Anne Lamott

Because on top of everything else, on top of the Gerber moments playing
side by side with cancer scares, the slow-motion rides on the merry-go-round
in a double bill with your child missing at Safeway, there was a tiredness
beyond all imagining. It’s like the last day of a speed binge, but about half
the time. It’s almost like combat exhaustion, the all-nighters with a sick
kid, with a colicky infant or a toddler with an ear infection at midnight; a
grind-’em-up endgame battle, the third day of the Battle at Gettysburg with
Gen. Pickett relentlessly charging the Union soldiers. You are the fixed
line of Union soldiers; unrelenting neediness is the Confederate general.

Now, I’m an intelligent woman and I understood that having a child was
not going to improve a lifetime of poor sleep. But I had been led to believe
that maybe for the first year or so you’re up every few hours in the
middle of the night, but after that you’re only up when they’re croupy, or have a
nightmare.

This sense of short-term tiredness turns out not to be the case.

I’d been sleeping poorly long before I had a child. I always had trouble
drifting off, and whenever I needed to get up early — school, jobs,
etc. — I went through the day feeling vaguely hungover. But usually if I
couldn’t fall asleep, I could at least make up for it by sleeping in. I wasn’t
able to consistently fall asleep before midnight until I discovered
barbiturates in my early 20s, although “fall asleep” is
perhaps a misnomer. Let’s say they caused awareness to end. Sometimes I was
so drunk when I took a sleeping pill that boyfriends would say incredulously
that I would be in a vegetative coma by morning, drool trickling down the
sides of my mouth, but I’d think, “Gee, you make that sound like a bad thing.”

So nine years ago I had this beautiful child, and we survived colic and
ear infections and croup and fevers, and after that first erratic year he was
one of those kids who would sleep in. I couldn’t believe my good fortune,
that he was not one of those early risers who want to bound out of bed at 6
a.m. and begin a new day. I really cannot stand that in a child. Often I
stay up writing until quite late at night, and then I’m unable to fall asleep
until 2 or 3 or 4. So I’ve always needed to sleep a bit in order to
function. The difference between having to get up at 7 and 8 is — besides an
hour — the difference between bloodshot flu symptoms and just feeling a little
tired. A little tired I can do; it’s actually one of the things I do best. I
found a preschool that started at 9, and a little Christian kindergarten
that started at 9. Then, miraculously, it turned out that the public school
where he has gone since first grade had a Late Bird/Early Bird schedule
through third grade, and Late Birds did not start till 9:15.

So all those years, if I had a horrific night of insomnia, I could at
least sleep until just before 8, and Sam would sleep too, and we’d get up and
have a relatively dopey morning together, which was great.

But this year he started fourth grade, and all the fourth graders are
Early Birds. I guess it’s good for them to get up nice and early in
preparation for the factory jobs they’ll no doubt hold one day. So I
started getting up at 6:45 to turn on the heat and make a pot of coffee for me
and a cup of cocoa for Sam, and have a few moments of quiet before having to
get Sam up, fed and dressed. It was so disappointing to lose that languid
quality of our first nine years together that I almost considered home schooling, or
plugging Sam into some existing hippie spiritual survivalists out in the
valley, or maybe a nice Christian militia group that started at 9. But
Sam loves his friends at school and has had fantastic teachers every step of
the way, and I believe in public school and know it’s where we’re
supposed to be.

- – - – - – - – - -

But I’m so tired these days. I am still often awake in the middle of the
night, agitated because I know I have to get up so early. The jungle drums
beat and I flop around on the bed and read and pray, meditate and pray and
read and flop around. When I come face to face with God in heaven someday, I
am going to bow down and then I am going to shout, “What were you thinking?”
In the meantime I’d like to point out that some of the world’s worst people
are some of the best sleepers: You show me someone like Tom DeLay, and I’ll
show you someone who falls asleep easily and then stays asleep all night — and
then is mean about it, passive-aggressive, sing-songy: “My head hits the
pillow and I am out. Ha ha ha ha.” As if this speaks of some deep, hard-won inner peace.

