operating instructions: quotes

I just finished reading Operating Instructions, Anne Lamott's memoir abut her son Sam's first year of life. I'm not a huge Lamott fan -- I only vaguely remembering reading Crooked Little Heart when I was a teenager, and an English teacher quoting Bird by Bird. At times I find the "honest, confessional" style of writing a bit much, and I didn't like the political comments in the book. I don't really understand reconciling your faith with demonizing one political party or the other (seemingly a staple of American politics at the moment), whichever "side" you're on. However... she is a good writer! Some of the descriptions and moments she captured in the memoir are bang-on, or created such a unique picture in my mind, that I had to write them down.

"I've had the secret fear of all mothers that my milk is not good enough...but Same seems to be thriving even though he's a pretty skinny little guy. I'm going to have an awards banquet for my body when all of this is over." (An awards banquet ... I love that!)

"His hands are like little stars."

"It's so great to have so many friends who had babies right around the time I did ... because they all have extremely bad attitudes and sick senses of humor like me. It would be intolerable to call a friend, a new mother, when you were feeling down and for her to say some weird aggressive shit like 'Little Phil slept through the night yesterday, isn't that marvelous since he's only eight weeks old, and guess what, I'm already fitting back into my pre-pregnancy clothes.' You'd really have no choice but to hope for disaster to rain down on such a person."

"If I could have on wish, just one crummy little wish, it would be that Sam outlive me."

"I went and stared at the crucifix for a long time and breathed it in. I believe in it, and it's so nuts. How did some famously cerebral and black-humored cynic like myself come to fall for all that Christian lunacy, to see the cross not as an end but a beginning, to believe as much as I believe in gravity or in the size of space that Jesus paid a debt he didn't owe because we had a debt we couldn't pay? It, my faith, is a great mystery. It has all the people close to me shaking their heads. It has me shaking my head."

"Part of my wants my body back, wants to stop being a moo-cow, and part of me thinks about nursing him through kindergarten. I know a woman who nursed her daughter until the girl was almost four, and of course we all went around thinking it was a bit much, too Last Emperor for our blood. But now when Sam and I are nursing, it crosses my mind that I will never ever be willing to give this up. It'll be okay, I think to myself, we can get it to work, I'll follow him to college but I'll stay totally out of the way...
This is the easiest, purest communication I've ever known."

"One thing about Sam, one things about having a baby, is that each step of the way you simply cannot imagine loving him any more than you already do, because you are bursting with love, loving as much as you are humanly capable of -- and then you do, you love him even more."

[upon news of her friend finding a lump in her breast] "Just like that. Boom. Can you imagine? Just like that. I feel a dread like hearing sirens late at night, like I did with my dad. I know it's bad. There's no doubt in my mind."

"Life is full of unexploded land mines, and she [the friend with cancer] seems to have stepped on one."

"I laughed so hard that it broke up the thin candy shell of fear that was covering my heart, and I could breathe again."

[on going up and down a wooden step for exercise] "Everyone's doing it. It's the most now and happening form of exercise, although my person belief is that thin smooth thighs do not necessarily speak of a rich inner life."

"When I held Sam alone for the first time, after Steve and Pammy had gone home the night that he was born, I was nursing him and feeling really spiritual, thinking, Please, please, God, help him be someone who feels compassion, who feels God's presence loose in the world, who doesn't give up on peace and justice and mercy for everyone. And then one second later I was begging, Okay, skip all that shit, forget it -- just please, please let him outlive me."