by Anne Lamott
It shocks me how hurtful and annoying we can be to the people in our families. We know the soft spots on one another’s turtle shells. The weight of family makes us helpless, and in trying to make sure the helplessness doesn’t utterly flatten us, we may throw the dart at someone else.
The underdog needs to be hyperattuned to everything going on in order to survive, and everyone in the family is the underdog—except of course, Dad. Dad is Dad, king of the cannibal island, like Pippi Longstocking’s father. It had probably always been hard for him to articulate his deep need for love, beauty, and authenticity, so maybe—just guessing here—he was afraid and closed off. Mother, the mom cat, never felt appreciated. She always wanted love, but it was dicey to let her love us because it was all so loaded, with her voracious needs, her thwarted expectations and ambitions. She was scary and maybe just a bit homicidal. Any mother overflowing with love for her tender offspring wishes at times that the trapdoor would open and swallow them up. I was so petty and mean to my mother when I was a teenager. My older brother and I disliked each other and never got along: he was the one in the family who always wanted to escape, and I was the one who always felt that someone else was getting the better deal. We were desperate to be praised, but what was handed to us by our parents was all the stuff we didn’t do right, or could do better, or had better be able to pull off again. Praise and cuddling made us soft, distracted us from the scent of the mechanical rabbit. My younger brother and I were raised to be perfectionists, which meant that if you somehow, against all odds, managed to finally do something perfectly, you beat yourself up for not having been able to do it years before. We didn’t know that mistakes, imperfections, and pain were going to turn into strengths and riches, turn us into Coltrane, Whoopi Goldberg, our true selves. Our parents forgot to mention this.
What surprised me when I lit into my uncle was that it made me look so angry to the family. He got to look like his victimized, gentlemanly self, while I came across as Leona Helmsley. Angry was not part of any of my identities—just the opposite, in fact. Angry women got shamed or exiled when I was a child. They got divorced. We were suckered into thinking that jokey, superficial pleasantries was how it was supposed to be in good families, like on TV or next door. People should be functional, grateful, always on, and completely at ease. Had I known how uncomfortable my parents were within themselves, I would have had no hope. I agreed to think both my unmet and my overmet potential were the problems. I agreed to think this to survive. I agreed to be a perfect girl. When I screwed up, that trapdoor opened up at my feet. Decades later I fought my way back to my birthright of ordinary, mixed-up, gorgeous, sometimes lost human. But I hadn’t at the time of the dustup with my uncle, so my sense of self took a bit of a hit.
I had the choice of fight, flight, or freeze. I flew, lay low, and got on with the rest of my life.
A few months after I finally stopped drinking, I went to my uncle, hat in hand, all but down on one knee, and asked for forgiveness. I thought he would say: “Wow, that took a lot of courage. Of course I forgive you, my darling.” He thanked me and robotically said everything was “fine.” I thanked him and we both pretended it was, that this thing was behind us and we could move on. We moved on to where we had started, where he didn’t let himself feel much for me or need anything from me. I understood he loved me, in his lifelong anorexic withholding way, and this was some progress: barest minimum, which was a real step up from where we had been.
So diplomat was one of the first identities I relinquished. I mostly gave up trying to get my uncle to be one of those people you miss so much when they die. We both showed up for every family occasion and were unfailingly polite to each other. Now, as he has aged and grown infirm, I offer him rides to other people’s funerals and bring plants and books when I visit him in assisted living. I have taken the path of liberation: kindness.
Those old identities keep us so small, and I unconsciously prefer this. It’s safe. I make sure everyone knows every time I visit my uncle and what I brought him. But being Dutiful Niece has let me taste something else that I always secretly thought might be there: a rich and inherent decency. (Saying this out loud causes me to tremble.) Also, every so often I notice that I can loosen other identities slightly, too, like tight shoelaces, without having it lead to chaos and death. Contrary to my upbringing, the bigger, more real, and friendlier the world inside me becomes, the safer I feel in the outside world. As above, so below; as inside, so before us. It is not quite yet a world of infinite possibility, but little by little there are more ice cream flavors I may just try.
