TBR: Operating Instructions
On one of my lists recently, someone asked what was the parenting book that you couldn’t live without. Lots of people suggested books with advice about getting your baby to sleep, or what to feed them, or how to talk to them. My choice was Operating Instructions, by Anne Lamott. It’s not an advice book, but just a memoir, in journal format of her first year of parenting following an unplanned pregnancy.
I picked this book because I truly think it kept me sane as a new parent. Because it reassured me that it was perfectly normal to feel tired, overwhelmed, frustrated, and inadequate, and that none of these things made me a bad mother. And it did so without being whiny and made me laugh out loud more times than I could could count, as well as cry.
Lamott also manages to talk about all this without ever losing sight of the wonder and magic of parenting. Many books that attempt to show the "dark side" of parenting — Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work and Naomi Wolf’s Misconceptions come to mind — make you wonder why anyone would ever willingly choose to have children. The joys of parenting shine through Operating Instructions. I actually gave it to my husband to read when we were discussing whether to have children — I figured it would be a good sign if it didn’t scare him off.
One of my recurring themes on this blog is the question: "Where are the fathers?" Sam’s father is totally absent from Operating Instructions. Lamott writes "The baby’s father was dramatically less excited than I was to find out I was pregnant, so much so that I have not seen or heard from him in months and don’t expect to ever again" but she is never dismissive of the role of fathers. In a haunting passage, she imagines Sam talking with the child of friends of hers, who was born without a left arm, and comparing the holes in each of their lives. A few years ago, Lamott wrote on Salon about how Sam’s father is now part of his life, which is lovely to hear.
Operating Instructions isn’t an advice book — the joke in the title is, of course, that babies don’t come with manuals — but it does have some good advice. The most important advice she gives is that it’s ok, even good, to ask for help. Married or single, young or old, parenting is just too big a job to do without help. And that help might take the form of someone cooking you a meal, or it might just mean that someone takes a walk with you and the baby and gets you out of the messy house for 15 minutes.
November 17th, 2004 at 9:25 am
I agree completely. After my son was born, Operating Instructions was a constant source of inspiration, hope, laughter, and, most important, validation that what I was experiencing was not abnormal. When my daughter was born, I read the book again. It seems that I needed to hear those messages just one more time!
I always recommend this book to new parents.