Operating Instructions

by Anne Lamott

  Everything feels funny and not real. It’s that old familiar feeling of having a dental X-ray apron on my chest. I keep thinking of these lines I have taped to my wall that someone once sent in a letter; they’re from Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus:

  And if the earth has forgotten you

  Say to the still earth: I am flowing.

  To the rushing waters say: I am.

  Sam seems like a really happy baby. I don’t know why I’m so sad.

  MARCH 16

  I wish I felt more like writing. I don’t particularly feel like I have anything to say these days. I feel like the propulsion is missing. All that emptiness and desire and craving and feeling and need to achieve used to keep me at the typewriter. Now there’s me and Sam, and it feels like there’s not any steam in my pressure cooker. Whenever I teach, I tell my students about that line of Doctorow’s, that when you’re writing a novel, it’s like driving in a tulle fog: you can only see about as far as the headlights, but that’s enough; it’s as far as you have to see. And I tell them that this probably applies to real life, too. But right now I feel like I’m just sitting in the car with Sam, not really going anywhere, just getting to know each other, both of us looking out through the window at what passes by, and then at each other again.

  The slow pace and all this rumination wear me down and bore me and make me desperately want a hit of something, of anything. Adrenaline, say, or a man to fantasize about or have drama with, or some big professional pressure, like a deadline I’m just barely going to be able to make. I want to check out. I do not want to be in the here and now with God and myself and all that shit. I know that this is where all the real blessings and payoffs are, that there is a good reason they call the now “the present.” I want to learn to live in the now, I want to learn to breathe my way into it and hang out there more and more and experience life in all its richness and realness. But I want to do it later, like maybe sometime early next week. Right now I want a rush.

  Last year when I was obsessing over this married man whom I adore and who adores me and with whom I was trying to avoid having an affair, I talked about it with this older lesbian, a recovering alcoholic and addict. I was talking about how often I wanted to call him, and how, when we saw each other, I wanted to drop these erotically charged bombs into the conversation, and how high I’d get off all the adrenaline, and how it felt like it validated my parking ticket because he was so luscious and powerful. And the lesbian said, really nicely, “Yeah, yeah, I get it, I’ve done it. But I think each step of the way you gotta ask yourself, Do I want the hit or do I want the serenity?”

  It seemed one of the most profound things I’d ever heard, and it’s helped me a hundred times since—with food, men, etc.—but at the time, to the lesbian, and right now, to myself, I said, Honey, I want the hit.

  Sam can get up on all fours now, but he can’t actually move that way. He drags himself from place to place, though. It’s a little like My Left Foot around here these days.

  He often makes a beautiful pealing shriek of pleasure and surprise.

  At church, during the “prayers of the people,” members of the congregation share these incredibly sad stories of their own lives and the lives of friends who need help. They ask that we pray for their families, and for kinder leaders, and for the homeless, and people with AIDS, and people in other countries in crises of starvation or war. The whole time, Sam sits there making joyful loud farting noises with his mouth. He sounds like a human whoopee cushion. I clap my hand over his mouth, but he just makes the loud farting noises directly into my hand. And they still call him their baby. “Oh, that’s our baby, sugar, huh? That’s our baby.”

  All of his sounds bring him such joy. He’s learning the range of his voice, learning to play it like a musical instrument.

  MARCH 20

  He’ll be seven months old in nine days. He’s really scooting around like mad now, doing some real distances but still not crawling on his hands and knees. Sometimes he stops and lifts his arms and legs and appears to be swimming in a thrashing kind of way. Megan and I were watching him do this today, and Megan said to him, with a real mixture of sympathy and encouragement, “Gee, honey, if you were in the water, you’d be there by now.”

