Spilling Secrets: An Old Woman’s Diaries

 

Three times in the past I’ve written posts about and have tried to purge over 45 years worth of diaries out of my life. I was twelve when I wrote in my first diary: “Today we had a spelling test and I funked it.” It was a black faux leather, five year diary and after that I had a one year, green book that I filled with movie playbills and boy crushes. Then I discarded the idea of using official diaries and I switched to using red and black books with blank pages from the office supply store. I was able to buy that same style from the mid ‘50s through to the new century. With some of the earlier, boy crazy volumes it took two books to get through a year. Later volumes compressed 3-4 years in each book. By the time I’d discovered blogging as my new form of diary keeping my last red and black book had only yearly entries for entire decade of the 2000s.

The fact that I’m back here writing about my old diaries again is all the proof you need that my three attempts to finally let go of them were dismal failures. I kept getting sentimental over reading through them and I'd decide the purging could wait until another day that never came. Until this week. Well sort of---I compromised with myself. Half are gone, half will get moved with me. I kept the ‘50s through 1960 when I was still an innocent kid. A boy crazy kid to the core if you can believe the ramblings of a teenage virgin who thought she was destine to never find true love. (Didn't give up my V-Card until I was twenty-five, in case anyone is asking,) Not much was on those pages that could hurt anyone’s feelings should family read them after I’m gone, not much of anything is in them which begs the question: Why can’t I let them go? I’m thinking maybe it’s because they show how much I’ve grown, expanded my mind, my writing abilities and interests in life? As a side note, do you find it as curious as I do that I’m back to looking for true love again, only this time I'm looking in the pages of romance books? The more things change the more they stay the same.

I also shredded the travel journal I blogged about not long ago, but I kept one later diary volume, 1970, the year I met my husband. Trust me, it was not filled with hearts and flowers and puppy dog tales. We had a rocky beginning to our relationship. I was more interested in his friend---we all met at the same time---who I was also dating and it was 4-5 months before Don and I got around to being exclusive. I think I kept that volume to remind myself of how much our relationship grew over the decades to come. We'd both been in serious relationships before we met that, for me, ended badly and took me to dark places. Don was fighting demons of his own. Eventually it won't be hard to shred that diary like I managed to do with the rest of the ‘60s through the ‘90s. Just not this year. I still have some lessons to learn from that tumultuous year.

One of the reasons people keep old diaries is an attempt to understand our pasts and how they influence our present. And I'm proud of myself for purging the diaries documenting the year I fell head over heels in love with the guy I dated before Don and the dark year after we broke up when the phrase "one-night stands" could have applied a few too many times. I thought he was my forever guy and for a while he thought the same way about me and it broke my heart into million pieces when it was over. Since my last attempt to purge that era of diaries I did a deep dive into a collection of letters written back and forth to Vietnam and I found the understanding I needed, of how much the Vietnam War played a heavy hand in our break up. We met through those letters and he serviced five tours of duty over there before we started dating. Looking back with an old woman's wisdom I finally realized the breakup was not about me...or him. It never was, and just like that I made peace with the hurt and found the healing I needed. At last, it was easier than I thought it would be to tear those two books apart and put the pages through the shredder.

In 1999 I had gone back to using a one year diary that documented my last year out of five of share-caring my dad and his dementia and trying to balance the time spent with him, working and my life with Don. It was not a pretty picture. I was always sleep deprived and stressed out and that diary was filled with tensions and arguments with my brother. And imagined or not, I felt like my share-caring---being away from home three days and two nights a week to be with my dad---was pulling Don and I apart emotionally. He was still there for me when ever I needed his help with Dad or whatever but our time for fun and recreation fell by the weigh-side and was being filled in his life by a neighbor couple. I was jealous. 

This week as I read through that 1999 book it became the first one to hit the shredder. I didn’t want my nieces to one day find it and see their father and me in a bad light. And I’ve never been that person who talked negatively about a significant-other or spouse. That’s what diaries are for and I didn't want my nieces to see me doing The Snitty Dance just because Don essentially had time to laugh and play with the neighbors when I didn't. Those neighbors, by the way, turned out to be good time Charlies because after Don's massive stroke they rarely came to visit and that really hurt Don.

Crazy to say this but those five years of share-caring my dad are what I'm most proud of. I met a hard challenge and helped give Dad the best life a guy with lung cancer and dementia could have and yet you'd never know that, reading that one year diary. Some of my best memories of my dad happened that year but I never wrote a word about them in real time. The diary had to go so the a glossy "re-write" of my personal history doesn't get contradicted by a book filled with the writings of a woman who was clearly holding on by her fingernails to her world spinning out of control. To my nieces my caregiver crown will still be a shiny example for the same challenge they've recently taken on for their dad.

Marie Kondi in one of her books on downsizing said no one should own more than 30 books and we’re to keep them in a box in a closet. Ideally she thinks we should just tear out the pages we like in a book and throw out the rest. (Clearly she's not a reader.) I really dislike that woman but I actually followed her advice during my diary purging project. Mostly I kept some of the preambles that I wrote each year. God, some of them are so pretentious that they make me laugh. They would have been great preambles if I’d turned out to be famous. Just goes to show that teenagers and twenty-somethings don’t know squat. But of all the pages I want to save---and there were less than a dozen---the diary entry I love the most after a reading marathon that covered so many years of my life is still my “I took a spelling test today and I funked it” written in 1955. If I every purge that diary I will frame that page and hang it near my computer because I am still a notoriously bad speller. ©

Note: Sorry this post is long. I couldn't decide what 300 words to cut to keep within my self-imposed 1,000 word quota. It was also somewhat liberating to spill all my secrets at once and let the chips fall where they may.

The diary box before the purge. The notebooks on the right are filled with bad poetry I wrote .