By Coley Gallagher
@coleygallgher
I knew I had it coming. Stamping through the frozen yard in my husband’s snow boots, I felt some surprise that it’d taken so long. A motion light harassed me as I crashed into the alley, the pipe I’d just confiscated from my 17-year-old still warm in my palm. I lifted the lid on the nearest trash can and hurled the glass smoking implement inside. The garbage had been collected earlier, so the thing hit the bottom with a satisfying clatter. I let the lid fall, then stood there, in only too large boots and pajamas.
It’s not like I didn’t know my son got high. His dad and I had talked to him about it. We tried to warn him off. Still, he came home with glassy eyes, his speech cottony. I’d just shake my head disapprovingly. Unless he was driving. Then I took away his keys. This time felt different. I thought he was doing homework. When I found him with his head and shoulders out his open window, I couldn’t figure out what was happening. I mean, zero clue. My lizard brain knew. It wanted that shit away from my young and out of my house. Through a skunky mist, I approached my son, palm upturned, and said, “Give it.”
He handed over the pipe, head bowed.
Underdressed in the alley, threat eradicated, I didn’t know what to do next. I should have gone inside where it was warm, but I lingered beside the garage, struggling to comprehend how my child could be sounhappy, so lonely, or stupid, so whatever, that he needed to smoke pot—alone in his room—on a Wednesday night. My throat and bare arms started to sting. Both ears throbbed. I knew. Without a doubt. This was happening because of Anne Lamott.
My beef with Lamott predated that godforsaken January night when I had to face the fact that he, we, might have a problem. The grudge started back in my twenties. Then, like now, I struggled to finish the things I wrote, so a friend gifted me Bird By Bird, Lamott’s genial guidebook on writing. The autobiographical section was poignant, heartfelt. Her suggestions were gentle and practical, the writing itself immaculate.
I effing hated Bird by Bird.
I was blocked, rife with bad habits, all fits and starts. Reading the book, I’d be all What if you struggle to string birds together? What if your birds refuse to be strung? Huh? You got a book for that, Anne Lamott?
Not long after I deposited my copy of Bird By Bird at the used bookstore on Chicago Ave, I became pregnant with my first child, the one who needed to numb out so badly that he got high in his bedroom. At his baby shower, a different friend presented me with Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year. This friend said, “Becoming a mother will give you tons to write about.”
If only.
Although I’d set out to write the next Liars Club, when I received Operating Instructions, I wasn’t writing squat. An hour or so every morning I scribbled scenes from my traumatic childhood, then spent afternoons napping or shopping online for sandals. Evenings I seethed with failure and regret. By then I’d forgiven Lamott for Bird By Bird. More like forgot about it, although to this day, my eyes roll involuntarily when someone refers to a “shitty first draft.” I laid Lamott’s book about motherhood on the bedside table, next to my hand lotion. Later, after it began to torment me, I remembered how the friend who gave me the book had said, “You can read it while the baby sleeps.”
Problem: he never did. Hypersensitive from delivery, my lil munkin stayed awake. And cried. A ton. It was hard for me to eat a meal. Or bathe. My hair got so dirty I could smell my own scalp. Every few days I’d glimpse Lamott’s book on my nightstand. A tilted photo of her baby in a tiger hoodie graces the cover. Below his cutie pic, the publisher highlights punchy quotes from the Boston Globe review:
“An enormous triumph…Charming…Powerful…Funny.”
I read Operating Instructions until Lamott’s kid gets colicky. I closed that book and never reopened it the second I realized she managed to write her celebrated memoir with a fussy baby depriving her of sleep and destroying her nerves, basically under the same conditions I was in. No, way worse conditions. I had a partner to help me, she didn’t.
I often kept baby detritus heaped over the book. Still, anytime I unearthed Operating Instructions, I remembered to hate myself. Surely, lack of sleep and haywire hormones contributed to my self-flagellation. Lamott’s book certainly didn’t help. Instead of giving comfort, or inspiring, or just making me laugh, another of her beloved books served as a reminder of my failure: I was not writing -– not about motherhood or anything else. Getting a shower was a triumph. There was nothing charming or powerful about me. Albeit, sometimes, on the phone with close friends, I could be a little funny.
One particularly hangdog morning, underslept, my baby crying his guts out, I hurled Operating Instructions against the closet door and split the spine. For years after, I ignored all things Lamott. I committed my sin against the author a full fifteen years later, after she published her five-thousandth book, when I read a fawning article about her in the New York Times. Near the end of this puffery, the reporter alluded to the fact that Lamott’s son, now grown, wasn’t doing so hot.
He struggled with addiction.
Like Lamott, and her son, I had tussled with substance misuse. As had my father, stepfather, both grandfathers, too many of my cousins. Now, apparently, this monster had its claws in my son.
Also like Lamott, I was long clean. I knew about genetics and internal family systems. I believed in generational trauma. I am a person who prays daily for the safety and happiness of all beings and yet, reading about her son’s struggles, I was like, Maybe if his mother had been taking care of him instead of writing about him…
Wait. It gets worse.
I nearly laughed out loud near the end of the story when I read that Lamott had to help care for her young grandchild.
Karma, Anne.
I knew this reaction was cruel. This was not who or how I wanted to be. I also knew it was false: substance misuse is no one’s fault. I didn’t care. Considering the suffering she had caused me, Anne Lamott had it coming. I secretly hoped I had enough good deeds built up to withstand whatever lesson the universe lobbed at me in return.
Turns out I didn’t. Not even close.
Shivering in the deserted alley, I felt horrible about how I’d treated Anne Lamott. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I take it back.”
The motion detector light blinked off.
I started to cry, remembering how, when I was my son’s age, I got high all the time. I got high before school, skipped school to get high, got baked after, then smoked anytime I went out with my friends. Mine was a mostly-stoned existence, yet I had standards. Ok, one standard: I tried never to get high alone. People who got high alone were—what were they?
Kinda pathetic.
The real druggies.
Their suffering was so obvious.
Bawling and nearly hypothermic in an alley three decades later, I tabulated all the ways I had scraped and strived and self-improved to prevent this. How, when my children came, I showered them with otherworldly love and affection, and meted out fair, consistent discipline when necessary. I’d made them play outside in all weather, fed them vegetables with every meal and read them thousands of books, books about animals and mythology, more sports biographies than I can count. I’d done everything I could think of so he wouldn’t want to. So he wouldn’t have to. And yet my son—My. Son.—smoked pot alone in his room.
I closed my eyes and invoked Anne Lamott. I envisioned her as she was in the picture that accompanied the NY Times piece I’d disparaged: barely-smiling, her head adorned in unflattering, worm-like dreadlocks. “Anne,” I cried aloud. “Help me.”
My body was practically convulsing from cold. It was getting hard to breathe. I turned for the gate, tripping the motion detector light again. Before I passed through, I added, “Please.”
Coley Gallagher is a writer, responsible citizen and mother of four. She’s finishing up a memoir about trying—and failing—to prevent her children from suffering.
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