  I am really trying to trust God, to believe in the tenderness of a God who cares even about a bruised reed, or a hurt bird, and certainly about this happy little baby. I feel the presence of that tenderness in the people who love Sam and me, who bring us groceries and help us keep our spirits up. But I’m still fucked up and feeling off my feed so much of the time. I know the solution is to slow down, and breathe, and learn to pay attention. My friend Bonnie’s kids went to a kindergarten with a sign over the front door that said, “Start out slow, and taper off.” It’s so easy and natural to race around too much, letting days pass in a whirl of being busy and mildly irritated, getting fixed on solutions to things that turn out to have been just farts in the windstorm. Our culture encourages this kind of behavior. That’s why we call it the rat race. Some days I get stoned on the pace, but today it is making me incredibly sad. That’s probably a healthy sign. Maybe I’ll learn to slow down and breathe in time for it to help Sam. Peg’s friends over in AA say that the willingness comes from the pain, by which they mean the willingness to change; in other words, people don’t get sober when they are still having fun drinking. Today I feel like one old rat who wants to get off the exercise wheel.

  Maybe if I can learn to breathe and go slower, I can somehow help Sam be spared some of the craziness I had in my life, all that chasing down of these things that I thought would make me okay or would prove that I was okay. A lot of it, looking back, was metaphorically the serpent in the garden. I like that line of Kazantzakis’s in The Last Temptation of Christ when he says, “The doors of heaven and hell are adjacent and identical; both green, both beautiful.”

  Still, you know what the name Samuel means? It means “God has heard,” like God heard me, heard my heart, and gave me the one thing that’s ever worked in my entire life, someone to love.

  MARCH 24

  I’m just feeling stressed to the nu-nu’s today, very tired and unable to keep the house and our life together. It is clear to me that we need a breadwinner. Also, servants. I opened the fridge to make us some lunch and could instantly smell that something was suffering in there, but I did not have the psychic energy to deal with it. I don’t think I will tomorrow, either. I think the easiest thing would just be to move.

  He moves so fast these days, like a lizard. He’s babbling with great incoherent animation. He gets on all fours and rocks, like he’s about to take off, like Edwin Moses in the starting block. His new thing is that he likes to stick his fingers in your mouth and examine your teeth. He does it every time we nurse. Maybe he wants to be a periodontist when he grows up. It’s a little disconcerting. He’ll stare at my mouth for a minute when he’s lying in my arms, and then reach in with these tiny monkey fingers and go tooth by tooth, checking each one for problems. Next he’s going to start picking cooties out of my hair. When Sam is doing my teeth, I sit there basking in our monkey lives.

  I really felt like smoking today. It’s been almost four years. It would be the answer to a lot of my problems—weight control and stress management, for instance. A friend of mine with a difficult baby Sam’s age—we call her “little Evita”—started smoking again a few months ago, and she’s become very thin and self-possessed. Of course, she smells like Nagasaki, but if you’re thin, who cares? I hear that practically all Michelle Pfeiffer does is smoke and go bowling. I rest my case.

  Sam’s got this new maturity all of a sudden. Part of it is about being so terribly pleased with himself. He is so fast and physically adept that he can hardly contain himself. I’m cheering him on and blown away by each new skill, but at the same time the corners of my mouth turn down, like a mime’s.

  I remember when he was always sort of placidly stoned and incompetent, like this puzzled little baby I saw in L.A. w
hen I was pregnant. I could not take my eyes off her. We were staring at each other in a sidewalk café in the Palisades, in similar states of burnout, neither of us blinking very much, and all I could think of was a baby that Ram Dass described in a book I read years ago; he believed this baby to be a very old lama, someone who had been incarnated tens of thousands of times, a very old soul who was born this time as a baby in the Bronx, one of those very stoned-looking babies who are wondering what on earth they are doing here and who want to bless everybody but can’t get it to work.

  That’s exactly how Sam seemed a lot of the time when he was an infant. Maybe all infants have that look. But now, he’s happening. Steve thinks he is finally beginning to enjoy his stay here, and not only that but he may want to be one of us when he grows up. There’s definitely a sense that he’s the new man at the company and is now ready to start working his way up the ladder.

