Free Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace by Anne Lamott Page A

their love of their children, out to the next concentric circle, where something bigger awaited. My mother and her women friends made not only vats of that world-class chutney but also
mole poblano
and cakes from scratch, and yet because she was empty inside and stayed in a miserable marriage for twenty-seven years, she who cooked like a dream could not ever feel satisfyingly filled and got fat.
    I found the spiritual food for which I longed as a child in the families of my two best friends. One was Catholic and lived down the block. The Catholics said grace before serving up aggressively modest fare—English muffin pizzas, tuna noodle casserole, fish sticks. The parents seemed to enjoy each other’s company: what a concept. Sometimes they yelled at each other and then later hugged and kissed in the kitchen—oh my God. It had never crossed my mind that peace could be found in full expression, in yelling and weepy embraces.
    I also loved to eat with—and be with—a Christian Science family, who did not yell but read the Bible and Mrs. Eddy together. When I was at their house, we prayed, eyes closed, breathing deeply. In the silence you could feel and hear your ownbreath in your nostrils, and that could be both relaxing and scary, like having a car wash in your head. Of course, I did not mention this to my parents; they would have been horrified. For me it was heaven, even though we frequently ate snacks for dinner—popcorn, store-bought pie. This food was so delicious because of the love in that house, the love that had at its core a sweet, strong marriage. The parents did not yell or kiss as much as the Catholics, but I felt enveloped by the friendly confidence of their faith, and I was sad each time I was remanded to the spiritual anorexia at my house.
    By the time I was in high school, I did what all bright perfection-seeking girls learned to do, besides staying on my toes because something bad might be about to happen: I dieted. Or, come to think of it, binged, dieted, and binged, like my mother, but never felt that simultaneous state of being full without being stuffed. And like my father, I began to drink a lot. Like both of them, I had the disease called “More!” and absolutely could not feel gently satisfied.
    Nothing can be delicious when you are holding your breath. For something to be delicious, you have to be present to savor it, and presence is in attention and in the flow of breath. It begins in themouth, my parents’ preferred site of comfort, and then it connects our heads to our bodies through our throats, and into our lungs and tummies, a beautiful connective cord of air.
    In the middle and late 1960s, two things came along that started to give me my life back: the counterculture and the women’s movement. A beautiful hippie teacher at my small high school gave me
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
and then Virginia Woolf’s journals, all of which I consumed like someone at a hot-dog-eating contest. My best friend, Pammy, and I together discovered Jean Rhys and
Ms.
magazine. Then I went to a women’s college, and the older girls and professors gave me the Margarets, Atwood and Drabble, and the first Nora Ephron collection, and it was all like when Helen Keller discovers that Anne Sullivan is spelling W-A-T-E-R into her hand, and wants her to spell everything in the world now. I was learning the secrets of life: that you could become the woman you’d dared to dream of being, but to do so you were going to have to fall in love with your own crazy, ruined self.
    I met in circles with more and more women, who, over lentil soup and Milanos, taught me about my spirit and my needs and my body. I met withmixed groups of people to strategize protests or save open space, and we gobbled down rice and beans. I showed new friends how to make my parents’ cassoulets. They taught me about halvah, pomegranate wine, and massages to heal both body and soul.
    Awareness dawned on me in these years that the values of