort of laughing at me as I stood there with bits of my teeth breaking off, and pretty soon they all looked like hallucinated troglodyte versions of Mary Tyler Moore.

  JUNE 25

  It seems cavalier to go out and have fun when Pammy is home with her husband being so sick from the chemo, but for one thing I need to make a living. I ended up going out with the gang to do a food review the other night. I was feeling very low, in quicksand, and like I wasn’t well enough to be out in public trying to be interesting. All I wanted to do was to stay home and sit on the couch necking with my fear and depression. But I made myself show up, and it got me unstuck. Like they say, take the action and the insight will follow. There’s still real life going on out there, and it was such a nice break to take my extension cord and plug into it for a while.

  Bill was all edgy because the restaurant we went to smelled so strongly of garlic and he’s badly allergic to it, so as usual we tried to order as many dishes as possible without it. We always order family-style. But I was whining about wanting to try this roast Dungeness crab with billions of cloves of garlic. I said in this conciliatory way to Bill, “Look, honey, if you’ll just let us order this one thing, you can order something fabulous that J can’t eat,” and he looked at me bitterly and said, “And what would that be, Annie? Thorns?” I laughed so hard that it broke up the thin candy shell of fear that was covering my heart, and I could breathe again. I think that’s what they mean by grace—the divine assistance for regeneration.

  JUNE 27

  Peg and Pammy both came over for lunch, and then we all took Sam for a walk in the park. He swung in the baby swing for over half an hour. His Big Brother Brian has been bringing him here since he was a few months old, putting him in these swings ever since he could hold his neck up. We have come here a lot together, too, Sam and Pammy and I, especially in the last couple of months. Sam is our anchor. Without him as our counterbalance to Pammy’s cancer, we would float off into outer space on fear. It crossed my mind recently that maybe we were using him like a drug, to avoid the terrible feelings we are having. But drugs take you away from what is in front of you, whereas Sam is what’s in front of us. He’s not the drug, he’s the reality, I think this is why Pammy asks every day for the specific details of what he’s up to.

  When we first brought him to this park, he was an aging infant. In one of the swings, he looked like a fragile little egg with the face of Tweety Bird, swinging back and forth with a slightly perplexed expression. Then he went through a stage where Pammy said he looked just like one of those Al Capp characters called shmoos. Now he is cool and intense, like the child of James Dean and one of those aliens you see in the tabloids who resemble giant babies with saucer eyes. He is going to follow in my footsteps as a swing junkie, though. Anyone looking at me as a child on swings should have known that I would grow up to be an addict. Swings were one of my favorite things about life. When it was your turn, you’d sit on the piece of wood or the tire or the knot at the bottom of the rope, and your friends would wind you up in one direction until you and the rope couldn’t be twisted any tighter and then they’d let you go, and you’d unwind faster and faster, out of control until it felt like your head was going to spin off your neck. You’d just lose your mind joyously in the whirling wheel of green foliage you’d see every time you opened your eyes.

  Everyone but me would eventually want to go home. Red-faced, exhausted, my nerves jumping, I’d be pleading to spin one more time, just one more time. Peg said today in the park that she was also this way—Peg who, like me, ended up snorting coke like a truffle pig. Along these lines (no pun intended), Sam’s expressions were somewhat alarming today: he completely gets it, was totally into it. Everything in his face was saying, “Swing; swing.”

  Peg pushed Sam while Pammy and I sat beside them in the swings for bigger kids. Peg had treated herself to a manicure the day before, and she told me that the manicurist had her soak her fingertips in a bowl of warm soapy water and marbles, of all things. “What were the marbles for?” I asked. “So that your fingers don’t get bored,” she replied. “So they have something friendly to do while they’re soaking. It was lovely. They clicked softly between your fingers, and the water was like velvet.” I’ve never had a manicure, but I could picture and hear it perfectly. It made me think of how Sam is in my mind when we are apart. In the old days, before Sam, my mind would be filled with fantasies and ambitious thoughts and terrible worry about every aspect of my life, including global starvation and the environment and nuclear power and weapons and friends dying, and now that all still goes on, but there are a lot of times in a very real sense when images of him give my mind something friendly to play with, something lovely for a change to click between its fingers.

  The three of us women sat for long periods without talking, while Sam played in the sand. We would talk with great animation for a while and then be quiet again. My father and I could do this, too. It is so profoundly, comforting and beautiful, the minuet of old friendships.

>   JUNE 29

  Every so often Sam will be standing up, holding on to something, like the coffee table, for instance, and he will have finished his work there—that is, he will have already flung everything to the floor—and all of a sudden he’ll let go with both hands and stand there for a few seconds. It’s totally charged time, like the moments right before lightning. Then you can see concern cross his face, and on the inside he’s going, “Yo! Holy shit!” When he starts to wobble, he reaches for the table again to steady himself.

  JUNE 30

  I do my food review every month for California, and my book review for Mademoiselle, and a pretty flabby job of trying to keep this journal up to date. I take notes and dick around with possible scenes for a novel, but I don’t feel like writing much else. Certainly not a long sustained piece of fiction. I can’t really remember how you do it. But I just remembered the other day a weekend I spent with my family at our cabin in Bolinas when I was seven or eight and my older brother was nine or ten. He had this huge report on birds due in school and hadn’t even started it, but he had tons of bird books around and binder paper and everything. He was just too overwhelmed, though. And I remember my dad sitting down with him at the dining table and putting his hands sternly on my brother’s shoulders and saying quietly, patiently, “Bird by bird, buddy; just take it bird by bird.” That is maybe the best writing advice I have ever heard.