I continue to visit my uncle. I have active empathy for him now. He sort of laughs at my jokes, or at any rate, he laughed at one of them last week. We even sang a carol together last Christmas in his lobby, one that I hate, “Deck the Halls.” To me, it was like Lourdes.
Augustine said that those who sing pray twice.
Empathy says: You and I are made of the same lovely, heartbroken, and screwed-up stuff. You are not an object to me right now. (Maybe I’m not, either! Let me get back to you on this.) Empathy, a moment’s compassion, seeing that everyone has equal value, even people who have behaved badly, is as magnetic a force as gratitude. It draws people to us, thus giving us the capacity to practice receiving love, the scariest thing of all, and to experience the curiosity of a child. And, as it turns out, the family is the most incredible, efficient laboratory, in which we can learn to work out the major blocks to these, which of course we got from the family in the first place. If we do the forgiveness work, forgiving our families and ourselves, they become slightly less “them,” and we become slightly more “we.” It’s ultimately about reunion. You might as well start this process at the dinner table. That way you can do this work, for which you were born, in comfortable pants.
Maybe on this side of the grave, you’ll never forgive or be able to stand your wife’s brother or your sister’s child, and that’s okay, but don’t bank on never. I don’t so much anymore. Yes, it’s hard hard hard, but when I’m having a good time with my big messy family, I notice and savor it, and I say thank you, that this came from a place of joy and absurdity, that it turns out we have it in us to laugh. And who knows, we may again—later today, tomorrow, or in patient, patient time.
CODA
Hope
Some days there seems to be little reason for hope, in our families, cities, and world. Well, except for almost everything. The seasons change, a bone mends, Santa Rosa rebuilds after the fire. In the days after a cataclysmic school shooting, thousands of students took to the streets and the public squares. They got us back up onto our feet and changed the world.
Still, we hold our breath. In times of rational and primitive fear, hope has to do push-ups out in the parking lot to stay pumped—and it does. More and more, one hears Dr. King quoted everywhere, of finite disappointment versus infinite hope. Science, art, community, and nature make manifest that bad will or mistakes can lead to progress, like Bob Ross on his show The Joy of Painting reminding us that when we make big mistakes on canvas, we can turn them into birds—“Yeah, they’re birds now!”
This is true of almost everything, if one looks up and around, especially in nature and the medicine chest.
For now, just glance out the window at a bird. Those little show-offs with their pure piping song can be the morning’s reset button. In a pinch, even absurd, big, silent, gangly birds can do the trick. Two days after the shootings in Parkland, Florida, I bumped into an old friend on the blacktop, where we were sharing feelings of dread and frustration; she was in tears. Suddenly, we noticed that three tall birds had crept up near us, not ten feet away. They were cranes the size of small people. They had long sharp bills, and my friend waggled her fingers at them, to encourage them to go back to the marsh across the street and not peck us to death. They looked like confused tourists with tiny perplexed eyes: “Why us? We’ve come a long way. Here we are, minding our own business
. . . .” They glared at us and dug in.
It was all so absurd that we burst out laughing, which startled them enough that they walked away huffily. We hugged and parted, somewhat happier. Nothing was solved, and yet hope was restored for two cranky older women who now had a shared story of near-death, by bird.
In my current less-young age, I’ve learned that almost more than anything, stories hold us together. Stories teach us what is important about life, why we are here and how it is best to behave, and that inside us we have access to treasure, in memories and observations, in imagination. This is what I want to teach the little kids in my writing class, along with the most important thing anyone ever told me: Almost thirty years ago, when I called my mentor Horrible Bonnie at my most toxic and hysterical, having screwed up as a mother, she said to me, “Dearest? Here is the secret: You are preapproved.” I kept asking her, “Really?”
