Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year Read online

  I have always known, or at least believed, that way down deep, way past being kind and religious and trying to take care of everyone, I was seething. Now it’s close to the surface. I feel it race from my center up into my arms and down into my hands, and it scares the shit out of me.

  I hope that somehow I am and will be a wonderful mother for Sam. Perhaps I should stop asking him about the stick with the nails. I want him to grow up to have a lot of faith and to be a very gentle person, and also to be militantly on his own side, as I have come to be. I hope he grows up to be caring and amused and political, someone who does not give up on the ideals of peace and justice and mercy for everyone. Of course, on the other hand I am already actively and consciously poisoning his mind against the Republicans.

  He has the most beautiful hair, his dad’s hair; I feel about this like the oldest women at my church who cry out, “THANK ya, Jesus, THANK ya.” I grew up feeling like E.T. with an Afro. It was too hard having this crazy hair. I still don’t think I look like a white person—I look like a very pale person of color.

  Sam’s father has white-people’s hair. He is very tall and nice-looking, although his character is a bit of a problem, in that he doesn’t seem to have a great deal of it. This is probably not true—I think maybe I’m a little angry. Sometimes it feels awful, the fact that he has so entirely rejected both of us. We were friends. We slept together several times a week for several months. We talked on the phone four and five times a day, every single day. I was finishing up my book, the one that will be out in another month. We spent Christmas Eve together, Christmas morning. He gave me, ironically, a wonderful extra-large white T-shirt that has an airbrushed mama cow nuzzling her baby on it. Then two days later I found out I was pregnant, and we never spoke in a friendly way again. I don’t really get it, how he can know that there is a child of his in the world and yet have absolutely nothing to do with him. Peg keeps reminding me of something that her alkie pals over in AA like to go around saying—more will be revealed.

  He was so furious when I even considered keeping the baby that he temporarily lost his mind. He was calling six and seven times a day to tell me what a piece of shit I was, how unethical it was of me—and how I actually couldn’t have the baby because he had supported Planned Parenthood all these years (which, the more I think about it, probably means that he had delivered dozens of girlfriends there for abortions). So for three or four days I was completely on the ward, just devastated, having decided that I couldn’t survive any more abortions, having decided that I did in fact want this baby, and at the same time feeling it was impossible to have a baby when the father (who is six-foot-four and two hundred pounds) was so frantically and maybe violently opposed.

  So I wrote down all my fears, and as I folded up the piece of paper, I said to God, “Look, I am trying to keep my sticky little fingers off the controls here; I am willing to have the baby if that is your will, if that is the right thing for us, and I am willing to have an abortion, if that would be best for the baby and me; so I am putting this in your in-box, and I’m just going to wait for my next operating instructions.”

  Then Sam’s dad’s best friend, Manning, appeared on my doorstep, and I thought he was here to browbeat me into the abortion—they’ve been best friends for twenty-five years (both are in their early fifties). He asked how I was doing, and I said terribly depressed, and he said, “Why? This is a great blessing!” What a gutsy thing for him to do. Then we drove around on his motorcycle for a while, me with this tiny pollywog in my belly.

  For two weeks I vacillated between thinking I had no choice but to have the abortion, and thinking maybe there was a way for me to pull this whole thing off and that maybe God had something up his sleeve and I was going to come into some money or something. And two weeks after I found out I was pregnant, I went to bed with so much pain in my chest that I lay there breathing like a three-hundred-pound asthmatic, just lost in the ozone, wheezing, blinking back tears. Early that morning I dreamed that I was walking along the dock of the houseboat where I used to live, carrying my little baby boy, and I tripped, and he ended up falling into the bay, and I dove in but knew I had lost him. I kept swimming downward and downward, and I kept managing to just touch his body as it fell through the really freezing black water. Then I couldn’t see him at all. Through a small miracle I felt my fingers on his body again, and I actually dug them into his flesh, like the psychic surgeons supposedly do, and my fingers went all the way into him, like he was the Pillsbury Doughboy, and I got hold of him and swam to the surface. When I broke through, holding him above my head like the Olympic flame, there were friends waiting there who rushed him to the hospital, and I knew he was okay.

