The Diaries

On Mother’s Day this year two significant things happened: I met my first great-grandchild, a delightfully good-natured little boy with huge, curious eyes. A smidgen over four months old, he stole my heart immediately and forever. And I received my mother’s diaries.

She died 32 years ago; I never knew about the diaries. My brother had them and never told me about them or shared them with me. He was living with her when she passed, then went to live with my older daughter in southern California. He died six years ago. Only recently did my granddaughter (mother of my new great-grandson!) learn of them. Her dad found them tucked away in their garage where my brother lived for a while before moving into a smaller house on their property. He gave them to her, saying he thought I should have them.

Though more than happy to receive them, I was devastated and not a little heartbroken that my brother felt it was his right to withhold them from me. They could have filled in some much-needed blanks in my life including many “lost” years—early years of which I have no memory. Indeed, a week later, just having them has already given me some closure. Like rocks appearing across a river I’d given up hope of ever crossing. Slippery, for sure, but there!

The day after receiving the diaries, I couldn’t open them. Some family members had already been reading them. It felt like my heart space had been invaded with a backhoe. Like the diaries were a semi-public garden to be explored. They meant no harm, but I was devastated (perhaps unreasonably). Even the smallest extension of my place in line after my brother felt grievous.

Genealogy can be enlightening. As we seek to understand the documentation of our lineage, we need to learn truth gently. It is not perfect, this accounting of yesteryear. The stories buried beneath tintype photos and historical documents—and diaries—can leave out details that might alter our understanding if we were privy to them. Each ancestor endeavored to swim unexpected and often painful currents in life. Though a family tree or diary may expose facts, it may also conceal truth. Unadmitted or misunderstood realities hidden because of fear or shame or simple ignorance. My mother hid things from me in life, leaving me with half-truths or no truth at all. Though my lived history of my family was sadly uninformed, it was none the less true for me.

The diaries go from 1941 through 1963. I wondered about that. What happened to the 30 years before the first diary? Already an answer has appeared. Referring to my father she wrote: He took my diaries and wouldn’t give them back. As for after 1963, I will never know.

Reading my mother’s diaries cannot verify reality though written in ink on faded pages. What it can and will do is fill in the blanks about how she experienced life, how she felt during the 22 years in which she wrote them, and who else was in her life during those years. Already, I am reading about how her family, including her five siblings, surrounded her on almost a daily basis. That her mother, “Nonnie” to me later in life, often stayed overnight to help with her “babes”—my brother and me, born 14 months apart. Perhaps I will learn, finally, what happened to change all of that, at least from her perspective. Whatever is revealed, one river rock at a time, I will reach the other side less unacquainted with my own history.