If there is one book that should be required reading for anyone going through their first pregnancy, it’s Annie Lamott’s Operating Instructions.
After reading 30 short pages, I feel more ready to have this baby than after all the parenting blogs, newsletters and expert columnists I’ve consumed over the last 11 weeks. Moreover, I haven’t ridden this crazy a roller coaster of emotions since, well, okay, since the mood swings of about three days ago.
Lamott – who wrote Bird By Bird and Hard Laughter among others – is pregnant at the beginning of this book. The baby’s father – a good friend and causal lover in her life at the time – wants nothing to do with this baby, and bails rapidly – but not before calling her 6-7 times a day to tell her “what a piece of shit” she is.
(This btw, is nothing like C, who is over the moon with joy about the bean.)
While pregnant, she obsesses – and I use this word lovingly – over the certain trauma that will surely befall her child in the cruel social clutches of junior high thirteen years from now. Holy shit! I’ve not been thinking at all about my baby’s junior high years yet … What kind of slacker mom am I?! 
Her relationship to spirit has fits and starts, too. She writes at one point, “I’m not even sure there’s really enough God to go around…”
And of course, she revels in the scatological truths of motherhood – something that resonates so deep and delightfully for me, that I know will keep me afloat. Lines like this one, after she’s brought the baby home for the first time:
[T]he kitty tore back into the house and ran up to the couch to check out the new arrival. In the next few seconds, with the kitty’s eyes on us, shit began spouting volcanically out of the baby’s bum, and I started calling for help. The shit just poured voluminously out of Sam while the kitty looked up at me with total horror and disgust like “You have got to be kidding, Annie, this one’s broken.”
Hallelujah!
flyingfabu said,
October 2, 2007 at 10:58 am
lol! i like that you haven’t quite thought of the bean’s teanage years. my friend with the 5 month old just brought up the topic of sex education to her future teen child.
we had to remind her she was only 5 months old. she does, thankfully, have a few years to work it out!
mama pajama said,
October 2, 2007 at 2:22 pm
Dare I ask how scatalogical truths resonate so deep and delightfully for you? And yes, have no fear, your future is full of this particular joy….
pregnantover40 said,
October 2, 2007 at 5:43 pm
lol flyingfabu – i wonder if there’s some kind of immersion learning – like you know how if you speak spanish all the time when the kid is a tot, he grows up knowing spanish? maybe there’s some way to apply this to the sex ed thing…?
pregnantover40 said,
October 2, 2007 at 5:50 pm
mama pajama – great to know a poopy future is secure! i hope it’s as funny in person as it is in print. Uh, heh. I am not sure how the scatological got such a fastpass to my funny bone. Poop is just hilarious. Even the word is hilarious, dont you think? Poop poop poop. hahahha!