So. The other night I had a worse time than usual. I was channeling
Edgar Allan Poe till 3:30, tortured and skittish, up every half hour for milk,
or to pee, reading grimly in between. Finally, finally, I fell asleep, but
when the alarm went off at 6:45, I felt like I had tsutsugamushi disease — dreaded Japanese river fever. Sam came bounding into my room. I said, “Honey, I
didn’t get any sleep. I feel awful. Do you think you could make your own
cocoa, put on the TV and I’ll get up soon?”

And he said, “Oh, sure.” He looked very pleased to be trusted. He knows
how to make cocoa in the microwave, he knows where the whipped cream is kept.
He’s such a cool kid, and he’s getting so grown-up: He knows his multiplication tables;
he eats salad; he mousses his hair. So I drifted back to sleep. I heard
the TV go on, and I called to him, “Did you get your cocoa?” And he said,
“Yes, Mama. You just sleep. I’m fine.”

I slept for half an hour or so and woke up at 7:15.

“How’s it going?” I called.

“Just fine.”

“Did you drink your cocoa?”

“Yes. You just take care of yourself, Mama.” I thought, This is so
great; Jimmy Carter lives at my house now. I also thought about getting up
but didn’t have it in me. So I said, “Could you get breakfast, too?”

“Sure,” he said. “What should I get?”

I named a bunch of foods he likes and told him where they were. “And
there are pears by the sink, all washed and ready to eat.”

“Wow, great,” he said. “Can I cut them with a knife?”

I thought this over and almost got up: You have to be careful with Sam,
who loves sharp things. When he was 5, he tore inside one day, yelling,
“Mama, Mama, do we have a chain saw?” But he’s careful with knives now, and it
seemed like incentive to get him to eat the pear, so I said, “Sure, a small
knife.”

“OK,” he said. “A small knife. You can sleep a little more.”

I have waited a long time for him to talk this way to me. Most of the
time you’d think he was at a truck stop, where I’ve already introduced
myself — “Hi, I’m Annie. I’ll be your mother today.” When he says, “Do we
have any string cheese?” it means, of course, go get me some. Sometimes I do,
because I’m happy when he’s hungry for healthy food. Sometimes I bristle,
remembering Roseanne once saying that her husband and kids would always ask
her if there were chips or sodas, as if her uterus were a tracking device.
But: “You can sleep a little more.”

I mean, I ask you.

I woke up again around 7:30 and felt like I might be able to get up
soon. I didn’t have to make him lunch, as it was Pizza Day, and it was
another parent’s day to drive. I called out, “How’s it going in there?”

He said, “Just great.”

“You are doing such a great job, Sam. I’m so proud of you. But could
you do one more thing? Could you get yourself dressed? You know where
everything is — and I’ll get up and help you get your shoes on.”

“OK, Mama.”

A minute later, I asked, “Did you find your shorts?”

“Yep.”

This was just boggling my mind. He was out there acting like a real,
high-functioning person, instead of like the pencil man who sits outside
Macy’s on his dolly. I fantasized about letting him get himself ready on
mornings when I wasn’t driving the car pool. I could sleep in two or three
times a week, and, in the bargain, he’d be assuming more responsibility for
his own care. The women or men in his future would thank me forever for not
raising an entitled, wait-on-me guy.

I closed my eyes, then bolted awake at 7:50, 10 minutes before he gets
picked up, and while tearing around my room looking for my pants, I suddenly
stopped. Duh! Why was I tearing around like this? He had eaten, he was all
dressed, it was Pizza Day.

So I smiled and went out to greet the day and my big grown-up son. Who
was sitting on the couch wearing only his underpants and drinking a root beer.

“Hi, Mama,” he said. “How you feeling?”

So in the 10 minutes left to get him fed and dressed, I tore around
like the Roadrunner, flinging shorts and a shirt and socks his way, putting
together breakfast he could eat on the ride to school — a box of juice, the
string cheese and pear I thought he’d already eaten. But then I started
laughing, and he started laughing too, and we had a very sweet, very rushed
few minutes together. He’s just who he is; he won’t be who I try to get him
to be. And that’s (sometimes) so great, and I (sometimes) love that so much.
When he left, I crawled into his bed and pulled his blanket over me. It is
flannel, a Southwestern design in rose, blue and dark green. He calls it his
Moko Koko blanket and — maybe he’s not such a great big boy after all — does not
like to go to sleep without it. He says it helps you fall asleep, so I
wrapped it all around me and took a little nap.

