Pregnancy Today Book Review

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 clichés 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. It’s like Patsy Cline’s voice...”

Lamott’s spirituality is a big part of this book. Fortunately, with her dry wit, she manages to avoid preaching about “all that Christian lunacy,” as she describes it, and instead offers some unique insights into the universal struggle for faith, which most people will probably be able to relate to no matter where their spiritual beliefs lie. Towards the end of her son’s first year, Lamott is forced to face the loss of someone close to her, and the juxtaposition of this sadness with her joy over her growing son wraps up the journal with excruciating poignancy.

Anne Lamott is a delightfully good writer. She experiences everything deeply and writes it all in a most unreserved, charming and clever way. Her book made me wish I could invite her over for dinner so that we could trade stories and admire our kids together.