by Anne Lamott
Except—in my defense—I come to my money nuttiness honestly. My parents had terrible problems with money; they never had enough. My mother grew up cold and poor in Liverpool, and money for her was like grades in school, it was about how you were doing in the world’s eyes. If you had a nice pile when the winds howled, you’d be safe. Rich friends and movie stars had a glaze of smoothness, shininess, and troubles must surely slide off them. Horrible things could not crawl under or over their beautiful white picket fences. And my father was raised by stingy, repressed Presbyterian missionaries, for whom money was even more treacherous than sex. Manage your money, and you might be able to manage your more heinous appetites. Root of all evil, the devil, the Four Horsemen, and so on.
Let it be said, though, the lack of money is no great shakes, either. My father gave my mother a meager monthly budget. This was shaming and crazy-making and scary, because she had three kids, and pets, and no matter how inventively she served up ground beef and zucchini throughout the month, she couldn’t make ends meet. She often had to go into my father’s study to ask for more because the kitty had gotten sick or one of us had lost a shoe. I’d be doing homework with him when she came in, a supplicant with a bad attitude. He’d look down his nose at her, over the tops of his reading glasses, and slowly, like Bartleby, reach for the big black leather-bound check ledger he kept in his top drawer.
This was how it was for all her friends. This was the system before the women’s movement.
We were not stupid children. You do not side with the unhappy person with the rice bowl. You align with the person who has power and the leather-bound company checkbook. I inwardly recoiled from my mother’s neediness and rage.
Then both my parents died without leaving anything, so we three kids had money problems, too, which is to say no money.
I have worked for twenty years on getting over some of my fear and shame about money, and where has it gotten me? A letter arrives from the IRS, and before I open it I’m instantly thinking identity theft, arrest, liens, perp walks. I don’t get it: If God has all the power and I’ve bravely shined so many flashlights into these dark corners, why doesn’t God let me get well?
I reread the second e-mail. And then I ratted the man out: I e-mailed everyone on the committee, and included a copy to our pastor, so she could see how unjustly I was being treated, how I was being hassled. I wrote, “Clearly, I do not have what it takes to be a Presbyterian,” which meant to be an anal-retentive petty bureaucrat. And, I added, “I simply cannot spend one more second on this matter.” Then I hit Send.
I felt powerful and righteous, for several minutes. Then I felt like hell. I was a snitch. Why had I sent that e-mail? It was clearly the kind of thing you wrote to get off your chest but not to send. Now the real me was being revealed in the high school showers of life. You do so much learning and therapy and living, gleaning as much insight as you can, and you think you’ve won all these carnival tickets that you can cash in now—but the crabby, hairy-nosed old carny won’t let you cash in the red tickets you’ve amassed in other realms. The prizes on the money shelf require orange tickets. And as with money, you never seem to have quite enough.
I could not go back. I needed a cooling-off period. But something in me cried out: Annie! Stop! Church is where your recovery began, a year before you got sober. This is about how weird your parents were about money, how your father withheld money from your mother, and how desperately you loved him. The guy at church is an innocent bystander. This is not your stuff. It’s your mom’s and dad’s. The man didn’t know your parents. How can he even be involved?
Finally I thought of one true thing, which is that sometimes I act just as juvenile as I ever did, but as I get older, I do it for shorter periods of time. I find my way back to the path sooner, where there is always one last resort: get a glass of water and call a friend.
I got some water and called a friend who always stays up late.
She was sound asleep.
But after I woke her, she insisted I tell her what was going on. I spilled it all out. I told her about Faith Fair, my mom’s budget, my dad looking down his nose. She listened to how horrible it was, to my rationalizations. She laughed gently at the bad parts, and said, “Oh, hon,” like a sweet waitress in a crappy coffee shop.
She did not say much, but let me get my guck into the air, so it was no longer in the anaerobic rat chamber of my mind. And as I told her my bleak and embarrassing story, it felt like dirty clothes. I’d been trying to wash and dry it inside myself, in my embarrassed mind, which doesn’t really make much sense, laundry-wise. When you hang things outside, they get air, warmth, light; and you see that even with the stains and frayed collar, the garment has kept you covered and warm for a long time.
Then my friend spoke. She said that when she’d gotten sober, she saw that even though you get the monkey off your back, the circus never really leaves town. “Make yourself a nice snack,” she told me.
I made oatmeal with applesauce.
The best way to change the world is to change your mind, which often requires feeding yourself. It makes for biochemical peace. It’s almost like a prayer: to be needy, to eat, to taste, to be filled, building up instead of tearing down. You find energy to do something you hadn’t expected to do, maybe even one of the holiest things: to go outside and stand under the stars, or to go for a walk in the morning, or in such hard times, both. But first I wrote back to everyone on the committee, plus the pastor, and said, I am sorry; ignore my earlier e-mail. Please forgive me. I wrote, “I know you already do.” This made me feel like crying, because I was so grateful, and because I wished I had been kinder to my mother. By the next morning, before I left for church, everyone had e-mailed me back. The man wrote: “We are here with only love for you, Annie.” I went outside and sat on the front step with my coffee and looked at the wild orange blossoms of the ginger plants in my garden until it was time to go.
• • •
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Acknowledgments
Gertrude Stein said that “silent gratitude isn’t very much to anyone,” and I am loudly grateful in my heart to a number of people.
Jake Morrissey at Riverhead has been a perfect new editor for me for a while now. Thank you also to Susan Petersen Kennedy, Geoff Kloske, and Mih-Ho Cha; to my copy editor, Anna Jardine; and to Craig Burke and Heather Connor.
Thank you to everyone at the Wylie Agency—Andrew, Edward Orloff, Liping Wang, and especially my agent and darling friend, Sarah Chalfant. Love to Nick, too.
Thank you, Lori Leibovich, my fabulous editor and friend at Salon, where some of these pieces first ran, and to Joan Walsh and David Talbot, who gave me total freedom.
Thank you to the people who help me write and who make my work so much better on a daily basis by being close, brilliant, inspiring, and articulate friends, especially Doug Foster and Neshama Franklin. Thank you loudly, Karen Carlson, Geneen Roth, Mark Childress, Karl Fleming, Robyn Posin, and Father Tom Weston. It would be hard for me to explain how central you are to my work and my life.
Last, the hugest, deepest thank you to the Reverend Ms. Veronica Goines and all the people of St. Andrew Presbyterian Church, Marin City, California. Services at eleven.
Permissions
Some of these essays have appeared, in slightly different form and some under other titles, in The Boston Globe; the Los Angeles Times and Los Angeles Times Magazine; O: The Oprah Magazine; Salon; and Maybe Baby: 28 Writers Tell the Truth About Skepticism, Infertility, Baby Lust, Childlessness, Ambivalence, and How They Made the Biggest Decision of Their Lives, edited by Lori Leibovich.
The author gratefully acknowledges permission to quote from the following:
“Are You Born?—1” by Muriel Rukeyser, from The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser © 2005. Reprinted by permission of International Creative Management, Inc.
“Saint Francis and the
Sow” by Galway Kinnell, from Mortal Acts, Mortal Words. Copyright © 1980 by Galway Kinnell. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
“Separation” by W. S. Merwin, from The Moving Target (Atheneum). Copyright © 1963. Reprinted with permission of W. S. Merwin and The Wylie Agency.
Lines from “ABC” by Donald Justice are quoted from Departures (Atheneum). Copyright © 1973.
About the Author
ANNE LAMOTT is the bestselling author of Plan B, Traveling Mercies, Bird by Bird, Operating Instructions, and six novels. She lives in northern California.