And that Obama is nothing if not brilliant. This guy has had some liberal victories legislatively, and when word of these victories — the realities of healthcare, financial reform, student loan reform, etc. — trickles out, we will have pride and stamina again. We will experience grace again, the grace of generosity to the underdog; the grace of second winds, and psychic WD-40. The grace of unseen water wings.

I say, buckle up, buckeroos and buckerinas. Fingers crossed and heads high. Once more into the breach. Also, figure out how you, in your area, can help mobilize the Latino vote. We owe Harry Reid to Hispanic outrage and get-out-the-vote efforts — send someone money today. (I love Mi Familia Vota, but there are organizations in every state.) Or go somewhere nearby and register Latino voters, and the youth, who accidentally forgot to show up on Tuesday — the “yout,” to quote the great Joe Pesci in “My Cousin Vinnie.” Help whip up the Youts for 2012. Lots to do! Kids to mentor, wars to protest, homeless people to help through the coming winter night. Time to rest and get ready.

So goodnight, moon. Goodnight, long national nightmare of the last two months, when it looked like we might lose John Dingell, and Barney Frank, and HAR-RY. Good night, Carl Paladino, with your cute red bat! Goodnight, Christine O’Donnell, with your election night list of demands — fabulous! I don’t know a living writer who could have thought that up, or the “I Am not a Witch” campaign. Maybe the late, great Terry Southern? But anyway, excellent — and goodnight. Goodnight, Dino Rossi, but can we keep the name? And goodnight, icky Meg Whitman, thank you from the bottom of my heart for not being my new governor. Money and power and ego can’t buy ya love, huh? Does that suck, or WHAT? And we all know what it’s like to spend money unwisely — who among us does not have some crazy purchase in our closet or drawer and garage right now? The stories I could tell — the blisters, the eyeglass frames that look so adorable on Justin Timberlake. Oh well, good night, Meg; and thank you for your courage, Meg Whitman’s housekeeper. And good night, Joe Sestak — but DON’T go very far away. You’re the real thing. Good night, Joe Miller, even with all those rascally votes still to count. But goodnight, and thank you for sharing.

Let’s all go have some well-earned rest. A new day dawns.

I’m not thinking of the San Francisco Giants here, although I have been following them with love and a sick stomach for most of my 56 years. This year they are almost certainly going to the Series, a great and unique team. Yet some of my earliest memories are of coming into the kitchen of the small coffee-colored house we rented in the late ’50s, to find my parents and older brother seated around the radio, with their arms folded across their stomachs. They’d be doubled over with worry as the Giants seemed poised once again to throw away victory, blowing a comeback at the last possible minute.

I’m not thinking about how much being a lifelong Giants fan is like having been a lifelong Democrat — they are both such beautiful teams, from the Willies May and McCovey in that coffee-colored house, to Tim Lincecum and Pablo Sandoval; from Adlai Stevenson to Lynn Woolsey and Russ Feingold. They have taught me that when it comes to playoff games and midterm elections, you can’t let your hopes get too high — but of course you do, and once again, the Giants or the Democrats break your heart — or totally, hilariously kick butt.

The Giants are usually described as rag tag, kind of a great garage sale team, and the Democrats are described as the Mommies to the Republican Daddies; and everyone hates the mommies, but wait, wait — I didn’t intend to get into the pathos and thrill of being a Democratic Giants fan. There is a certain delusional nobility in the wild ride.

And I’m not even thinking of a recent discussion I had with my Sunday School kids, about how when we as individuals or nations get so terribly lost, we have prophets to call us back. The prophets aren’t like the guys on Christian radio, predicting the end of the world for sometime next Thursday, right after lunch. They are truth tellers, lights, Dr. King or Nelson Mandela, calling us back to decency, sanity, to each person being treated exactly the same.