  I woke up from the dream smiling, shook my head with amazement, and said to myself, “Honey? Look’s like we’re going to have a baby.”

  Genewise, I could have done a lot worse. The one thing of mine that I hope Sam gets is my vision. I see like a hawk. It’s sort of a joke in my family. I could always find things people had dropped in the dirt. When we were children, my father used to take us to Duxbury Reef in Bolinas on the weekends, and we’d scour the beach for bits of fossilized whalebone, which look like small pebbles with a thousand tiny bright chambers, like a bee’s eyes. You’d find them mixed in with all the regular pebbles and agates and soft smooth pretty bits of old glass. I could find so many pebbles of whalebone, at least a dozen on any given outing. My dad would always shake his head and say admiringly, “Baby, you have got eyes like a hawk.”

  SEPTEMBER 20

  I cut Sam’s finger this morning while trimming his fingernails. He wept and bled, and I felt awful and went to get him a Band-Aid. There were three new tins of them, because of a particular session I’d had with my therapist when I was about six months pregnant.

  I’d gone in and found myself staring for the first time at her sand tray. It really is a tray of sand, on a stand, and beside it is a bookshelf with thousands of little figurines all lined up, everything imaginable: blown-glass kitties and dogs and birds, little matchbox cars, plastic palm trees, dollhouse things, a cocktail parasol, little religious symbols and people, Jesus and Mary and Shiva and the Buddha, a long rubber snake, lots more. What you do is stand there in front of the bookshelves, look at each figure, and take down those that call out to you somehow. You put them all in a little Easter basket, and take them to the sand tray, and arrange them in little scenes according to some mysterious right-brain processing. Then you tell your therapist what is going on in the scene and why each little icon is meaningful for you.

  Now, this is very scary stuff for a cerebral type, because it takes you to places you couldn’t get to on your own—it rolfs old body memories out of you. I mean, who needs it, right? It’s so much easier and more comfortable to stay at one’s current level of mental illness. But on that particular day, I was given the willingness to work, and the desire to have some breakthroughs on Sam’s behalf so that he would have a model of what it means to be whole, to be really alive and present and capable of deep, healthy, abiding love.

  I’ve been going to this therapist, Rita, ever since I got sober, mostly because I had so many variations on the theme of low self-esteem, with conceitedness marbled in, the classic egomaniac with an inferiority complex. Or as Peg once put it, the piece of shit around which the world revolves. A couple of years ago Rita set the sand tray up in her office and explained how it worked, and for a long time I’d walk in, glance at it, and say, “I don’t want to do it today,” and she’d say, “That’s fine,” and I’d say, “Won’t be doing it today,” and she’d say, “Whatever.” And then finally, as I said, on this one afternoon not long before Sam was born, I walked in and looked over at it and said, “Well, I guess I’ll give it a shot today.” And she said, “Okay, good, that’s fine.”

  I took down six or seven figures—a cross right off the bat, because I figured a lot of dark family-secret stuff would be coming up, and the cross reminds me to stay in the light, to walk in
it and tell the truth. Then I picked out a daddy, a little girl, and some kitschy stuff from Japantown like a little ceramic bridge and teeny geisha dolls. My dad was born and raised in Tokyo by Christian missionaries (he was a lifelong atheist—sometimes these things, like alcoholism, skip a generation). I grew up with a lot of little Japanese artifacts and paintings around, not to mention a psychologically abused father. I also selected a tiny box of Band-Aids like you’d buy for a little kid who has a dollhouse; it was the size of a lima bean, and I included it in my scene.

  Rita asked, “Do you know why the Band-Aids are so important to you? And why, after two years of viewing the sand tray as if it might be about to blow us both up, you include them in your first go?”

