Mom’s Journal as a Second Camera
On May 1, 1979, my mom opened a fresh notebook and wrote:
“This is to my children, Donny and Helen. Forgive me darlings, for not starting this years ago…”
I was four. Helen was two. To us, that journal didn’t exist. We were busy with sand piles and cartoons, goats and Sunday School.
Decades later, I’m sitting at a desk surrounded by hard drives and scans and markdown files, trying to reconstruct a childhood that feels half-mythic in my mind—and suddenly I have Mom’s voice, dated and time-stamped, filling in the weather, the errands, the sicknesses, the prices of gas.
It feels like finding a lost camera angle.
Her entries are simple:
- “We went to K-Mart and Piggly Wiggly.”
- “Donny and Helen helped can corn.”
- “Kids watched Snoopy in our bed.”
- “Donny drew pictures a lot—he’s trying to design new rides for Great America.”
To her, this was domestic detail. To me, it’s scaffolding:
- I can place my Superman shirt in early May 1979.
- I know exactly when the bunk beds arrived.
- I can date my obsession with drawing rides to August 1984.
Most of all, I can feel how much she loved us. Nearly every page has some version of:
“Donny and Helen are such fine children… my little angels… I love them so much.”
It’s jarring, honestly, to read those lines now, knowing how tangled my adult relationship with faith became, how complicated family and grief got in my twenties. But underneath all that, there was this steady, ordinary devotion: gas prices, pickles, Bible studies, and two kids she was trying to raise with whatever light she had.
So this post is a marker: the point where my memoir stops being just recollection and becomes a collaboration with my mom across time.
From here on out, whenever I write about 1979–1985—the haymow, the garden, the van trips, the first NES games—I’ll be tracing my steps over her penciled notes, filling in the emotional color she didn’t always have time to describe.
It makes the whole project feel less like “my story” and more like our family’s shared archive, finally waking up.