Diary Door

Accidental Independence

My youngest child is eleven and about to enter middle school, and this recently inspired me to write a mischief story in her diary.  In Before You Forget - The Wisdom of Writing Diaries for Your Children , Chapter Six, I describe the value of reflecting on mischief stories that herald change in our relationships with our children:

Mischief as a Developmental Marker

Children's mischief may represent more than curiosity, unchecked desire, veiled emotional expression, and self-will run riot.  Mischief may also reveal signs of your child's developmental growth, playing with boundaries as a means of preparing for new freedom and the idea of greater independence. . . Writing regular portraits of your child in action allows you to be aware of and to celebrate transition and growth as it is happening.  When children are ready to grow, they will test the limits.  The limit testing allows us both to mutually warm up to change through a balance of giving and taking.

In my daughter's diary, I wrote this mischief story:

To Franci, June 10, 2008

The morning after we visit the middle school for the evening tour, you wake cheerful, but soon you're furious with me when [a friend] calls and I change our after school plans to help her out.

I go outside to brush Judy - there's time before the bus. . . but I order you to get ready, and tell you we'll walk to the bus since it's such a nice day.  You say something kinda nasty that I can't quite hear, and then you are gone - back inside to get ready, I assume.

I soon stop brushing Judy, come in to get you out the door.  I call for you - no answer.  Again and again.  No answer!  I begin searching, not yet threatening.  I look everywhere I would look if we were playing hide and seek.  No Frances.  What a good hider you are, I think, angrily.  Then I start yelling threats for you to come out NOW.  And still you hide..

Okay, I think, now she has missed the bus, and this is so unlike her - she has a Big Project due - it's so weird because you would never blow off an important project.  Well, I fume, I will not be manipulated!  I will not go through the middle school crazies again!

I sit down and try to read the paper, confident that if I ignore you, you will soon emerge.  I will have to cancel my plans and drive you.  Furious, I hunt the house again.  8:30!  How dare you!

It's not until Dad's car pulls in the driveway from his early morning meeting that it begins to occur to me that perhaps you aren't in the house.  Could you possibly have gone to the bus without me?  But you wouldn't do that!  You've never gone to the bus w/o me - ever!

I walk out and meet up with your Dad - he tells me to call the school and see if you're on the bus.  I pray that you are, and call.  Mrs. Bent assures me the bus is in - she will go look for you.  So, I wait for her to call me back, trying to understand what has happened here this morning.  Where ARE you?  Where's Frances?

The phone rings and Mrs. Bent assures me you are there.  Phew.  Aaargh!  I ask if I can speak with you, but she hears the exasperation in my voice and advises, "No." 

As I go through the day, my perspective returns and I begin to imagine what happened - that perhaps you walked up the driveway, mad, but certain I would follow and by the time we were to the end of the driveway I'd be begging for your forgiveness.  Yeah.  And when you got to the end of the driveway and realized I wasn't following you, you would be afraid to come back home because you would then miss the bus.  So, there you were, stuck at the end of the driveway, waiting alone for the bus with your accidental independence.

When you get home from school, I find out yes, that's what happened.  And neither one of us is angry anymore.  Not angry, but aware of this bit of distance sprouting in our relationship.  A breaking free of sorts.  You will need and want me less in the old ways.  And I will look for you in the places I expect you still to be in, and you will be gone from those, you will be moving on.

~

Comedy, Mishaps & Mischief - Writing Adventure Stories of Daily Life

My favorite chapter to write in  Before You Forget - The Wisdom of Writing Diaries for Your Children was the one about writing mischief stories.  This past week my 5th grader went to her middle school orientation and the next morning we clashed with each other in a comedy of errors that reminded me of the power and pleasure of writing these stories.  So, through the month of June I'd like to focus on Mischief Stories in this blog, sharing excerpts from my book and diary entry ideas. Here goes ~

Excerpt From CHAPTER SIX

"Oh my Lord

There’s so much to do

Tomorrow I think I’ll pour a pitcher of water down the mail chute

Ooooooooooooooooooo I absolutely love the Plaza!"

(Kay Thompson, Eloise, p. 65)

Children like adventure stories.  They like fast action, suspense, surprise twists, comic mistakes, and heroic rescues.  If these exciting plots are pulled from their very own childhood, if they get to play a starring role in these dramas, so much the better.  If you look for these stories in everyday life, if you write them and save them, your children will read, enjoy, retell, and treasure them for years to come.  And so will you.  Writing diary stories helps to transform distressing or irritating events into family lore and family laughter.

~  Kelly

Links to My Other Blogs

This is one of my three ongoing blogs. 

