by Anne Lamott
When I got pregnant at thirty-four, my assumption that I would be a mother dovetailed with the knowledge that it would be increasingly harder to conceive if too many more years passed. I might not ever get pregnant again. I was still single, habitually broke, nomadic, but by now I was three years sober and finally beginning to grow up. So I went forward with my pregnancy, with fear and anticipation and a shyness, too, in the face of the enormity of becoming a parent.
I had my friends’ love, and great relatives—especially my younger brother, who lived down the street from me—and I knew, trusted, believed, and hoped a lot of things.
My faith told me that my child and I would be covered, that God’s love, as expressed in the love of my friends and family, would provide for us one hundred percent of the time. This turned out to be true. God was most show-offy when things did not go according to my plans, which was approximately ninety percent of the time.
A sober friend told me that while fear and confusion often swirl around us, faith is straight ahead: I trusted that even though I didn’t know a thing about taking care of infants, toddlers, kids, or teenagers, I would be shown the next right step on a need-to-know basis. I trusted that other parents would help me every step of the way, and that if I did not keep secrets when motherhood was going particularly badly, there would be healing and enough understanding and stamina to get by. And this has proven to be true.
I thought that there would be a little more downtime. That’s a good one.
I believed that at some point rather early on, a quiet confidence would inform me, and it did sometimes. But I was stunned by how afraid I felt all the time, too. My friend Ethan says that being a parent means you go through life with the invisible muzzle of a gun held to your head. You may have the greatest joy you ever dreamed of, but you will never again draw an untroubled breath.
I thought a lot of things: There would be some sort of deep communion between me and my child, a fleshy communion of delicious skin on mine, of smells and textures and silences. This bond would be so rich and deep and intuitive that my lifelong quest for a sense of connectedness would at last be over. Much of this was fantasy, the longing of a lonely, scared child. But there was and is the experience of truly twining with another human soul. And there was soft, unarmored baby skin, and that was priceless, and there was also much juiciness in our bond—although I was unprepared for what uncomfortable juice it would be, and how it came with such lumps and grit in it.
I believed that being a parent would be a more glorious circuit than it’s turned out to be—that the transmission would be more reliable. Now I think I imagined it would be more like being a grandparent. It’s been a lot of starts, stops, lurching, and coasting, and then braking, barely in control, gears grinding, and then easing forward.
I knew that children could teach you how to pay attention, but by the same token so can shingles, and I knew that children gave you so many excuses to celebrate, only half of them false. You will have to forgive me for using these terms: Children can connect you to the child inside you, who can still play and be silly and helpless and needy and capable of wonder. This child does not have to be yours, of course. It can be a niece or nephew, or the child of a friend. But living with a child makes the opportunity for this more likely. Having a child, loving a child deeply in a daily way, forces you to connect with your mortality, forces you to dig into places within that you have rarely had to confront before, unless you have taken care of a dying parent or friend. What I found way down deep by caring for my father during his illness and then by having a child is a kind of eternity, a capacity for—and reserves of—love and sacrifice that blew my mind. But I also found the stuff inside me that is pretty miserable. I was brought face-to-face with a fun-house mirror of all the grasping, cowardly, manipulative, greedy parts of me, too.
I remember staring at my son endlessly when he was an infant, stunned by his very existence, wondering where on earth he had come from. Now when I watch him sleep, I know that he somehow came from life, only I cannot put it into words any better than that.
Samwheel
There are only six stories about Sam at seventeen that he’ll allow me to tell, and this is my favorite. It’s about a fight we had once that left me wondering whether anyone in history had ever been a worse parent or raised such a horrible child. It challenged my belief that there is meaning to life, and that we are children of divine intelligence and design.
Our fight was ostensibly about the car. We have an old beater that I let Sam drive whenever he wants, although because I pay for the insurance I have some leverage. It’s a good deal for him. But I had taken away his car privileges earlier in the week because he’d been driving recklessly, hit a curb going twenty, and destroyed the front tire. So he felt mad and victimized to begin with, my big, handsome, brown-eyed son. And actually, so did I. I asked him to wash both cars, as partial payment for the tire I’d had to buy. It was a beautiful sunny day, and he had other plans, which I made him postpone. I went for a walk with the dog, to let him work in peace. When I got back, the cars were still gauzy with dirt.
I pointed this out as nicely as possible.
“I washed them,” Sam said defiantly.
“You liar,” I said in an affectionate way, because his response was so flagrantly not true that I assumed he was joking.
He produced two filthy washrags. “I’m not a liar,” he said. “I just did a lousy job.” Turning to walk away, he looked back and gave me a catalytic sneer.
It was as if something had tripped a spring-loaded bar in me. And for the first time in our lives, I slapped him on the face.
He didn’t flinch—in fact, he barely seemed to register it. He gave me a flat, lifeless look, and I knew that I was a doomed human being, and that neither of us could ever forgive me.
Then I grounded him for the night.
I felt I had no choice. Slapping him did not neutralize his culpability: it simply augmented mine.
He looked at me with scorn. “I don’t care what you do or don’t do anymore,” he said. “You have no power over me.”
