Operating Instructions by Anne Lamott Read Free Book Online

am abandoning myself, and I end up feeling used or resentful or frantic. But when I say no when I mean no, it’s so sane andhealthy that it creates a little glade around me in which I can get the nourishment I need. Then I help and serve people from a place of real abundance and health, instead of from this martyred mentally ill position, this open space in a forest about a mile north of Chernobyl.
    My brother stayed over the night before last, walked and danced with my poor gassy baby all night while I lay in the tub. Steve seems to adore being an uncle, even though the baby cries so much and has such terrible acne. Steve calls him Pizza Face.

S EPTEMBER 27
    E very night between 8:30 and 12:30 Sam cries and is miserable. I have tried everything that all the baby books suggest, and it is not getting better. I feel so badly for him—I keep thinking about how hard it is for him here, especially compared to how easy and warm and floaty it was where he used to live. It’s nuts. I’m so tired that I could easily go to sleep at 8:30 and sleep for twelve hours, but instead I walk the sobbing baby and think my evil thoughts—Lady Macbeth as a nanny.

S EPTEMBER 29
    B ig day for Sam. He’s one month old. Pammy and Steve and I celebrated by giving him another real bath in his little plastic tub, which we set up in the living room, while listening to Toots and the Maytals on the boom box. He peed all over me and into his bathwater just as the kitty walked past. She began rubbernecking with the most shocked and horrified expression on her face, clearly thinking, “Oh, my God, now I’ve seen everything.” I think she had just begun to get over the trauma of witnessing the shit storm that poured out of Sam on his first day home, was just beginning to put her life back together. Steve watched Sam pee, then put his hands on his hips and said rather fiercely, “You should make him drink it.”
    Sam does these fabulous nipple tricks now, lolling around at my nipple, pushing it in and out of his mouth with his tongue, sort of lackadaisically, like it’s a warm summer day and he doesn’t have much else to do but work over his wad of chewing tobacco. And Pammy noticed a new aspect of his bath personality. He doesn’t want us to think he’ll ever like it, but deep down, he may be starting to.
    •   •   •
    We were watching the news tonight while nursing, and I almost had to get up and leave the room when Bush came on. No one in the world hates George Bush as much as I do. (Who was it who said he looks like everybody’s first husband?) This is a true story: I was telling Sam how I feel about Bush and why someone once referred to him as “that preppy snot in the White House,” and I was saying that Sam really must grow up to be the leader of the rebel forces, and then I said to him, “Study that face for a second, listen to that whiny voice,” and Sam actually looked intently at the TV for a few moments, closed his eyes, and made the loudest, most horrible fart I’ve ever heard. I raised my fist in the air and said, “Yes! You
got
it.”
    I keep wanting to do what Martin Luther King taught us—to walk in love, to love the racist and hate the racism—but I must say, it is not going very well these days. I am often beside myself with hate. I have a quote of his on the wall over my desk that says, “Let us not despair. Let us not lose faith in man and certainly not in God. We must believe that a prejudiced mind can be changed and that man, by the grace of God, can be lifted from the valley of hate to the high mountain of love.” But I sometimes despair. My hatred of American conservatives apparently sustains and defines me as much as my love of Jesus does, since I don’t think I’m willing to have it removed. Who would I be without it? I know I’m as mucha part of the problem as anyone else and that we’re all like the people in that old Dylan song who think God is on their side. Part of me does not want Sam to be