My most current writing can be seen at my Riverwoods Blog - Photo Inspired Prose Poems from the Charles River at Rocky Narrows.  This is a journal where I write prose poems and reflections on my experience of nature from my home.  I'm in the process of "illustrating" this journal by including photographs as well.

News and information about my playwrighting can be seen at my Stagedoor Blog.  This is where I publicize my upcoming play productions, performances, participation in play festivals, and publication of my plays.

I hope you will visit these blogs as well, and I will return here to my parenting diary writing soon!

Kelly

Write Me A Long Letter. . .

When my middle daughter, at 14, went away to boarding school nearly two years ago, I committed to writing in her diary every day while she was away from home.  And I have.

Now, she will be home to stay at the end of June, and I find myself less and less motivated to write in her diary every day.  This is a sign of her anticipated homecoming.

She wants letters.  Mailed to her.  Recently, in a long letter to me she asked me to write her a long letter.  She had only to ask.  The long letter was soon written, and mailed, and followed by another.

Her homecoming, her wish for letters, signals a change, for now, in the diary writing.  She needs to be connected by letter NOW, and the diaries, well, they are for later.  This is a blessing of the no e-mail, limited phone calls rules of her boarding school.  Inviting us to write long letters to each other.  Today.  Now.

Kelly

Lists Help Break the Silence

Heavy snow, silent house.  I pick up my daughter's diary, my 10-year old; the last entry was February 4, 2008, an entry that opens with the line,

"Super Tuesday tomorrow!"

My intention was to write on Super Tuesday about how she came with me to vote in the primary, and how I let her fill out the ballot with our choice.  This was a personally historic moment I hoped to capture for her in the diary - casting our vote for a woman presidential candidate. 

Never got to it, though.  There it is - the silence I intended to fill, the gap in dates, the entry never written.

I've learned to focus on writing the next entry, rather than missing the last, because guilt doesn't inspire me, it silences me.  There's no room for perfectionism and the tyranny of expectations in diary writing for our children.

It's February 22, and we're in the midst of her school winter vacation.  To reconnect, I just began writing about her vacation, and I made a list of what we have done every day, starting with last Friday.  Lists are a wonderful device for reconnecting in the diary because they create a container that we can fill with as much or as little as we want. 

Saving the daily highlights for her, day by day, I realize that what I hope she remembers most is the pleasure of having free time.  Really free time.

Kelly

Waiting for Inspiration

Dare I write that I don't feel like writing?

It is cold and windy and the sky is a little blue, but my creative impulses feel trapped beneath an icy, snow-covered landscape.

I am dreaming of gardening in spring. 

There are silences in the diaries.  This is a silence of inner doldrums. 

I am craving inspiration and I am craving spring, and still, it is cold and white and winter.  The diaries wait too.

Kelly

Reconnecting to Passions

My son, at 20, has recently fallen in love with jujitsu.  Three to four nights per week he goes to the dojo, returns home smiling and sore from his workout, stimulated by challenge.  I hug him, now, his chest is a board. 

I love the way the diaries, re-visited years later, surprise me with clues long forgotten, hints of future passions:  It's January 28, 1993, he's in pre-school, and we're living in Florida.  The last line of this brief entry notes: "Your second Karate class tonight."  Two days earlier, an entry recorded on January 26, 1993, is all about starting karate:

Your very first karate class!  Daddy took you w/Perri tonight, and you were so thrilled when I got home to see you late tonight.  You just thought it was the most fun thing you have ever done.  You were so nervous you said your legs were rubbery, but you had a blast. 

He didn't practice Karate for long.  We kept him involved for a few sessions, and when we moved out of the area a year later he joined a new class where he struggled with an intimidating teacher.  Soon, another move, this time to the Boston area, and his passion for the martial arts took a long hiatus.

The diary entries are full of clues, predictions, reminders of passions put aside, forgotten, even abandoned, that may be reclaimed. 

Kelly

The Slap

It's January 13, 2002, and I write to my youngest, at 4, on a snowy Sunday, exactly seven years ago.  Then, she was pre-Kindergarten.  Now, she is pre-teen.  Yesterday we went to the mall on a quest to buy her first i-pod.  Seven years ago, we walked in the snowy woods. Amidst the turmoil of change, there is always a way to find peace.

Friday night to the pool w/the Darcy's.  Then to Amarin.  You very tired by the time we're heading home.  Acting up in the car.  Daddy speaks sharply & firmly to you at home about your threat to open the car door while he's driving.  Then you listen, shut down, tune out, turn off, go straight to bed, exhausted and probably hurt by the chasisement. 