This is what I want to teach my niece and my grandson, too, my Sunday school kids, my dearest children, that they are preapproved. This is a come-as-you-are party. Who they were in utero, in kindergarten, in high school, in bed last night, was the very best they could be at the time; was in fact the only way they could be at the time. It is okay for them to make bad mistakes and decisions, to write ghastly first drafts. Hey, they’re all birds now.
Hope changes as you get a little older, from the hope that this or that happens, to hope in life, old friends, laughter, art, goodness, helpers. I hope and am amazed, some early mornings, at just finding myself alive. I thought as I approached eighteen years old that I was a goner for sure. And here I am, still alive, still here, and often in a good mood. Other early mornings? Not so much. My back aches, my vision fades, I can’t concentrate. It’s like in the Samuel Beckett novel—“you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
Recently the car needed a new bumper, because I keep backing into the same goddamn tree that insists on standing too close to the driveway and rushing at my car as I pull out, so I dropped it off at the mechanic’s and walked down the street to a coffeehouse where a friend would pick me up. As I did, I passed a weedy empty lot where kids were playing a game involving tin cans and a deflated soccer ball. Watching them, I remembered the incredible boredom of childhood, and thought of the effervescent response that I had to playing almost sixty years ago, and that I had today. One of the kids flung the deflated ball through the tin-can goalpost, and I shouted, “Goal, goal,” and got some slightly worried glances out of them. Then they went on with their play.
Hope springs from that which is right in front of us, which surprises us, and seems to work.
Of course, we are reduced at times, late at night, no matter how deep our faith in God or Goodness or one another, to quavering aspic. No matter how beautiful our views are of trees and birds and children, there are such scary pronouncements from Washington or our doctors that we can’t help hearing the descending tones, of age, global warming, the ticking of the nuclear clock, the heartbeats of the 7.6 billion other people around us. This stuff is scary and it’s very real. Yet hope is real, too.
I see my uncle often (the one I accidentally called a scumbutt). Whatever: hey, it’s a bird now. Two weeks ago, after he had spent a month in bed and at the hospital with various infections and was near death, he looked up at me as if I were Doris Day when I entered his room. In his whispery, dry-leaf voice, he asked me to come to exercise class with him. We’re almost dating at this point. And I am filled with hope and relief because my cousins have asked hospice to enter in. (Hospice is the cavalry. Hospice means that death isn’t going to be nearly as bad as you think.) All those years I wished he was the sort of uncle I would miss when he died, and now he is. I will cry and will miss him when he goes, and I am glad. You can’t logically get from where we were to where we are now. I think that is what they mean by grace.
The marvelous folksinger Peggy Seeger said once about a cherished friend, “He died, but he is still in my present tense.” My younger cousin, who is one of those unusually sweet, faithful people, has advanced colon cancer. Why did this happen? Why her? Well, because as my friend Karen says, this happens to people, and she is a human. I desperately hope her doctors find a way to heal her. My pastor says God always makes a way out of no way, yet the reality is that my cousin may die of this. Mugabe and Assad both seem to be in good health. Why is my cousin sick?
“Why?” is rarely a useful question in the hope business.
By way of illustration: Learned rabbis have disagreed for the last few thousand years on why God was upset enough to bring about the great flood, but it certainly had to do with some humans behaving atrociously to one another, and then having a bunch of vile children. At the time, there were a lot of other myths about great floods in the cultures around Israel—in Babylon, for example. But what is unique to the Bible’s version is God’s making a covenant afterward, via the rainbow. This is just one of a series of covenants after the breakdown of communications between God and humanity in the form of Adam and Eve, and this one includes animals and all of nature—it’s kind of an environmental charter. What if we focus on what the bad event brings forth, like new lands and life and starting over, rather than on the fact that people do horrible things like shoot kids? If we instead focus on the shootings, it’s too easy to lose all hope in life and humanity. Yeah, someone should hit the great reset button in the sky. Notice that it is God who repents, is converted, at the end of the Noah story. God realizes that He or She overreacted, and promises never to do it again. God gave the people a rainbow as the promise, whenever the light of the sun shines through the rain. If God gets to start over, then it’s a free-for-all, even for cowardly lions like me. (But a rainbow—I ask you—how corny is that? And yet every rainbow gets my attention, gets to me, moves me—every time.) Still, why the devastating flood had to happen eludes me.