This is not strictly true. He has little money of his own and loves having our old car to tool around in. Also, he realizes that families are not democracies, and he’s smart enough to obey most of the time.
We stood in the driveway, looking daggers at each other. The tension was like the air before lightning. The cat ran for her life. The dog wrung her hands.
I felt a wall of tears approaching the shore, and without another thought, I got in my car and left. Nothing makes me angrier, nothing makes me feel more hopeless, than when someone robs me of my reality by trying to gaslight me. Like Charles Boyer with Ingrid Bergman, saying he hadn’t seen her purse, when actually he’d hidden it. Or lowering the gas jets and then pretending not to notice the darkness. I started to cry, hard, and not long after, to keen, like an Irishwoman with a son missing at sea.
Recently I have begun to feel that the boy I loved is gone, and in his place is this male person who pushes my buttons with his moodiness, scorn, and flamboyant laziness. People tell me that the boy will return, but some days that is impossible to imagine. And we were doing so well for a while, all those years until his junior year of high school, when the tectonic plates shifted inside him. I’ve loved him and given him so much more than I’ve ever given anyone else, and I’ll tell you, a fat lot of good it does these days.
I should not have been driving, but since I’d restricted Sam’s driving privileges, I couldn’t make him leave. So I drove along, a bib of tears and drool forming on my T-shirt. Why was he sabotaging himself like this, giving up his weekend, his freedom, and his car, and for what? Well, this is what teenagers have to do, because otherwise they would never be able to leave home and go off to become their own people. Kids who are very close to their parents often become the worst shits, and they have to make the parents the villains so they can break free without having it hurt too much. Otherwise, the parents would have to throw rocks at
them to get them out of the house. It would be like a TV wilderness show where the family has nursed the wounded animal back to health, and tries to release it into the wild, shooing it away: “Go ahead, Betty! You can fly!”
So even though, or because, I understood this, I cried harder as I drove, harder than I have since my father died. God invented cars to help kids separate from their parents. I have never hated my son as much as when I was teaching him to drive. There, I’ve said it, I hated him. Sue me: it’s actually legal, and sometimes he hates me, too. He always drove too fast, cut corners too sharply, whipped around in the ’95 Honda like it was a souped-up Mustang convertible. But somehow he tricked the California Department of Motor Vehicles into issuing him a license. I hate the way most young men drive, so cocky, reckless, apparently entitled. I suppose they hate the way I drive, too—slow and careful, all but shaking my puny fist at them as they pass.
I started letting Sam drive himself to and from school, and to and from his appointments, events, practices. I also ordered him to make emergency runs for milk and ice cream sundaes. But recently as he was leaving, I saw him peel around the corner nearest to our home, endangering himself and anyone who might have been on the street. I threatened to take away his driving privileges, and he slowed down. For two days. Then he sped up when he thought I wasn’t looking, and lost his rights for a week.
What has happened? Who is this person? He used to be so sane and positive, so proud of himself. He used to call himself “Samwheel” when he was five, because while he couldn’t pronounce “Samuel,” he knew it was a distinguished name. He used to care about everything, but now he seems to care only about his friends, computers, music, and most hideously, his cell phone—the adolescent’s pacemaker. He threatens to run away, because he wants his freedom, and the truth is, he is too old to be living with me anymore. He wants to have his own house, and hours, and life. He wants my permission to smoke, so he doesn’t have to sneak around. He wants to stay out late, and sleep in, and because I won’t let him do any of this on weekdays, he sees me as a prig at best and at worst a coldhearted guard at Guantánamo.
I wept at the wheel on a busy boulevard. At first people were looking over at me as they passed in the next lane. I wiped at my face and snorfled. Then I noticed that people were dropping back. Eventually, there were no cars in my immediate vicinity. I felt like O.J. in his Bronco on that famous ride. I started calling out to God, “Help me! Help me! I’m calling on you! I hate myself, I hate my son!” I wanted to die. What is the point? What if the old bumper sticker is right and the hokey-pokey is what it’s all about?
But I have to believe that Jesus prefers honesty to anything else. I was saying, “Here’s who I am,” and that is where most improvement has to begin.
You’ve got to wonder what Jesus was like at seventeen. They don’t even talk about it in the Bible, he was apparently so awful.
Then I said the stupidest thing to God: I said, “I’ll do anything you say.”
Now this always gets Jesus’ attention. I could feel him look over, sideways, and steeple his fingers. And smile, that pleased-with-himself smile. “Good,” I heard him say. “Now you’re talking. So go home already, and deal with it.”
So I drove home, wiping at my eyes, and when I stepped inside, Sam said, his voice dripping with contempt, “What do you have to cry about?”
I staggered to my room, like Snagglepuss onstage. I sat on the floor and thought about his question. The answer was, I didn’t have a clue. But all the honest parents I know—all three of them—are in similiar straits.
Their kids are mouthy now, and worse: they couldn’t care less about school, and some are barely passing. They drive like movie stars from the fifties, like Marlon Brando or Troy Donahue. You can see in their driving that everything in them is raw, too intent, and thoughtless. No wonder teenagers make such good terrorists.
