Lovely Little Shelf

The Book: Operating Instructions: A Journal of my Son’s First Year, by Anne Lamott

The Story: If you’ve ever read Anne Lamott before you know that she has quite the history (drug addict, alcoholic, yadda yadda) and quite the circle of friends.  She converted to Christianity later in her life and is still figuring out all the ins and outs.  In the meantime, she gets knocked up by some guy who doesn’t want a kid and begins the journey into parenthood. Alone.

She decided to keep a journal during that first year and then later to publish it.  This book covers all the nitty gritty: the birth, the late night feedings, the total drug-out, can’t-thing exhaustion, along with all of the beautiful stuff: loving Sam and watching him grow and become his own little guy.

Because Sam’s dad left her when he found out she was pregnant, she is technically a single parent, but her friends just really gather around her and help her.  They cook when she’s too tired and play with Sam while she takes naps.  In the course of the book, one of her best friends finds out that she has a pretty serious form of cancer and Anne records her struggle through that as well.

In this book, Anne Lamott makes it ok to get mad at your baby and ok to think that he’s the greatest thing on earth.  She says all of the stuff that most parents would never fess up to, like how shocked she is that babies cry so much, and how she thought it’d be more like getting a new cat.  She really covers a broad spectrum of emotion and, in one journal entry, can provoke about 90 different emotions.

What I Thought: I’m going to go ahead and admit right off the bat that I’m madly in love with Anne Lamott and have been for years.  I read her novels first and then all her non-fiction and she always makes it to my list of authors/people that I’d love to sit down for dinner with.  I love her. So this review is not unbiased.  I went in knowing I would love this book and was not at all let down.

For me, the appeal of Anne Lamott’s books are this honesty that almost never comes out.  Hearing that someone else struggles with the same things and delights in the same things as  me somehow makes it ok.  The fact that she can talk about these things in a poetic, gritty, wonderful way is just icing on the cake.

This is one of her only books that I hadn’t read yet, and I’d been saving it for when I was about to have a little one of my own.  Give me a couple of months and I’ll be blogging with puke running down my shoulder (except for with babies, it’s called “spit-up”… how cute, right?) so I thought that the time was right.

In the first couple of entries, she talks about her fears about becoming a mother and doing this thing right.  She also talks about how beautiful it is and how excited she is about having her son and loving him so much.  Because we’re still waiting on my little guy, this is the part that I related to the most.  Since I’ve been pregnant, I’ve talked to so many other mothers and so many pregnant women and usually it’s either “oh God, I can’t do this” or “I can’t wait! Baby, baby, baby!”  How I feel is somewhere in between, and I just felt like she captured that feeling perfectly.

I could go on and on. I just loved this. I’m going to give copies to my pregnant friends. This is part of my new shower gift pack.  I need to stop, because I can tell that I’m gushing.

Conclusion: Pregnant women, mothers, grandmothers: Read this.