Some Assembly Required

I just finished listening to Anne Lamott's new book SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED. The audio version is read by Anne Lamott and her son, with whom she also wrote the book. It was great to hear Sam's participation in the book; Sam, whom we met in OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS as an infant.

              

I devoured OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS years ago, even though my children were both past babyhood when I read it.

Being a mom with a baby (and then having another baby and a toddler) was hard for me. My tendency was to dissolve into the role of mother and caretaker. When my children were infants, they needed my body (and it felt like my soul) so completely. It was hard for me to extricate my Self from the role of mother and keep track of who I was.

But then they got older. And more independent. (yay!) I taught school. My kids went to school. (yay!) And now they are in their 20's, and my son is engaged to his wonderful fiance.

Anne Lamott didn't sugarcoat the realities of having an infant, which I greatly appreciated. Though she has struggles with how best to be present in Sam and Amy and Jax's lives, as she did with how to be a good mom to Sam, what comes through loud and clear is her love for Sam and Amy and Jax.

Anne Lamott starts SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED being surprised and concerned to find out that her 19 year old son, Sam, is going to be a father with his girlfriend, Amy. At the same time she is excited to welcome this new being into her world.

...having a child ends any feelings of complacency one might ever have and I knew what Sam was in for. It was like having a terminal illness, but in a good way.

I love how she puts things.

One of the things she struggles with is finding the balance between wanting to tell Sam and Amy what to do in any given situation, at the same time realizing that she can't control a situation, that Sam and Amy have to figure it out for themselves...

Amy and Sam seemed to be in a good place when I got back, but demented with jet lag, I had to grip myself by the wrist not to pitch one good idea after another at them. I didn't say, 'Let's find some great day care for Jax so Amy can work part-time', but I writhed with the effort to stay silent. I almost offered to babysit twice a week to this end, but didn't. Since Jax's birth, my ideas about what would be best for everyone usually got in the way. Life is already an obstacle course, and when you're adding your own impediments (thinking they're helping), you really crazy it up. You make it harder to even just cross the room. You should not bring more items and hurdles to the obstacle course.

Indeed.

Having children is messy and hard. And wonderful.

Lamott talks about how grandparenthood allows her to not be so caught up in the 24/7 intensity of the survival and well-being of a child that one has to be as a parent. She says that being a grandmother allows her to see her grandson, Jax, and his growth in softer focus. I think I will like this grandmother gig when it comes.

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Mathilda Savitch

Why do we read books? To be entertained, to learn about other people and places, to learn about ourselves, to be shocked or scared or thrilled or... delighted.

Mathilda Savitch was a delight. Reading this reminded me of reading Mark Haddon's Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime and Garth Stein's The Art of Racing in the Rain. I was enthralled by Christopher and Enzo and so eager to see how each of those characters interacted with their world, and so I was with Mathilda.

As Christopher and Enzo did in their respective books, Mathilda narrates in her own unique voice. Mathilda is a preteen (-ish, we don't really know) whose sister was killed after being pushed in front of a train. She is trying to make sense of her life after the tragedy, wondering how she fits into her family now that her sister is dead, how could Helene actually be GONE, as she also searches for the man who killed her. Her parents are emotionally absent, wrapped up in their own grief. That all sounds rather grim, but Mathilda comes up with her own, often very un-grim ways of sorting things out and thinking about things. Her observations are often spot on, sometimes poignant, sometimes hilarious, sometimes both at the same time.

She goes into a Catholic church on a weekday and meets a nun...

     I ask her if she knows any prayers. Which makes her laugh for some reason.
     "Oh yes," she says. She says she knows quite a few. She walks over to one of the rows and picks up a red book in a little book-holder built right into the bench. She opens the red book to a particular page and points to something. "This is a good one," she says.
     I move a little closer to her. She hands me the book, but I'm not about to audition for her.
     "Do you ever say something that's not from the book?" I ask her.
     "Like what?" she says.
     "Just something you made up,", I say. "Your own thing. Like stories."
     "No," she says. "What kind of stories?"
     "I don't know," I say. "About whatever's bothering you."
     "If you say the words of the prayer," she says, "things won't bother you so much. That's why you say them."
     "But they're not my words," I say.
     "Yes, they are," she says, "they're everyone's words."
     She was a lunatic, I decided. You'd almost have to be in her profession.

