Monday, May 12, 2008
In an exclusive excerpt from her new book, "Plan B," Anne Lamott writes about the difficulty and beauty of mothering a teenager.
Mar 3, 2005 | If I could only write one more story in my whole life, it would be this one:
Sam's wrestling practice got canceled one recent afternoon, and he was driving me crazy with his pent-up energy. I was puttering and picking up the house, which is my main spiritual practice, and he kept ambushing me with demands for food, or attention, and demonstrations of wrestling menace -- grabbing at me as if to put me in a hammer hold, or coming at me as if to pile-drive me into the kitchen floor like Hulk Hogan: "I'm not going to hurt you," he kept reassuring me, like a serial killer, flinging his leg around the backs of my knees so that I was afraid they would buckle. I'm 50, but already I'm turning into an old dog, with poor vision, dysplasia, achy knees, a weak back and flatulence, while he's raw, robust animal health. Something in him wants to flip me, pile-drive me into the ground, Samoan-drop me into the carpet. I put up puny Rose Kennedy dukes, and asked him if he wanted to go for a hike on the mountain. He said yes.
He's 2 inches taller than me now. The other day he gave me a goodnight hug, and noticed that he was looking down into my eyes.
"Wow," he said, stepping back to look down at me. "When did this happen? You're like a little gnome to me now."
I am shrinking and he is shooting up, but we both feel no different than children, and we both get a lot of exercise. I am positive of only a few things in life, but one is that if you want to have a decent middle and old age, you have to get exercise almost every day. All the older people who are thriving have stayed physically active -- there are exceptions, and everyone knows someone who smoked two packs a day and had a few social beers with breakfast every morning, who lived to be 85, but you have to assume this won't be you. You have to assume that without exercise, you'll be the dead one, or if you're lucky, the one in diapers, with a cannula up your nose.
We headed out for a hike to Deer Park, which is the northern face of Mt. Tamalpais, in Marin County, Calif., about half a mile from our house. I hiked on the southern side of the mountain with my father my whole life until he died. As young children, my brothers and I straggled along just behind him, but when I got older, he and I would stride up steep hills together, sometimes in silence, other times talking about books, politics, culture, family. I'd mention books or poems that I knew would please him -- Kazantzakis, Prufrock -- and sometimes before a hike, I would read criticisms or introductions so I could keep up in conversation. I lived for his admiration. I didn't want to instill this pressure to impress me in Sam, and, luckily, "impress" might be a bit strong to describe how Sam acts around me. He loves me, most of the time, and thinks I'm hilarious, but he doesn't perform in the way I used to: He doesn't study up for our conversations, he doesn't chat up my friends, he doesn't read books so that we can discuss them. In fact, he reads very few books. He reads what he wants, magazines about things I have no opinions of or particular interest in: motherboards for his computer, bike frames. I'd always imagined Sam and me strolling along together, talking like my dad and I used to talk, about intellectual things. We don't, but if you get what you hope and pray for, you're shortchanging yourself: I get something better. I get this: "Darling," I asked at the trailhead, kicking off a bookish discussion, "did you finish 'Romeo and Juliet'? And did you like it?"
"Yep. I loved it."
"Tell me what you loved."
"Great writing. Clever story." That was it.
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