But, it's a sign.  A sign of you not needing to be talked to like a baby anymore.  A sign that you are calling out a new level of discipline. 

I have a bad dream:

You are disobeying me, threatening to run out in the street.  I decide I must discipline you sharply:  I decide to slap you hard on the cheek!

I do it!  I hit you hard, feeling horrible.  (This, of course, I've never thought of doing in real life, you prescious, tender thing).

But I think, somehow, this is the right thing to do -- I must MAKE you AWARE.  You're a big girl now.

Ouch, I want to sob as I write this. . . Who's really feeling the sting of the slap?

I remember having a similar dream about Landon, turning twelve? or thirteen?  I remember writing it down.  Realizing it was a rite of passage dream. . . the archetypal slap, signalling the new stage, the new role.

For both of us. . . .

Monday night a beautiful time with you. 

Snow.  A light snow falling.  Not a storm.  Just a couple of inches.  It is before dinner. Landon's at Scott's.  Perri home.  I will walk Flash.  It's dark, but I have the headlight Dad gave me for Christmas. 

You beg me to come.

I will not refuse this request! 

We dress warm.

A still and quiet evening, light snow, we enter the path toward the pond, the soft straw on the road, then the frozen ridges of mud.  Pass the pond -- no skating for awhile!  Not sure where we're headed, but happy. energetic.  Peace. . .

Up toward Gram's, but we decide not to stop -- we cross the Christmas tree field, head down the road that runs under the pines, parallel to their driveway. 

Cross the street into Mayo's field, crossing, entering the horsetrail behind Katie's house, trudging up through the "Erico's" backyard, cross Course Brook Road. 

Home.  Happy.  Cold.  Hungry.  Perri wildly happy to see us. . . .

Kelly

Woods, On a Snowy Evening

Another day, another year, another ski, another child.

It's twenty years ago, January 9, 1998, my son's diary. He is eleven.

I like where this entry takes me, takes us.  Re-reading it, I return to the tranquility of the snow, the woods, my pre-teen son, his desire to be go there with me, and the good fortune to seize a moment in time, even as it is melting away.

By the time we put on our skis together and pushed off down the driveway, the snow had turned to rain.  But there was enough -- about three inches -- to make a good enough cover over the ground to have a real ski.

We had been roller skating in Norwood.  You had cheerfully rented skates despite your expectations and hope that you could blade there.  So, you just adapted by skating as fast as possible.  Even I skated and I really got the hang of it.

It was snowing hard when we arrived, and snowing hard when we left, with Ross, Cara, Tori and Perri.  The traffic was backed up badly; it took an hour and more to get to Friendly's in Medfield where we had dinner. 

Home in more snow, snow that we knew, because of the forecast of impending rain, will be with us only for, perhaps, an hour or two more, until it warms up and turns to rain.

And I had not yet skied this season.

Dad picked you up some second hand x-country skis last summer.  As son as you saw me glide down the driveway on mine, you thought of yours.

"Mom, after Ross leaves, can I go with you?" you asked while busy building a snow fort w/Ross & Perri.

"Sure!"  I skied around the back yard, waiting for you, as the snowflakes grew wetter and wetter until they felt so wet they had turned to rain drops and the texture of the snow on the ground grew sludgy.

Ross left.  Your skiis fit.  We took off in the couple of inches of snow up the dark street toward Mayo's field.  It was after nine, warming up, slippery, but like sludgy glue if you stopped for a moment.  We kept moving, climbing the gradual hill by the paddock, gliding down the hill toward the open field.

The street was fast skiing now, home around ten.  Happy.  We had grabbed the snow in the moment. 

By morning it was gone.

Kelly

This Day, January 8, 2001

More leafing through my children's diaries.  One I find, for my daughter Perri, has an entry for Jan. 8, 2001.  The cover of the diary is a frame, holding a picture of her heart shaped face, hand under her chin, she is lying on a hammock, near water, above grass, leafy green trees are the backdrop, and into the camera, she is smiling. 

She is nine.  I write:

. . . We went cross country skiing just before dinner in the dark - you, me and Dad, and you were terrific.  Your first big scary adventure.  We separated from Dad, tired and hungry, heading home, took a shortcut that was the opposite of short, had to climb the big sledding hill and all the while I wasn't sure you could hold up -- but you did. . . We ended up at the place where we left our stuff. . . a few moment before Dad, and you were happy to see him!

After dinner, I write, she joins me as I clean up dinner, sits on a bar stool, and tells me a secret.  I keep it, in her diary.