  By then my throat was so constricted that I couldn’t talk, and I couldn’t quite figure out why until I remembered that Dad gave Mom a small and certain amount of money every month for groceries and household expenses. Because there was none extra, she couldn’t blow a couple of bucks on Band-Aids, especially since little kids love them so much and use them at every opportunity, like to accessorize. So when I was small, and got a cut or scraped knee or stubbed toe, and went to get a Band-Aid, there’d often be only those little tiny ones that are almost big enough to bandage a bee. It was one of the small things that made me grow up feeling scared, like I wasn’t being protected very well and I better not fall.

  I realized during that session that I wanted Sam to grow up with the sense that it’s safe to fall, that there’s enough of the important stuff in the world for him, including Band-Aids. I still secretly worry that there isn’t enough love, or money, or acclaim, and I have to do all I can to make sure I get my fair share. I’m not even sure there’s really enough God to go around. I worry that people, even friends, are sucking up my portion of fame, or God, or money, the way I used to snort up cocaine like an anteater, and I will be left with only the dregs, with only the shitty little baby Band-Aids. It’s so nuts, because my faith tells me the exact opposite, and my life, especially in the last ten years, has been one of great abundance and (possibly too much) attention. But anyway, after that session, I went straight to a drugstore and bought three economy-sized tins of Band-Aids.

  The long and the short of it is that when I cut Sam’s finger today, I thought, “Aha! Finally after thirty-five years of waiting, I can put one of those eentsy Band-Aids to work, even though we have three full tins at our disposal.” But it was useless on Sam’s finger; it wouldn’t stick. There was no glue on the goddamn tape, and just because I’m so wasted and fragile, I got kind of weepy, because the six hundred big Band-Aids we have are too big for him. Sam watched me very intently, like his business is just to take it all in because at some point one of the bigheads is going to explain some of the rules and procedures to him.

  We’re going to be experiencing cash-flow problems at some point fairly soon if something unexpected doesn’t come through. I saved up a bunch of money while I was pregnant, mostly by doing nonfiction pieces for various publications. Plus I get a thousand a month for a food review. Maybe we’ve got enough to last through the end of the year. But then, well, I don’t know. I’m not too worried yet. I know God hasn’t brought me this far to drop me on my head now. Plus, I mean, how bad can things get when you’ve got over six hundred Band-Aids? I’m sure Sam will be telling all this to a shrink someday, making me sound like a real crackpot, like some terrible cross between Squeaky Fromme and Howard Hughes in his last years, surrounded by all those boxes of Kleenex and latex gloves.

  SEPTEMBER 21

  My novel will be out in a few more weeks. The reviews in Publishers Weekly and Kirkus were both great. It all seems very far away. I can’t imagine that I’ll ever again have the stamina to write fiction. Writing is on my mind, though, today. It feels good to be writing this. The baby is sleeping. He was extremely hungry earlier, lunging for my breast like Ray Milland. It will be odd for him to have a writer for a parent. It was odd for me. I honestly did think that my father couldn’t hold down a regular job, that that’s why he worked at home at his typewriter. You’d hear him tapping away at dawn, but you could sleep through it until he woke us for breakfast. He was a wonderful storyteller. I wish I could talk to him about writing. He got sick and died right as I crossed the threshold into publication—he knew that Viking had bought my book, and he had read it and loved it. Then his brain started to get all gummed up.

  I think he believed that our job, the job of a writer, is not to get up and say, “Tomorrow, in battle, most of you will die.…” Instead, a writer must entertain the troops the night before. I think he believed that the best way to entertain the troops is to tell stories, and the ones that they seem to like the best are ones about themselves. You can tell sweet lies or bitter truths, and both seem to help, but it’s like Czeslaw Milosz said when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, “In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.”

  SEPTEMBER 22

  The county is in the middle of a terrible heat wave. It is very hot everywhere but in this house. The baby and I both have acne. In all other ways he is unspeakably beautiful. He has the hugest, roundest eyes you can imagine, like those old Keane paintings. His hair is dark brown and thick, and he has what Pammy calls pouty baby porno lips. It’s a very beautiful mouth, but all you see when you look at him are his eyes. They’re not quite human; they’re more like those of a gentle extraterrestrial.

