Pregnancy Today Book Review:

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

By Anne Lamott review by Jillian Hanson

Nothing has ever been the same for me since I got up the courage to cross over the threshold from autonomy into mommyhood. My daughter is fast approaching two, and it's confounding to try and characterize the past two years. The heights and depths of emotion my little girl inspires in me sometimes feels like a roller coaster I can't get off, and I also can't seem to describe adequately. When I try to write about it, my exhausted brain can only manage to dredge up old clich豠and over-used adjectives which I'm tempted to put into capital letters with lots of exclamation points. It's the best I can do, for now. Fortunately, Anne Lamott does much better in her book, Operating Instructions - A Journal of My Son's First Year (Fawcett Columbine, New York, 1993). I first read it when my daughter was three months old, and I've gone back to it several times since, whenever I've needed a good laugh about how crazy it feels at times to be a mother.

Lamott is a published novelist who, as a recovering drug addict and alcoholic, turned to Jesus for redemption. She is also a single mother with a network of supportive friends and family that fill in for baby Sam's absent father, and provide a colorful cast of characters that orbit around Lamott and her son. This journal of sleepless nights and tiny triumphs was comfortingly familiar to me as I struggled through the early weeks of my baby's life. It also mirrored my own feelings about how difficult and wonderful it is to live day after day awash in the incredibly intense emotions of new motherhood. I was struck by how perfectly Lamott describes, with quirky, self-deprecating humor, the terrible, tender pain of feeling such an overwhelming amount of love. "Real tears leave his eyes now. It is almost more than I can take. Before, he'd be sobbing but there were no tears. Now there are. It seems an unfair advantage. Between the tears and the cooing and his crazy drunken-old-man smiles, it's almost unbearable. There's so much joy and pain and love and wonder in my chest and behind my eyes that it's like The Unbearable Lightness of Being