I lift the lid of the heavy wooden hope chest in our entryway. I’m young—ten or eleven—and it’s a feat for my skinny arms, but I manage it, propping it against the wall so it stays put. A particular smell drifts up from the blankets and linens, vaguely spicy, a little musty, a smell that to me means mystery, legacy. I feel like I am disturbing a sleeping kingdom. I love to sort through my mother’s special things, whether it’s these quilts and embroidered handkerchiefs passed down from great-great-grandmothers, or the necklaces and bangles she never wears, stored in the tiny drawers and cabinets of a lacquered Japanese jewelry box from her sister-in-law.
Each time, including today, I don’t know what I’m looking for. Or I do, but it’s something that resists words. I already know what’s in here, having done this just last week, but something compels me to look again. I lift out the felt mobile that once hung over my crib, the one she’s saving for my future children, beings so abstract and theoretical they may as well be aliens. Next comes the blouse she sewed in high school, and the coral dress she wore to her city-hall wedding.
Then my fingers bump into something new. Something angular and hard. A book! I pry it out from beneath the weight of blankets and pull it into the light. It’s a pale yellow diary, with a faded drawing of a little girl sitting in a chair, and a tiny, dull lock on the side. My heart beating wildly, I pat around the bottom of the chest for a key. I’m running my fingers into the far corners when my mother comes up from the garage with a basket of laundry.
“Whatcha doin’ swee-” she says warmly, stopping short when she sees what’s in my hand. “I’ll take that, thank you very much!” She takes the diary from me, tsk-tsking in a gentle way as she heads upstairs to her bedroom.
That’s the last I see or hear of the diary for the rest of my childhood and adolescence, leaving me to question the details lodged in my memory. Could I really have made that up? Did I long so much for a deeper sense of who my mother was that I invented a locked book and missing key, symbolic of all that was unspoken between us, that ancient dilemma of mothers and daughters?
Years later, in graduate school, I read Terry Tempest Williams’ When Women Were Birds and felt a strum of self-recognition in the image of her mother’s journals—dozens of beautiful books inherited after her death, all of them completely blank. When Women Were Birds is written into the brink, filling in the silence of those pages with conjecture and memory.
My mother’s journals are an expanding and collapsing universe each time they are opened and closed, Williams writes.
My mother’s journals are an act of defiance.
My mother’s journals are capable of receiving my words.
Fast forward a few more years and I’m a mother now: two daughters, one son. My relationship with my own mother—once complicated by my need to know her more, and her need to keep the past at a distance—has eased under the weight of my children. We connect over our shared wonder at my babies, and a common love of sewing for them. Maybe, too, the effect of motherhood on my energy and pride have worn away my former tendency to expect more from a conversation. I find myself more able to enjoy a spell of silence in my mother’s company, feeling a passage of understanding between us that doesn’t need words.
My mother’s diary is the conversation I longed to have with her at sixteen.
My mother’s diary is a bridge to who she was before I was.
My mother’s diary is a chimera, stand-in for a shape-shifting, unanswerable question.
Here’s my own version of a hope chest, kept in a large basement cabinet: Four overflowing banker’s boxes and counting, each one filled with the diaries, journals, and spiral notebooks I’ve kept since age seven. There’s also a locked wooden box, about the size of a toaster oven, given to me when I was five, originally filled with a doll and doll clothes. The well-dressed doll is long gone, but the box contains more diaries, including my first one in pink vinyl, its cover bearing a photograph of a sleeping orange kitten. There are also letters from a boy I liked in third grade, with sentiments such as You are pritty and I will give you one marble.
I’ve carried these boxes from rental to rental for over a decade, until last year, when my husband and I bought what we think is our forever home. With each move, I’ve sorted the journals again and thought about burning them all, more out of fatigue and disgust at my one anti-minimalist habit, this uncharacteristically sentimental bit of excess, than any sense of shame or scandal. We have the storage space now, but we also have plenty of room out back for a burn pile. On an ordinary Wednesday burn day, they could all be ash, decades of my ruminating voice drifting up in one big sigh, gone.
The possible absence is appealing. Whenever I think of reading them, a sense of dread overtakes me. Each book is an immediate portal into a former self. Though my seven-year-old anxieties make me smile, the words are mine, the emotions instantly palpable. You know how you never want to repeat middle school? Rereading my old journals is a little like that. Maybe my mother felt the same way about her diary, her adolescence: better to let the past be the past.
But the sheer volume of journals is part of it, too, and their lack of a narrative arc. I filled just about every book, but irregularly: there’s always a spate of daily entries, then months before the next one. Huge events on the national stage—Columbine, 9/11, Katrina—get an abbreviated, anguished entry, followed by gaps in time and a descent back into the banal: a shopping list for my college dorm, extended analysis on what my first real boyfriend meant when he said, It bothers me that you don’t need me.
Over time, my spelling and handwriting improve, and the entries gain length and complexity, but it’s the rutted track of the same mind, leaving its wheel-prints across years, as I work out ordinary fears and dreams, crushes and skirmishes. I wonder about my life’s purpose on one page, and gripe about the neighbor’s leaf-blower on the next.
I wonder: did my mother’s diary contain a similar assortment of mental debris? If Terry Tempest Williams’s mother had actually written something in her journals, what kind of inheritance would Williams have gained, and which would she have preferred—the real thing or the thing imagined? These are the questions that keep me from striking a match, now that my once-hypothetical children are living, breathing beings, peppering me with requests for stories about my childhood.
One day I FaceTime my mom to tell her about this essay I’m writing, about my journals, the dread, the pyromanic thought I’ve lugged from house to house alongside the banker’s boxes. I tell her about my memory of finding her diary and she immediately smiles, stretches an arm outside the frame of the phone and suddenly brings it into view: the little yellow diary with its bronze lock! A chill runs over me. It turns out it contains only a few pages of writing, most of it about her pregnancy with my older sister. She says she’ll bring it with her next time she visits.
What an unexpected gift. At ten years old, such a diary would have bored me, but now I can’t imagine anything I’d love to read more than her experience of entering motherhood for the first time, a snapshot of the woman she was before she became my mom, blurred with the coming-into-focus of the mother I know. I can’t wait to meet her on the page, this version of my mom as she enters the phase of life I’m in now.
It strikes me that this might be the answer to my match-hungry question. My oldest daughter is six, a year shy of the age I was when I first started keeping a journal. Maybe I’ll dig out that pink kitten diary, reading myself at seven as I raise my own seven-year-old. Maybe it will help me empathize with her more, remember what I worried about and what I wanted to understand. Maybe I’ll buy her her own journal and let her read mine if she wants to.
My journals are an uncompleted task.
My journals are nettle and ivy.
My journals are a map read backward, handed forward, leading to where I stand.
In-post journal photos by Lyle Poulin
Read a Rumors of Water excerpt
Read Making the Perfect Cup of Tea
Read Re-Covering Time
- UNLOCKING MY MOTHER’S DIARY - 09/21/2021