All I started out to say was that I remember so many matches I played as a junior tennis star, when I got off to a bad start, and was losing big time to someone I either should have been able to beat, or needed to beat to keep up my ranking. My opponent was frequently an awful arrogant, stupid person, which I say without judgment. It was simple reality — most competitive tennis players in my day were privileged, spoiled, entitled and white. Also, many of them were beautiful, fit, tan and of good stock — great big hair and white teeth and long legs. Then there were the rest of us.

Future Democrats, and Giants fans.

Anyway, you’d be losing by a set and a service break, say 6-3, 4-1, to an athlete whose practice partner has come to watch her, and whose father was hiding behind a bush nearby, giving her hand signals (whereas your pathetic Giants-and-Adlai-Stevenson-fan father has such bad nerves that he couldn’t even watch you play, even when you were in the finals). Your stomach ached, but you held serve, 4-2. Then, about to serve for 5-2, your opponent got a little cocky, began wondering who was winning the match over on court 12, which would be her next opponent on the march to the finals. And so your opponent double-faulted. Love-15. And because you had nothing to lose, and the game was surely over, and you did not have much of a chance, let alone great hair, long legs and braces on your future perfect white choppers, you secretly got back in the game. You secretly dared to hope.

When your nonplussed opponent crossed over to ace you from the backhand side, you’d nick one of your stealth serial killer moves with your eyes looking away quickly. Then she caught your eye as she aimed at a spot on your service court. You flicked your eyes over to the left, and it threw her. She served long, and her second serve is weak, and you suddenly have the advantage, because you have nothing to lose. And you rallied hard for, and eventually won the point.

Now it’s love-30, and your opponent starts to fall apart. Her nerves fail her, and her left arm on the next toss is as herky-jerky as a tennis ball machine, and she actually has to change down the toss to hit it, or do it over. She’s reduced to pushing in her serve, and you make winners. And she begins to come apart like a two-dollar watch. She’s grinding down those teeth, and her father is losing his mind in the hydrangeas, signaling for her either to serve as hard as she can, or smash in your head at the net. You can’t tell, but he’s furious. Oh, well. Ha ha, as we Christians like to say.

I won a lot of matches when there was almost no hope, and even less time, and it always started with winning one point here, and one point there. It always depended on not giving up, on getting my focus and courage back. It was the greatest feeling on earth, and, I imagine, it would still be so today, to take such a risk, and God only knows, maybe prevail.

But Mother’s Day celebrates a huge lie about the value of women: that mothers are superior beings, that they have done more with their lives and chosen a more difficult path. Ha! Every woman’s path is difficult, and many mothers were as equipped to raise children as wire monkey mothers. I say that without judgment: It is, sadly, true. An unhealthy mother’s love is withering.

The illusion is that mothers are automatically happier, more fulfilled and complete. But the craziest, grimmest people this Sunday will be the mothers themselves, stuck herding their own mothers and weeping children and husbands’ mothers into seats at restaurants. These mothers do not want a box of chocolate. These mothers are on a diet.

I hate the way the holiday makes all non-mothers, and the daughters of dead mothers, and the mothers of dead or severely damaged children, feel the deepest kind of grief and failure. The non-mothers must sit in their churches, temples, mosques, recovery rooms and pretend to feel good about the day while they are excluded from a holiday that benefits no one but Hallmark and See’s. There is no refuge — not at the horse races, movies, malls, museums. Even the turn-off-your-cellphone announcer is going to open by saying, “Happy Mother’s Day!” You could always hide in a nice seedy bar, I suppose. Or an ER.

It should go without saying that I also hate Valentine’s Day.

Mothering has been the richest experience of my life, but I am still opposed to Mother’s Day. It perpetuates the dangerous idea that all parents are somehow superior to non-parents. (Meanwhile, we know the worst, skeeviest, most evil people in the world are CEOs and politicians who are proud parents.)

