I’ve never journaled the traditional way, but I’m having fun with blogging, and my 16-year stint as a newspaper columnist provides a personal history log as I look back on my weekly musings. Fact is, of all the great reasons for journaling, one of the most satisfying is the opportunity to relive the precious moments that become lost as you move from one stage of life to another.
I got a kick out of this memory penned in the Dunwoody Crier back on October 3, 2001 and it’s one I included in my first book, “You’ve Got a Wedgie Cha Cha Cha,” a compilation of some of my favorite columns. Probably would never have remembered this had it not been written down, but this one is about my daughter Jackie when she was 9, and ironically, it’s about journaling!
(The Crier 10/03/01) I found a leak.If you make the effort to protect your personal identity and private information by shredding confidential papers and cutting up credit cards and then spreading the pieces between 12 different trash cans, allow me to offer this important advice: Check your child’s school journal.
It’s an exercise in creative, freestyle writing that most teachers have students do every morning to loosen the imagination and ready the brain for learning. It’s free-thought journal writing and I’m all for that kind of thing. At least I thought I was. Then I went to Parents’ Night and was invited to sit at my child’s desk and browse through her desk and journal.
There in rigid cursive and number 2 pencil, was a full account of the morning I’d woken after a fitful night full of bad dreams that a shark was eating my purse.
The morning I mistook the coriander for cinnamon and served it on toast? In there.
Her older sister’s double-top-secret locker combination? In there, too.
A panoramic description of our front porch after the cat wrestled with and then left us a couple of sweet gifts? Right there in the school journal.
I turned the page only to find a detailed chronicle of the day she was late for school because I had Clairol shade number 3488690 on my hair and had to wait to rinse. That could be found right above the exact words that came out of my mouth when some guy pulled out in front of me as I later took her to school — driving over the speed limit and with a towel wrapped around my head.
After seeing the panic in the eyes of some of the parents as they read through these journals, the teacher assured us that she’d only believe half of what she heard about us, if we believed only half of what we heard from our kids about her.
I suppose that means Mrs. Shepherd had some help when she hung the moon.
I was lucky that my 16 years of writing weekly columns for the Dunwoody Crier coincided with the growing-up years of our two daughters. While I started the column when Jill and Jackie were 6 and 8, the title story, “You’ve Got a Wedgie Cha Cha Cha” comes from a time near the end of that run and is about becoming an empty nester. It’s available via Amazon. http://www.authorkathyflorence.com
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