  MARCH 25

  He’s definitely got his daddy’s thick, straight hair, and, God, am I grateful for that. It means he won’t have to deal with hat hair as he goes through life. This morning as we were racing around, I was trying to get us both fed and ready for church, and I had total hat hair. When you have extremely curly hair, it is always getting mashed down into weird patterns, like grass that’s been flattened. You get it when you wear hats, and you get it when you sleep. In extreme cases, you wake up looking like a horse has been grazing on one side of your head all night. I know hat hair is not as bad as having, say, Lou Gehrig’s disease, but still I’m glad that Sam will be spared.

  On the day I was born, I think God reached down and said, “Baby girl Annie, I am going to give you a good brain and some artistic talent and a sense of humor, but I’m also going to give you low self-esteem and hat hair, because I want you to fight your way back to me.”

  Bonnie, whose three daughters are half black, has a poster of Jesus with fluffy, nappy hair, just like her children’s, just like mine.

  Church was especially sweet this morning. Of course, it goes without saying that the more quiet and sacred any occasion, the more you can count on Sam having terrible flatulence. Today, during the period of silent confession, it was like machine-gun fire. I think it may be another guy thing. I don’t think girl babies do this. Plus he continues to make loud farting noises with his mouth, so it’s like bringing a wiseacre drunk or a jackhammer to church. It’s hard to express how loud this sixteen-pound baby can be. I stood up during the “prayers of the people” to say how happy and relieved I felt to be there. Sam started farting again, not with his mouth, and I just stood there holding him, crying, and trying to talk about God and about how crazy my past was and how mostly beautiful my life is now. Through my tears, every time he farted I’d start to laugh, and I thought later that it must be music to God’s ears—someone trying to voice her gratitude while she laughs and cries and her big-eyed baby farts.

  There was this East Indian Jesuit named Tony de Mello who used to tell this story about disciples gathered around their master, asking him endless questions about God. And the master said that anything we say about God is just words, because God is unknowable. One disciple asked, “Then why do you speak of him at all?” and the master replied, “Why does the bird sing?” She sings not because she has a statement but because she has a song.

  MARCH 26

  Today he rode in a shopping cart for the first time. He was blissed out, stoned, bug-eyed. He looked like Buckwheat. He passed out almost immediately after we got back into the car. The excitement must have been too much for him. His eyes rolled back in his head as he fell asleep, but this time I didn’t slap him or try to wake him. I finally remembered what our Lamaze teacher had told Pammy and me—that you never ever wake up your secondborn, so try to remember that when you are about to wake up your first.

  It will be interesting to see if he remembers Pammy. She will be home in a few days. I’m sure he will. She was one of the first two people to hold him after his arrival here on the outside. She’s been his second mother. He might feel shy at first, though, because he’s a little shy at first with everyone but me. When I come home to him, he just goes ape-shit, like he’d given me up for dead. It’s like George Carlin’s impersonation of a dog—frantic and breathless with relief that his human has come back, going, “Oh, Jesus God, I’m so glad you’re back, I was going out of my mind, I was beside myself, I didn’t think I could last another fifteen minutes,” and his human says, “I just came back to get my hat, for Chrissakes.” That’s exactly how Sam is.

  He scoots joyfully all over but still doesn’t move with his stomach off the floor; i.e., he does not officially crawl. He’s like a salamander moving through the mud.

  Today a friend with a little baby Sam’s age called, and in the beginning of the conversation, her baby was cooing and peeping quietly. All of a sudden I heard the baby begin to babble animatedly, and then she burst into tears. My friend comforted her for a moment, and the baby was quiet again. “What on earth was that all about?” I asked. My friend said, “Oh, the great god Dad just came into the room and then left, and now she’s frustrated.” I felt a flush of many feelings all at once—longing, jealousy, sorrow beyond words that Sam doesn’t have a daddy. He will grieve over the years, and there is nothing I can do or say that will change the fact that his father chooses not to be his father. I can’t give him a dad, I can’t give him a nuclear family. All I can do is to give him what I have, some absolutely wonderful men in our lives who loved him before he was born, who over the years will play with him, read and fish and walk with him, make him laugh and throw him up in the air until he is too big, men who will be his uncles and brothers and friends, and I have to believe that this will be a great consolation.