Don’t get me wrong: There were times I could have literally died of love for my son, and I’ve felt stoned on his rich, desperate love for me. But I bristle at the whispered lie that you can know this level of love and self-sacrifice only if you are a parent. We talk about “loving one’s child” as if a child were a mystical unicorn. Ninety-eight percent of American parents secretly feel that if you have not had and raised a child, your capacity for love is somehow diminished. Ninety-eight percent of American parents secretly believe that non-parents cannot possibly know what it is to love unconditionally, to be selfless, to put yourself at risk for the gravest loss. But in my experience, it’s parents who are prone to exhibit terrible self-satisfaction and selfishness, who can raise children as adjuncts, like rooms added on in a remodel. Their children’s value and achievements in the world are reflected glory, necessary for these parents’ self-esteem, and sometimes, for the family’s survival. This is how children’s souls are destroyed.

But my main gripe about Mother’s Day is that it feels incomplete and imprecise. The main thing that ever helped mothers was other people mothering them; a chain of mothering that keeps the whole shebang afloat. I am the woman I grew to be partly in spite of my mother, and partly because of the extraordinary love of her best friends, and my own best friends’ mothers, and from surrogates, many of whom were not women at all but gay men. I have loved them my entire life, even after their passing.

No one is more sentimentalized in America than mothers on Mother’s Day, but no one is more often blamed for the culture’s bad people and behavior. You want to give me chocolate and flowers? That would be great. I love them both. I just don’t want them out of guilt, and I don’t want them if you’re not going to give them to all the people who helped mother our children. But if you are going to include everyone, then make mine something like M&M’s, and maybe flowers you picked yourself, even from my own garden, the cut stems wrapped in wet paper towels, then tin foil and a waxed-paper bag from my kitchen drawers. I don’t want something special. I want something beautifully plain. Like everything else, it can fill me only if it is ordinary and available to all.

Anne Lamott’s latest novel is “Imperfect Birds.”

I mean no offense, but the belief that Snowe’s vote made the bill bipartisan was delusional from the start. It was exactly the sort of thing my mother would have come up with — and she was from Liverpool. I rest my case: Those of us with English parents faithfully attend special 12-step meetings to break through the uniquely English forms of denial. The vote of one extremely withholding woman — and I say that without judgment — never changed the nature of the bill, no matter how much you and your staff convinced yourselves it did. It is a Democratic bill — a quintessentially Democratic bill, in that it’s about trying to help those in need. It is about fairness, decency and the common good, the values most Americans were raised on. But you can’t even mention those words and ideals these days without getting laughed at by the Republican leadership — or, worse, tea-bagged.

A great pastor in New York City once said that if you wanted to get into heaven, you needed a letter of recommendation from the poor. Teddy Kennedy got his. So did Lincoln, FDR, Shirley Chisholm. And now it’s up to you.

To get Ms. Snowe’s mingy vote, you would have needed to include her little pet rock, the trigger option. But the trigger option was the emperor’s new clothes. Perhaps a more precise way of saying this is that the trigger option was a figment, a dodge from greatness. My mother would have called it a “crock.” My 20-year-old son, “Totally bogus.”

I am not saying that continuing to waste our time — while people die every day from lack of healthcare — will keep you out of heaven, although you may get an inferior seat, possibly in the room serving only nursery snacks. How will you face Teddy if you muff this historic moment? Do you think he will share his eclairs with you? His brie?

It’s OK that you wanted Ms. Snowe’s vote so desperately, but the truth is that she was getting high on not giving it to you. She was getting a hit, like a junkie, from withholding. Believe me, I have dated men like her. She had a chance to participate in greatness, which does not happen all that often anymore in American politics, but the possibility is there now — for you, for us, for our country.

A huge majority of people in America and specifically in Maine want the public option. For a few months there, she had the power to kill it. Dude, what was that about? Was it some form of Kabuki theater, wherein you knew she would never give you her vote, but you needed to pretend she might for another week? Was it a multilevel chess game that all the people who voted for you were too dumb to figure out? She didn’t want decent medical care for the poor and middle class: She wanted power. She, like so many of us, is hungry for what she is not giving — for generosity of spirit, the only thing that can fill us up. And yet, she chooses to withhold, this woman who happens to have great government healthcare. I bet she and her extended family never worry when they get sick, or even when they need psychiatric care. Not to mention dental, which just kills me to think about — me and my family, with our terrible English teeth.

