“And I always felt that if something happened to Steve or Pammy, if they died, it would be over for me for a long time but that I’d somehow bounce back. In a very real sense, I felt that life could pretty much just hit me with her best shot, and if I lived, great, and if I died, well, then I could be with Dad and Jesus and not have to endure my erratic skin or George Bush any longer.
“But now I am fucked unto the Lord. Now there is something that could happen that I could not survive: I could lose Sam.
“…my heart is so huge with love that I feel like it is about to go off. At the same time I feel he has completely ruined my life, because I just didn’t used to care all that much.” – Anne Lamott, “Operating Instructions”
Yep. It does sum it up. Fourteen years since my baby was a baby and it still holds true.
I’m hearing Anne Lamott speak Friday the 15th in Portland. SO EXCITED!
That book is the truest true that has ever trued.
Oh, this book. Oxox.
Yep. That’s it exactly.
That freaking book kills me. KILLS ME. I don’t think there is another book about motherhood like it.
There’s an Anne Tyler book (can’t remember which one, it’s been too long) where she talks about how she felt like that, and had another baby to try to make herself feel less panicked about something happening to the first one. Then another. etc. And then realized that the problem is that the more you have the more you just increase the percentage chances of something happening to one of them and you feel the same way about all of them and so you’re even more screwed. So… yeah. Don’t do that.
I loved this painfully and gloriously honest memoir. When a friend got pregnant after years of trying, the only thing I could think to send her was “Operating Instructions”–so real and full of love.