Anniversaries

I sat the other day looking at the stacks of journals I have filled; there are 28 of the particular binding and dimensions I grew attached to and would buy, stockpiling them like the nuttiest sort of squirrel, every time I had to go to Target for diapers, for toothpaste, for laundry detergent. One secret thing in the shopping cart that suggested I wasn’t just a housewife. It’s my favorite aisle of the store, the one where I spot the women who browse notebooks attentively, with a slight dreaminess as they contemplate rule and binding. I can no longer find these notebooks, have been unable to for more than a year, and I write in the last of them a little regretfully. I finally this month found a possible replacement and bought up seven of them, they have spiral binding which makes me anxious with its sweater-snagging possibilities, but then, perhaps the lying flat on a table will change everything, my handwriting will be tamed by not having to scale the slight hump near the seam, and more important the covers are stiff and the paper is fine and they have a narrow rule.

Before those notebooks were the composition notebooks available at every drugstore and campus bookstore, the black and white pattern that evokes something for me, and then the experiments through different colors. I haven’t even a count on those. I had two filled from before I became an every morning journal keeper, so the surprise that came when I filled the first with my every-morning entry shouldn’t have been as sharp as it was. But it did change something for me, the sense of myself as a completer of something, as being able to commit, as the possessor of a new habit by intention.

The whole collection of journals stands, is important to me visually in my little studio, and it’s strange to think that everything significant in my life in the last eight years, including a pregnancy, a birth, a cross-country move, the creation of friendships, the entry of the youngest child into school — they are all contained in these books. Some things in my life started as hairline cracks, hardly noticeable and then suddenly came to dominate my life, other things, I’m sure, seemed huge at the time and now I scarcely remember them. I haven’t the patience to re-read through them, to trace ideas emerging and being refined. I’m afraid of being horrified at beliefs that turned out to be slightly delusional, or things I convinced myself of when I should have been more critical, pretty lies and ridiculous credulity, that if the journals aren’t completely a one-to-one mapping of my mind, they are a frighteningly accurate reflection of it.

Yesterday I was contemplating the whole stack and went to look at the first one and was startled that it was date 2/10/03, that is eight years ago to the day. Which means more than half of my marriage, a month shy of my 30th birthday, my third son only two and a half months old. I know that gaps slid in while I was pregnant with my fourth son, that here and there I missed a day because it was a holiday or we were traveling or because it was a Saturday and I needed to not be too rigid, but I’ve kept faith with myself. And that is something.

I don’t know what to make of it really, what being a journal keeper means. I have bought the published journals of women writers but they tend to slide into reading stacks below collections of essays and novels, more finished products. I gave up years ago trying to understand why I was keeping a journal and let it become simply what I did; addressing a journal entry “Dear Literary Biographer” is only slightly more me making fun of myself than trying “Dear Kitty.” They are private. Which means, I guess that I tease out the differences between private and secret, discreet and shameful, anonymous and public, what it means to write because the words are exerting a pressure at the back of your tongue, at the pen, what it means to write with audience in mind or to write as if there were no audience. I contemplate the power of words and the power of the taboo, the power of truth, and the kindness of discretion.

I don’t give up the blog, but it’s a quiet place right now, written to please myself, but also written with my name on it and with the consideration that there is no one I would be unwilling to have find it , read it. It convinces me that the voice I have is not, perhaps, confined to pages that I expect to see consigned to ashes before I die so as never to cause pain to anyone I love. But I haven’t any idea of how I would live without the journal to get up and write in in the morning.