  • • •

  He tries to sit up and I try to help him, but he slips down like a collapsible tin camp cup.

  The colic was very bad last night. Actually, it is bad almost every night now. Everyone is supportive and encouraging, but the colic still makes me feel like a shitty mother, not to mention impotent and lost and nuts. I can handle the crying for a long time, but then I feel like I’m going to fall over the precipice into total psychosis. Last night at midnight it occurred to me to leave him outside for the night, and if he survived, to bring him inside in the morning. Sort of an experiment in natural selection.

  It feels like I’m baby-sitting in the Twilight Zone. I keep waiting for the parents to show up because we are out of chips and Diet Cokes. The same few people come over all the time—Pammy, my brother Steve, Emmy, Peg, my mom and Aunt Pat, and Gertrud and Rex, who are our oldest family friends. They’ve been like relatives for over thirty years and have been selected to be Sam’s paternal grandparents (because I don’t think Sam’s dad ever mentioned us to his parents). Otherwise I am saying no to almost everything and everyone. This has become my specialty. My therapist, Rita, has convinced me that every time I say yes when I mean no, I am abandoning myself, and I end up feeling used or resentful or frantic. But when I say no when I mean no, it’s so sane and healthy that it creates a little glade around me in which I can get the nourishment I need. Then I help and serve people from a place of real abundance and health, instead of from this martyred mentally ill position, this open space in a forest about a mile north of Chernobyl.

  My brother stayed over the night before last, walked and danced with my poor gassy baby all night while I lay in the tub. Steve seems to adore being an uncle, even though the baby cries so much and has such terrible acne. Steve calls him Pizza Face.

  SEPTEMBER 27

  Every night between 8:30 and 12:30 Sam cries and is miserable. I have tried everything that all the baby books suggest, and it is not getting better. I feel so badly for him—I keep thinking about how hard it is for him here, especially compared to how easy and warm and floaty it was where he used to live. It’s nuts. I’m so tired that I could easily go to sleep at 8:30 and sleep for twelve hours, but instead I walk the sobbing baby and think my evil thoughts—Lady Macbeth as a nanny.

  SEPTEMBER 29

  Big day for Sam. He’s one month old. Pammy and Steve and I celebrated by giving him another real bath in his little plastic tub, which we set up in the living room, while listening to Toots and the Maytals on the boom box. He peed a
ll over me and into his bathwater just as the kitty walked past. She began rubbernecking with the most shocked and horrified expression on her face, clearly thinking, “Oh, my God, now I’ve seen everything.” I think she had just begun to get over the trauma of witnessing the shit storm that poured out of Sam on his first day home, was just beginning to put her life back together. Steve watched Sam pee, then put his hands on his hips and said rather fiercely, “You should make him drink it.”

  Sam does these fabulous nipple tricks now, lolling around at my nipple, pushing it in and out of his mouth with his tongue, sort of lackadaisically, like it’s a warm summer day and he doesn’t have much else to do but work over his wad of chewing tobacco. And Pammy noticed a new aspect of his bath personality. He doesn’t want us to think he’ll ever like it, but deep down, he may be starting to.

  • • •

  We were watching the news tonight while nursing, and I almost had to get up and leave the room when Bush came on. No one in the world hates George Bush as much as I do. (Who was it who said he looks like everybody’s first husband?) This is a true story: I was telling Sam how I feel about Bush and why someone once referred to him as “that preppy snot in the White House,” and I was saying that Sam really must grow up to be the leader of the rebel forces, and then I said to him, “Study that face for a second, listen to that whiny voice,” and Sam actually looked intently at the TV for a few moments, closed his eyes, and made the loudest, most horrible fart I’ve ever heard. I raised my fist in the air and said, “Yes! You got it.”