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!
