Confronting the Unthinkable with Imperfect Birds by Anne Lamott

My kids are 9, 7 and 4 and every day they give me more glimpses of the terrible teenagers they'll soon morph into. Bella rolls her eyes at me like a pro, Juju dances to Party in the USA, and Jack recently requested a balloon sculpture in the shape of boobies. Yes, boobies. We're laughing now, but I'm terrified of what will come all to soon, terrified that my kids will turn into strangers who despise me and count the days til they fly the coop to the freedom and kegs of college.
 
I just finished Anne Lamott's latest novel, Imperfect Birds, and it rocked me to my core by making me face one of my greatest fears: teenage drug addiction. The novel features the same characters in Lamott's two previous novels Rosie and Crooked Little Heart: Rosie, her mother Elizabeth, and her step-father James. She alternates between the mother and daughter viewpoints, describing each of their flaws poetically and unflinchingly, in her signature style, yet creating characters with whom it is easy to empathize.

I found the novel particularly shocking when Lamott speaks in Rosie's voice. Rosie is a straight-A student with a 4.2 average, described by her science teacher as a star, one of the ones he didn't have to worry about. She loves her parents, yet coldly calculates how to manipulate their emotions to hide her dependence on being high. She's not addicted to a particular drug, but is high most days on speed, cocaine, ecstasy, ADD medication and valiums bought off of other students, shrooms, and even cough medicine. In one scene, when Elizabeth confronts Rosie and makes her take a urine test, Lamott paints the firestorm of her complicated emotions:
"Rosie faced her mother, eyes narrowed with disdain even as she felt the ground beneath her turn to sand. Her heart pounded the way it did after the cheapest cocaine, going so fast that she felt like she might be having a stroke, and yet she still sneered with disbelief at such bald-faced foolishness, at her stupid, stupid mother who stood there in the bathroom holding a cup of pee like it was plutonium. Rosie's mind churned as she desperately tried to figure out the angles. If she went ballistic, she could beat her mother down, deflate the story into something more manageable, and continue her life as it had been."

Imperfect Birds is about more than the struggles of a teenager with drugs, it's also about relationships, and marriage in times of extreme hardship. I loved how well Lamott described the constant fine tuning a relationship requires for two individuals to stay in sync, to continue communicating even as careers and identities change. In one paragraph, she described the music of marriage so perfectly by saying, "She knew every single personal noise James made - grunts when he got up, light snores when he went to sleep, medium snores throughout the night, groans from repositioning, occasional farts, all part of the marital soup."

This is by no means an easy read, but it delivers an important message and it delivers it in Lamott's beautiful prose. I have a good friend who is an ER doctor who recently shocked me by telling me how often she treated overdosing high schoolers who came from well-off two-parent homes. Kids whose parents had no idea were doing drugs. Kids who began getting high by taking prescription medications from their parents' bathroom.

I heard Anne Lamott speak a few weeks ago, and she said, "The stakes are high with our girls and that's why we need to be their lighthouses. We need to show them that the respect they are so desperate for can only come from within." My kids are still little, but middle school and high school are just around the corner, and I feel a little more prepared from having read Imperfect Birds and having confronted the unthinkable.