Why did a fire burn hundreds of thousands of acres in Santa Rosa and the Wine Country, but not my county, which shares a border, and was just as dry?
Forty miles away, we were under red alert for two weeks that our hills might catch fire. But they never did, despite gale-force winds and not a drop of rain. I walk nearly every day along a path in the hills above my house, above a grove of redwoods. Not one tree was touched by fire.
I breathe in the grove ecstatically every time I see it, and again get to taste one of my favorite flavors of beauty: giant trees, chestnut roan in color, slanting fingers of sun filtering through the branches. There is also the affection and wonder caused by familiarity built over decades of walking beneath these hunky guys. They are so pure, like whales or mountains, as if they were carved. I don’t know why we were spared, but I do know that nothing grows as straight as a redwood. Redwoods are one of God’s vanities, which you usually see at the microscopic fractal level. I say, well done, Dude.
Trees in any forest have a presence, the beauty of the canopy and glimmers of blue sky like puzzle pieces, but they also have a mystical acoustic effect, due to their physical properties, a hush. You may not share my belief in a Creator, although when humans experience something as powerful as a forest or a rainbow, it is not crazy to assign its existence to a Greater Intelligence. But any hush is a hush, and a hush is usually sacred: there are pockets and patches of great cities where you may find an intense example of this phenomenon. San Francisco’s Financial District has it. When I’ve marched alongside dragons and drums and lions in the Chinese New Year Parade, it was through acoustic tunnels created by the narrow streets and tall buildings, a funnel of quiet.
Tall buildings can be, in their own stony way, gorgeous enough to blow your mind. Architects the world over fill me with hope for humanity and human genius.
Science also fills me with immense hope and relief, and not just the antibiotics I am stockpiling for Armageddon. Friends and family members have died peacefully and pain-free after what used to be devastating illnesses, and some others ended up not dying of them at all. I have a friend
with late-stage liver cancer, who is just not going anywhere and is always in a good mood, because she gets to be alive. When people talk about what terrible times these are, I remind them of Cipro, antiretrovirals, electric cars, vaccines. Scientists broke the genetic code, decontaminated miles and miles of the Hudson River, cured my older brother of advanced hepatitis C. The human mind, for all its bad press and worse ideas, is as awe-inspiring as Yosemite, as stars.
Our minds are hardwired in many ways to do many things, only half of which from my observations are self-destructive. We can walk without thinking about how we do it, and stay upright. (Well, most of us can, most of the time.) We can recognize a face from the past in a fraction of a second. Our minds can instantly determine whether that face is “friend,” “foe,” or “unknown” in that same fraction. But if it is someone we’ve been introduced to that day, we might not be able to remember the person’s name ten minutes later. Most of our brains are very good at some things but not so good at others, prewired for certain tasks but not for everything, good enough for most of us and definitely for government work. And then there are the artists, musicians, scientists, painters of light, and physicists—Caravaggio, Rumi, Einstein. As soon as regular people like me can grasp that light is particles, like specks of sand, or that light is waves, like the ripples in water, then scientists step in and prove not only that light is both, but that when we observe light, we change it. I mean, come on, now.
Life is way wilder than I am comfortable with, way farther out, as we used to say, more magnificent, more deserving of awe and, I would add, more benevolent—well-meaning, kindly. Waves and particles, redwoods, poetry, this world of wonders and suffering, great crowds of helpers and humanitarians, here we are alive right now, together. I worry myself sick about the melting ice caps, the escalating arms race, and the polluted air as I look forward with hope to the cleansing rains, the coming spring, the warmth of summer, the student marches. John Lennon said, “Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end,” and as this has always been true before, we can hope it will be again.