Growing Patience

I cried and laughed when I read this.  For me, this is too true, but I ask Edie if she'd want me to throw her into the sewer. I haven't asked her lately, but I did a lot when we first met.

From Operating Instructions by Anne Lamott:

"He's so fine all day, so alert and beautiful and good, and then the colic kicks in. I'm okay for the first hour, more or less, not happy about things but basically okay, and then I start to lose it as the colic continues.  I end up incredibly frustrated and sad and angry.  I have had some terrible visions lately, like of holding him by the ankle and whacking him against the wall, the way you "cure" an octopus on the dock.  I have gone so far as to ask him if he wants me to go get the stick with the nails, which is what my friend Kerry says to her dogs when they are being especially bad.  I have never hurt him and don't believe I will, but I have had to leave the room he was in, go somewhere else, and just breathe for a while, or cry, clenching and unclenching my fists.  I have four friends who had babies right around the time I did, all very eccentric and powerful women, and I do not believe that any of them are having these awful thoughts.  Of course, I know they're not all being Donna Reed either, but one of the wort things about being a parent, for me, is the self-discovery, the being face to face with one's secret insanity and brokenness and rage.  Someone without children, who thinks of me as being deeply spiritual, said the other day that mother hood gave me the opportunity to dance with my feelings of inadequacy and anger, and my automatic response was to think, Oh, go fuck yourself, you New-Age Cosmica Rama dingdong head - go dance with that one".

 
Don't just stand there, ma. Pick me up already!