She talks about mothers...

"Ma's not even here and still she's everywhere. Mothers are like that. When it comes to biology, mothers are a real problem. They stick to you because you have a lot of their cells and everything. It's worse than a monster movie."

And...

"Books again. I could scream. I mean, I like books just fine, but I don't want to make a career out of it."

I laughed out loud when I read this line in the first couple of pages. It was funny to me because it is in the beginning of HER book (and therefore perhaps a contradiction), and mostly I laughed because I DO want to make books my career. I guess maybe I already have.

Tweak and Imperfect Endings

I'm reading Nic Sheff's Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines, Nic's gritty memoir about his drug addiction and the beginning of his recovery. His father wrote a companion book, Beautiful Boy, about being the dad of a drug abuser. I read Beautiful Boy over a year ago and am appreciating seeing both sides of the story, one from the person who is addicted, and the other from a loved one watching.

Both are fascinating, and both are helpful to me as I train drug and alcohol counselors who work with abusers. (I use the book I wrote (ISBN: 9780595342051) to help drug and alcohol counselors deal with their clients' religion and spirituality.)

As many memoirs about abuse, it is often hard to read, hard to see someone, even from the distance of reading their book, in such a horrific circumstances.




I just finished reading Zoe Fitzgerald Carter's Imperfect Endings, a book coming out this month. Carter describes her mother's wish to end her life after suffering for years with debilitating illness, and her mother's hope that her daughters will help her decide exactly how to end her life and be there for the death itself. Not living in Oregon (the only state that allows assisted suicide in circumstances like this), her mother faces additional challenges in actually how to carry out her wishes.

I wanted to see how this daughter navigated this often scary and ultimately courageous decision, knowing that I might make the same decision someday (if I were to have a debilitating illness. which I don't.).

Carter goes into detail about her own fears about losing her mother, mostly not wanting her mother to want to die. She describes her childhood and her mother's childhood, hoping to gain insight into her own fears as well as why her mother might make this decision, as well as her mother's inclination to include her daughters in what might be a grisly process.

I absolutely agree with her mother's choice to end her life on her terms. Her illnesses guaranteed more pain and less dignity as it progressed, and she wanted to die before the pain and other effects of the illnesses (dementia, for one) got so bad she didn't feel as though she was able to be herself anymore.

This is an interesting (and unintended) pairing of books for this post...Tweak, about a young man who was going to die if he kept up his life of addiction, and Imperfect Endings, about a woman who chose to die on her own terms.

One argument addicts make (and Nic is no exception), is that it is THEIR life to throw away if they so choose. Why should anyone stop them if they want to keep using their drugs? If it kills them, then it kills them, and they argue that they are making a conscious decision, knowing that a life of drugs might kill them.

Yet Nic has a choice every day about whether to stay clean and to get healthy. Granted, it's an incredibly hard choice, one that seems monumental to make with the disease of addiction. Zoe's mother's debilitating illness offer her no choices. There is nothing she can do to make herself healthy. Medications might help some of the symptoms for a time, but nothing can reverse the progression of the diseases.

With both of these books, the story propelled my reading, more so than the quality of the writing. Sheff writes in that fragmented, broken way, jumping from one event to another, which seems to reflect his meth use. He holds nothing back, and sometimes the details are hard to read (digging for veins, prostituting himself). Carter's writing is much clearer, and there are insightful passages.

(Probably my favorite is when she describes her sister's penchant for labeling personality disorders, but mostly it talks about how she herself deals with pain...

"Her diagnoses of people tend to go through phases - borderline personality disorder, passive aggression, sugar addiction - and I wonder if trauma is her current favorite.
"Not that I don't find labels reassuring. naming the pain means holding it away from you, labeled and contained, instead of allowing it to wreak its havoc inside you like some rogue strand of DNA quietly lethal."

...maybe it was just insightful to me...I also find labels reassuring, my theory is that if I name it, then I can look at it and deal with it. This sometimes works well, sometimes not.)

We're all gonna die. Both books talk about how the choices we make affect how we die, but mostly the choices reflect how we're going to live.