I am not the original blogger in the family, although many think I am because of my writings to this day. Decades ago, we already had someone in our family who wrote almost daily about her life — our Mom.
My Mom loved to write. Even before she got married, she was already documenting her day’s events on her diary, which was actually just any old notebook she could get her hands on.
When she began having kids, you’d think that becoming a busy mother and homemaker would keep her from journaling. On the contrary, she kept at it. I remember seeing her, often late at night, at her desk, writing in her journal or preparing to send out a letter to a friend.
When I was away for two years working on my Masters, she wrote copious letters to me. Often, she had to pay double postage because these letters were thick, several pages long, and filled back and front with her stories. When our postman came along bearing letters for me, I could spot hers from afar just by looking at the envelope.
Mom’s style of journaling was not just an account of “I did this, then I did that”. We often would find actual dialogue among people in her entries especially when she was telling funny stories or ranting about something that happened during the day.
We currently have all her diaries from the 1960s till about the time of her death in November 2012. I think these have filled up more than one filing cabinet drawer!
Even while sick, she tried to continue the entries on her diary but we could already see the effect of her illness by the change in handwriting from her beautiful cursive style to almost a scrawl. The last entries of her final diary were too painful to read because she was not as coherent as her usual self.
These diaries, for me, are more precious than most of her possessions. Only one family member can have physical possession of the diaries but if we could digitize them all, we can distribute these to all our family members so that we each have memories of our growing-up years — much of which we can no longer remember — and the grand – and great grandchildren will have something personal of their lola’s too.
My mission now is to digitize all her diaries.The older notebooks, like some of those shown above, already have very brittle pages and the spines do not allow the notebooks to open up fully for flatbed scanning. So I just take photos of these with my phone. The newer ones can be done with the flatbed scanner.
The ink on some of these notebooks has already faded with age so another task I will need to do after scanning the pages is to transcribe them for easy reading. Once I am through with this project, we should have visuals of all Mom’s diaries as well as transcriptions of everything she wrote down.
Whew! Wish me luck! Mom, this is for you. We love and miss you!