So we’ve lost two or three months to that business. And now we have Lieberman. In some ways, he’s even worse, because of — well, you know — the voice.

We do not personally blame you for the fact that we have to listen to him. It’s political life, on political life’s terms. And maybe his therapist or rabbi will help staunch his latest episode of swerving sickness. But recently on “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the great Jane Hamsher compared the healthcare debate to a beauty contest in which the contestants who feel ignored start stripping and said that, at some point, one of the directors will convince Lieberman to put his shirt back on. So I am wondering, why can’t that be you? Why can’t you do what Leon on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” keeps urging Larry to do? Take him the ruckus.

Use your most reliable parenting skills: Joe Lieberman is acting like a petulant, icky little kid — I say that with love. Use those classic parental standbys, bribes and threats. Back-channel him. Try reverse psychiatry — “Thank God you stepped in, Joe. Otherwise, we would have been responsible for all those slacker poor people. All those feverish babies and children. All those English expats, with their bad teeth.” If that doesn’t work, maybe you could just remind him of the famous story from 15 years ago, that family with a 5-year-old girl with leukemia who needed blood in massive quantities to stay alive. You remember: Everyone in her family except her older brother was tested and found to be incompatible. But the boy was afraid of having blood drawn in order to test it, and his parents respected him enough to let him come to the decision by himself.

One day he came to them and told them he was ready. They took him to the doctor, his blood was tested, and it was an almost exact match with his little sister. So the two of them were put on beds side by side in a hospital room, and the nurses withdrew blood from his arm, and let it flow into his sister’s. He lay with his eyes closed, in silence for the entire procedure, until the doctor gripped his shoulder and asked how he was doing. The boy opened his eyes.

“How soon ’til I start to die?” he asked.

This kind of profound and innocent moral courage is the most attractive characteristic a person can display, especially a politician. It is time for you to come out vigorously and loudly for Harry Reid by getting your people in line. Reid has managed, with a lot of help from liberals and progressives and too much time lost, to whip most of the Senate Democrats behind what you campaigned for. Now it is time for you to roar. Ms. Snowe and Joe can still choose greatness, too: They have free will, and they may surprise us all. Or, hey, while we are at it, why not hit up George Voinovich? He is not running for reelection and is — or should be — rooting around for a legacy. Otherwise, people will scratch their heads while trying to remember who he was. “Oh, Voinovich? Wasn’t he the guy up on Laurel who had to tent his house for termites?” He could go out a hero, by simply doing what public servants are supposed to do — stand up for the people, for greatness, for compassion, fairness and the common good.

So again I ask you, do the right thing, and do it now. Shoot the moon, Boss: right between the eyes. 

Another troubling thing: I do not know when you first began to insist that Sarah Palin’s baby boy would need to appear before one of your panels, but I can tell you this, Mr. President, it is not going to fly with the American people. If you are going to try to ram the death panels through Congress, I have three words of advice: Easy does it. Certainly there are people we can all agree are of borderline value. For instance, there is this guy I know named Harold who is a total monster. Everyone hates him. No matter how friendly we are to him, he never returns our greetings, but instead gives us the stink-eye, and a sneer. It is hard for me to believe that even Jesus would argue on his behalf at one of your panels. But the little Palin baby? No way, no how.

There would need to be a system of checks and balances so that we could all rest assured that favoritism was not a part of determining who would receive healthcare. Some people would say that if someone more closely resembled an Alturien than an American citizen, that person might be considered for the death pile. But that strikes me as being very cavalier. Life is precious, Mr. President, and just because somebody’s appearance makes you think of space aliens and anal probes rather than car seats and root beer, it is no reason to throw them away, as you have proposed. Obviously, if there is going to be a lot of killing going on in your healthcare program, panels would have to be made up of people with impeccable credentials. Otherwise, this would be a real deal-breaker for a lot us. For God’s sake, what if someone like Harold ends up as a judge on the panel, instead of coming before it, like the little Palin baby, or someone’s perfectly good grandparents?

This death panel of yours will require people of sensitivity, fairness, efficiency and patience. And that is why I would like to volunteer to serve: I am fair, fast and fun. Mr. President, I am at your service.

Best wishes,

Anne Lamott