And me? I think it was all over the moment Sam was born. I recognized that the things I hated about my parents—their fixation with our doing homework and getting into a good college; their need to show us off and make us perform socially for their friends—were going to be things Sam hated about me someday. I also knew that I would wreck his life in ways my parents couldn’t have even imagined. I knew that God had given me an impossible task, and that I would fail. I knew deep down that life can be a wretched business, and no one, not even Sam, gets out alive.
It turns out that all kids have this one tiny inbred glitch: they have their own sin, their own stains, their own will. Putting aside for a moment the divine truth of their natures, all of them are wrecked, just like the rest of us. That is the fly in the ointment, and this, Sam, is what I had to cry about.
When I finally stopped my sobbing, I called Father Tom, who is one of Sam’s dear friends, too. I told him my version. He listened.
“You’re right on schedule,” he said. “And so is he. And I was worse.”
“You swear? Thank you! But it’s still hopeless. What should I do?”
“Call the White House and volunteer him for the National Guard.”
“Anything else?”
“Let the hard feelings pass. Ask for help. Mary and Joseph had some absolutely awful moments, too. See if you can forgive each other a little, just for today. We can’t forgive: that’s the work of the Spirit. We’re too damaged. But we can be willing. And in the meantime, try not to break his fingers.”
I sat on my floor and after a while the dog came over and gave me a treatment. Somewhat revived, I tried to figure out the next right thing. It suddenly came to me.
I went and kicked my son’s door in.
“Go clean the cars properly,” I said. “Now.”
And he did, or rather, he hosed them down. Then he went back inside and slammed the door. I went inside and filled a tub with hot soapy water, and took it to him.
“Go wash them again,” I said. “With soap, this time. And then rinse them.”
I went inside and did everything I could think of that helps when all is hopeless. I ate some yogurt, drank a glass of cool water, and cleaned out a drawer. Then I took my nice clean car to the market and bought supplies: the new People, a loaf of whole-wheat sourdough, and a jar of raspberry jam. I lay on the couch, read my magazine, and ate toast. Before I started to doze, I turned on CNN softly and watched until I fell asleep.
I woke up a few times. The first time, I was still sad and angry and ashamed, and I knew in my heart that things weren’t going to be consistently good for a long time. I was willing for the Spirit to help me forgive myself, and for Sam and me to forgive each other, but these things take time. God does not have a magic wand. I kept my expectations low, which is one of the secrets of life.
When I woke up a second time, I saw the last thing on earth I expected to see: Sam in the room with me, stretched out on the other couch, eating yogurt and watching CNN.
“Hi,” I said, but he didn’t reply. His legs hung over the side of the couch.
I dozed off again, and when I woke up, he was asleep, the dog on the floor beside him. He was sweating—he always gets hot when he sleeps. He used to nap on this same couch with his head on my legs and ask me to scratch it, and before that, he would crawl into bed beside me and kick off all the covers, and earlier still, he would sleep on my stomach and chest like a hot water bottle. He and the dog were both snoring. Maybe I had been, too, all of us tangled in one another’s dreams.
Everything in the room stirred: dust and light, dander and fluff, the air—my life still in daily circulation with this guy I have been resting with for so many years.
Blink of an Eye
One morning about ten years ago I awoke with a savage headache that rendered me unbalanced and nauseated. My six-year-old son came in to see why I wasn’t up getting him ready for school. He took one look at the situation—his mother in bed, sweaty and lifeless as the guy in cartoons with X’s where his eyes should be—and took charge. Hiking up his pajama bottoms, Sam said, “You go back to sleep. I can
get myself ready.”
He brought me a glass of orange juice, petted me, the way young children do, and made sounds of sorrow. I got some aspirin out of the nightstand and went back to sleep. When I woke up again, I heard the TV on in the living room, then kitchen sounds. I called out for a progress report. “Doing great, Mom,” he answered confidently. “I made my own breakfast.”
When I next awoke, with a half-hour until we would have to leave for school, I called out for an update. “Everything’s going great, Mom.”
“Have you gotten dressed, honey?”
“Ayyyy-yup,” he replied like some old guy from Maine.
So I went back to sleep with a wistful sense of our being partners in this business. Soon Sam would hardly need me at all. After nearly half an hour more of sleep, I bolted out of bed, my headache gone, pulled on clothes, and raced out to gather him for school.
There he sat, on the couch, a root beer in one hand, the TV remote in the other, wearing only his Power Ranger underpants, beaming proudly.
The seasons revolved like a rusty merry-go-round in a schoolyard; he became a young man. Last Sunday morning when I called out to see if Sam was ready to go do some errands, and he said groggily, “Yeah, in a minute,” I knew him well enough to go downstairs and check.
He and three other teenagers were in his room, still sleeping, in what smelled like the cafeteria at an elk preserve. One of the friends smokes cigarettes, although not in my house. Another one got busted at school with alcohol and a knife in his backpack. I have known all three boys since they were in first grade, and I adore them. They are bright, sweet, accomplished, and it is always easy to love and accept them, because they are not mine. They gladly help around the house when I ask them to, as Sam does at their houses, and every time I thank them for helping, they shrug like cowboys and say, “No problem.”