  MARCH 27

  I was secretly infatuated with a man for a few days this week, and it was just awful, like bad drugs. His packaging was nearly perfect. He’s tall, nice-looking, with lots of money and a degree from Stanford, but most of all he’s very funny, definitely a snappy piece of cheese. He called last night, and when I heard his voice, I felt on the verge of hyperventilating. I had to force myself to calm down so that I wouldn’t start wheezing. My back lit up, and there was a burning sensation in my neck. I was hanging on everything he said so I could micromanage each word and inflection, looking for a hidden meaning. On the inside I felt like the George Carlin dog, but I played it cool and was as funny as I’ve been in a long time. We talked for half an hour and didn’t make a date. We said we would talk again soon. I got off the phone and fantasized for a while about having this tender romantic sex with him. Then I called a woman who went out with him a few years ago and discovered the two most damaging things I can know about a man: one, he voted for both Bush and Reagan, and two, he was very very reluctant to give head. Now maybe on a really bad night I would let one of these things go by, but I tell you, if his head wouldn’t go south of my waist and he was up there talking with passion about the thousand points of light, I’d crack. It would be like “Hey, thanks for stopping by, pal, but the thousand points of light are in my pussy.” I don’t want to feel like I have to negotiate the SALT talks just to get a little oral sex. The right guy will love nothing more.

  Maybe I’m not well enough to have sex at all right now. I thought I was, but it all sounds sort of disgusting the more I think about it. Right now I secretly want everyone to be pristine and beautiful, like a summer lake, instead of being real, with all those little pimples and weird vein activity. Plus, with this latest crush, the last thing I’d want is to have to worry about a boyfriend sidling up to Sam in the middle of the night and whispering right-wing propaganda into his baby ears, stuff about supply-side economics and welfare cheats. So I’ve been restored to sanity.

  It would be one thing if I could leap into a disastrous romance and it would be just me who would suffer, but I can’t afford to get lost because Sam doesn’t have anyone else to fall back on. And I don’t have anyone else to fall back on, come to think of it. I can afford to wait for a good one
, not get derailed by some total fixer-upper. Once my agent Abby said that if we’re not careful, we’ll spend our whole lives blowing on sparks and trying to turn them into embers, when all along they were sparks that should never have been ignited. In that capacity, I’ve looked like Neptune, cheeks filled with wind, blowing on the sea.

  It gives me the chill to think about beginning a new relationship, even though of course I would love to find a man to love and grow old with. You see these seemingly perfect couples and feel like the kid with her nose pressed against the window of the candy store, but then you get to know them and learn all the ratty underbelly stuff about them, that they are cold to one another, or sarcastic, or unfaithful. I have loved men so much and am so afraid of what they will do to me. On bad days, I think straight white men are so poorly wired, so emotionally unenlightened and unconscious that you must approach each one as if he were some weird cross between a white supremacist and an incredibly depressing T. S. Eliot poem. I know they were very badly hurt and misled, but so was I, and I chose and am choosing to get well. I am sorry for how they were raised and for all the fears about their thinning hair and little penises, but I mean, bore me fucking later, try having been raised female in this culture. Most men shut down like sea anemones or bank vaults the moment things get too intimate or too dicey. I lived with a man who when he had hurt me enough—not that he meant to, but he always did—he would cry with fear that he would end up old and alone, never having really lived. And then I’d have to comfort him and nurse him back to health because he was so sad and I loved him so much, and I’d help him be able to reconnect with me again, but then two or three weeks later I’d look up and see that cold flat reptilian look in his eyes again. I am too old and tired and too well to do this anymore. Maybe.