by Anne Lamott
My father and the fisherman looked at each other, and the man rolled his eyes while my father sighed and looked stricken. For a moment, in memory and imagination, my father understood that he needed to protect his kids better from the world, from dangerous men, and from his deeply male, obtuse self. Just for a moment, the first I was ever aware of, at sixty-two years old.
The doctor asked what I wanted to do. I followed the movement of light on the bar, back and forth. For once, my first thought was not to comfort the males for their bad behavior. I just wanted out of this mess. I wanted Doug to take me home.
My mom and infant brother were on my parents’ bed; she was burping him, he must have just nursed. She invited me up. She was still weak after her third cesarean, so she’d brought a package of cookies to bed with her. Dad would not have liked this, as she had been quite round even before this pregnancy, when he was already picking at her about her weight. Stevie had graspy, translucent hands, like flowery sea anemones, trying to reach for me. I put my huge five-year-old finger in his hand, and it closed. What a grip! Milk-drunk, he soon fell asleep, and Mom laid him in her lap so she could gather me up. She was still in her nightie. Again, Dad would not have been pleased. Her skin was as soft as soapstone. Someone said the softest things in the world overcome the hardest.
And I suddenly saw and could feel in my adult heart that my father had viewed the fisherman as a harmless, hapless, jovial, ignorant redneck. He was not colluding with him, but understanding him. And I did, right then.
The rooms were still and quiet, the therapist’s office and my mother’s bedroom. Sometimes at the lagoon, the water rushes out with furious velocity, but between high and low tide, it lingers, flat, before flowing out to join the blue-gray ocean. I felt a crabby compassion for my father, isolated in his ego, that jocular Kennedy persona, exiled from his family. And anyway, he was not the person who needed my forgiveness. Neither was the other man. God only knows—but maybe the man was saying he thought I looked like Buckwheat, which I kind of did, beautiful and innocent. The men were portals, practice, training wheels: we are always the ones who need to be absolved, taken back into our hearts. I forgave myself for the fisherman’s words and behavior, for taking on his ugliness and making it something I believed to be true about myself. His words had gotten on me and in me, and then I had hoarded them, building evidence that I was right about being fundamentally wrong. I forgave myself for not having nice thick rhino skin. I shimmied him off me. I forgave myself for my father’s contempt and fear of women, gently released him to himself, in the same way you gently lift a hitchhiking monarch off your shoulder in a butterfly pavilion.
I curled up with Mom and Stevie. My mother had beautiful English skin, and long dark hair, but these aren’t who she was, any more than my hair was who I was. We are the final inside nesting doll. A baby feels and smells like God. You can get information from any point on a baby’s body, the toes, the soft spot, and this information is life, merciful energy, unruined radiance. Babies are waves, mosaic chips of the unified field. Is it possible, since skin is the largest organ of the body, that new babies don’t know the inside from the outside when they first come out? That there is no difference? That they are Möbius strips? This is how we came; wow. Talk about whole.
Images of tiny things, babies, yeast, and mustard seeds can guide us; things that grow are what change everything. Moments of compassion, giving, grief, and wonder shift our behavior, get inside us and change realms we might not have agreed to have changed. Each field is weeds and wheat, but mix the wheat with yeast, the most ordinary of elements, and it starts changing the flour. It becomes bread and so do we, bread to eat and to offer. The world keeps going on. You can have yet another cup of coffee and keep working on your plans. Or you can take the risk to be changed, surrounded, and indwelled by this strange yeasty mash called mercy, there for the asking at the frog pond, the River Jordan, the channel that flows between the lagoon and the sea.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you, Riverhead Books—Jake Morrissey, beloved editor and friend; and Geoff Kloske, Katie Freeman, Lydia Hirt, Anna Jardine, Kevin Murphy. Riverhead rocks.
Thank you, Sarah Chalfant and the entire Wylie Agency.
And thank you beyond the whole world, Sam and Jax, Stevo and John, Clara and Tyler.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ANNE LAMOTT is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Stitches; Help, Thanks, Wow; Small Victories; Some Assembly Required; Grace (Eventually); Plan B; and Traveling Mercies, as well as several novels, including Imperfect Birds and Rosie. A past recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an inductee to the California Hall of Fame, she lives in Northern California.
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