If you’re looking for a “how-to” parenting book, Anne Lamott’s “Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year,” may not be the best choice at first glance. However, if you’re looking for someone with whom to honestly commiserate about the frustrating first few months of raising a newborn, then this personal-diary-turned-memoir is a great read.
Lamott humorously and sincerely documents her life as a single 35-year-old new mom to her son, Sam, as she debates “leaving [her colicky son] outside for the night and if he survived, to bring him inside in the morning as an experiment in natural selection,” and wondering if “it is normal for a mother to adore her baby so desperately and at the same time, to think about choking him or throwing him down the stairs.”
Along with complaining about her hatred of “expressing milk,” which is the “ultimate bovine humiliation and it hurts,” and the transformation of her body into “a medieval dwarf,” with thighs that rub together as she walks down the street, Lamott expertly weaves together common complaints of motherhood with her complete and utter infatuation and love she has for her child.
Once Sam (finally) turns 3 months old, she writes, “There are huge changes every day now. Maybe there always were, but I was too tired to notice. His main activities currently are nursing, foot sucking, making raspberries and bubbles, and chewing on his Odie doll’s ear … he’s becoming so grown-up right before my very eyes. It’s so painful. I want him to stay this age forever …”
Hardcore right-wing conservatives may be offended by her matter-of-fact attacks on the elder Bush’s administration (this was originally written in 1989) and her attempts to teach her son to be a liberal rebel leader at a young age, but she does so in a way that is still charming and endearing. Readers will find themselves rooting her on as she fights to raise her child alone, raise him right and not kill him; land a freelance writing gig to keep her son fed; and attempt to stay sane as her best friend and biggest help is diagnosed with cancer.
Lamott’s memoir will no doubt relieve and comfort new parents on the verge of a meltdown in the midst of the whirlwind first three months of being a new parent. For the non-parents out there, it shows how perseverance and taking care of yourself first are the most important things you can do for all the loved ones in your life.
Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year, Anchor, $15, www.amazon.com.
(disclosure: Ruckus is an Amazon Associate)
