Diaries By Linda Stowe
My dining table and part of the couch are covered with boxes of personal papers and keepsakes. The boxes are part of my Swedish Death Cleaning project which has been going on for ten years. The boxes have not been setting out all that time. They are just the most recent stage, the last one. Things are going more slowly now because every item is a ticket down memory lane. It is likely that I will never complete this part of the project, which is okay. Now that I have finished my Workbook, the rest of this is just busy-work. There is no deadline.
Last month I came across my baby book. I don’t know if new mothers keep them anymore. If they do there’s probably an app for it on their phones. My baby book was completed in my mother’s handwriting and included such things as a lock of my hair, my birth height and weight, even an outline of my newborn hand. She dutifully reported each of my tiny milestones up until the time I started getting my immunizations (just the first ones, not later shots for polio, etc.). In all, she completed the first third of the book. I imagine she stopped because my brother was born around that time. I was the only one of her three children with the vestige of a baby book.
I thought about the baby book this week as I picked up a folio of writing exercises I did in April of 2013. Every day for two solid weeks I wrote a short piece based on a starting sentence prompt. I enjoyed reading the stories and was disappointed when they stopped. I do not know why I stopped writing the stories because the ones I had completed were well developed and even had artwork. I was clearly involved in the project. I looked through a few of my diaries to see if I could learn what was going on in my life then, but I couldn’t find anything covering that time period.
I have many diaries, and they all are the same. They start off gangbusters describing the events and my thoughts each day. Then they slow down, skipping a day and then a week and then they stop. A few months or a year later I would begin a new diary, but it would also trail off as I lost interest. Oddly, I have now been writing a daily diary for seven years. It’s not as emotional as previous diaries but it is consistent.
I used to think of my sporadic diaries as failures, but now I see them differently. They’re just snapshots of a time, not a motion picture of my life. When my mother stopped writing in my baby book, that didn’t indicate she stopped feeding and caring for me when my brother showed up. She just stopped filling in the blanks of a book that probably seemed like a good idea at the time when she was pregnant with me but in reality did not achieve any goals she might have had in mind. The diaries are the same thing. Sometimes I feel introspective, other times I don’t. The absence of diary entries may mean that other things have become more important.
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This is so thoughtful. I think Linda has an introspective sixth sense. Most people don’t have the ability to self-assess in this way. Reading this piece took me away. It prompted me to ask questions about myself.
It is important for all of us to look deeply at ourselves. It is even better when we can take these insights and evaluate their meaning.
We grow when we can learn about the world.
But more than anything, we grow when we can learn about ourselves.
