New Parents, You Won’t Regret Keeping a Journal

From nytimes.com

A baby book may require too much time and energy, but you and your child will treasure a few notes about this time

                   Credit...Beth Hoeckel

After my daughter was born, I moved into my parents’ house in New Jersey for three weeks with my husband. As a clueless first-time parent, I knew I would need their guidance.

One morning when I was blearily changing my daughter’s diaper, I asked my mom when I started sleeping through the night as a baby.

She shrugged. “I have no idea,” she said.

Later I asked her when I started eating solid foods. “I think you had colic,” she said. That was my sister, I reminded her. Starved for any kernel of information about that first year, I asked her what she did remember.

She thought for a moment. Her lone recollection was that when she was pregnant, she craved Popsicles. And the cigarettes she had given up.

I wished she had written something, anything, down. It would have been gratifying to read an account in her voice as she faltered through parenthood as I was doing now. But at the time, she was an overwhelmed young mom herself, attempting to raise a baby thousands of miles from her own family in Alabama.

I kept thinking of my own daughter, and how, in the far-off future, she might welcome these little tidbits if she became a parent herself. I began to write down everything I could remember about her birth. I wrote about how it was misty and the birds were singing on that predawn May day that we drove to the hospital. How, when I arrived, I dramatically announced to the receptionist that I was in labour, expecting to be immediately rushed away on a gurney like I had seen in the movies. (“Uh huh, take a seat,” she said, barely looking up.)

Making sense of the ‘confusion and chaos’

Even though it was usually the last thing I wanted to do at the end of the day when I was bone-tired, I started jotting down a few lines, once or twice a week — although I assumed I would certainly remember the details of the most significant event of my life.

Recently, I read over what I had written the first year, and was astonished to realize I had completely forgotten a good three quarters of it.

Which is no surprise. While research on so-called “baby brain” is mixed, the effects of fatigue — the bane of new parents — on memory are well-documented, said Rachel Marie E. Salas, associate professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins.

The thought of journaling while caring for a newborn is admittedly exhausting. Others have good intentions, and duly buy a baby book to fill out — for the first child, anyway. “I remember being so upset that my mom made my older sister a photo album, complete with notes and a lock of her hair from her first haircut, and she never made me one,” said Katherine Bunker, a library associate in Fort Collins, Colo. After Bunker became a parent, she confessed, she made “a wonderful baby book for my first kid, complete with all sorts of milestones and details. My third kid has nothing.”

But it’s never too late to write down the story of your child’s birth or adoption and early years — even if you only remember impressionistic little bursts, or your kids are older. And given how wildly uncertain the future seems at this moment, it may be a good time to look backward.

While it’s true that parents who are worn out by working and remote learning aren’t necessarily craving a “pandemic project,” scribbling a quick sentence here and there not only provides a future keepsake for your child, it’s a form of therapy to make sense of the confusion and chaos that is parenthood. Eventually, these small recollections will form a larger narrative that tells your child’s story, said Morgan Stromberg, a marriage and family therapist in Chico, Calif., and a single father.

‘You belong. We belong.’

Stromberg created an email account for his daughter four months before her birth, when he decided on her name. “I did it because I wanted her to know she was loved from the first moment, and have access to stories from the man that knows her the best,” he said. Stromberg has been regularly sending emails for her to read when she is older. “This creates a sense of unity and safety with our children that molds their identity and aids in their sense of belonging,” he said. These accumulated memories and moments, he added, act as a foundation against the uncertainty of the larger world.

“I have a 6-year-old daughter, and I’ve written things down since she was born because my mother did it in the ’70s,” said Takara Rooks, a therapist in New York City. “She kept a journal while she was pregnant with me, and wrote a letter to me when I was six months old, telling me how wonderful it was to be my mother. I once asked her what prompted her to do this, and she said there had been a movie out where the woman had a baby, and then recorded a journal and died. And my mother just bawled her eyes out and said, ‘What if something happened to me?’ I commend her for doing that, because having a newborn is the hardest thing in the world.”

Family stories, Rooks said, speak to our psychological need to say, You belong. We belong. “My grandmother kept a diary every day of her life,” she said. “We are an African-American family, and we as African-Americans don’t usually have a record of our history because of slavery, because things were taken from us,” she said. “But our family does.”

But many people are nervous about their writing abilities, or don’t know how to get started. This was the case with my sister, so I suggested easy writing prompts that addressed her sons directly: the most epic tantrum you ever had, what I remember from your first week of life, the best compliment a person gave me about you, funny words that you used, why I wanted to have a child, a time that you made me laugh hard.

Or simply write a letter, from your heart. The intimacy of a person’s own voice is immensely powerful. It doesn’t even need to be written: You can record your recollections on your phone, and forward it to a low-cost transcription service, like Temi.com. Send the manuscript to a company such as Blurb.com, which will convert it into an inexpensive hard-bound book, which can include photos (and can also be stored on the company’s cloud if the book is lost).

“Keeping any sort of journal is time-consuming, especially when your kids are little and your time is not your own,” said Rooks. “But it is valuable, because it is the story of your child through you, through your mother, and through your mother’s mother. It allows your child to get a sense of who they are, based on who you are.”

We now have several of these family books on our bookshelf. When my daughter was younger, she wasn’t interested in them, preferring to tuck into Don’t Let The Pigeon Drive The Bus. But as she has grown older, she has read the books so many times that she has memorized many of the passages — my sneaky intention, fulfilled.

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Jancee Dunn is the author of “How Not To Hate Your Husband After Kids.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/26/parenting/baby-book-journal.html

Diaries reveal what life was like for Glaswegians during WWI

From glasgowtimes.co.uk/news

By Barbara Neilson of Glasgow City Archives

Since Glasgow City Archives (GCA) closed to the public in March this year, we have been encouraging Glaswegians to keep a diary of their experiences of life in the time of Covid-19.

These journals will eventually our collections. Diaries are a powerful record of people, places and times. Collectively, our diary collections provide a range of perspectives across various time periods in Glasgow and beyond.

One remarkable series of diaries we already hold are the illustrated accounts of life in Glasgow during the First World War written by Thomas Cairns Livingstone (1882 – 1964). He was born and brought up in Rutherglen by his Northern Irish parents before moving to Glasgow as an adult. He was a mercantile bookkeeper and shipping clerk for Paterson, Baxter and Company. He married his wife, Agnes, in 1910. They had one son (Thomas Junior) and lived in Morgan Street, Govanhill.

                 Livingstone illustrated his diaries. Pictures courtesy of Glasgow City Archives

He was a dedicated diarist, producing nineteen volumes covering the period 1913 to 1933. These were purchased by GCA with the kind assistance of the Friends of Glasgow Museums in August 2016.

Although Livingstone signed up to fight in World War One, he was declared medically unfit for active duty and was never mobilised. He remained in the city and, instead of a battlefield account of the war, his diaries provide a personal narrative of the conflict’s impact on Glasgow.

This would be remarkable enough, but the diaries are also hand illustrated by Livingstone himself.

His cheerful, coloured drawings in combination with his characteristic dry humour provide a contrast to the often grim topics he describes. His diaries document the shortages the city faced as, one by one, essential food and provisions grew scarce and were rationed. They also cover rising rents, the threat of air raids in Scotland, women workers, the economy and fundraising initiatives in the city.

Yet they also chronicle the family’s daily life together: their walks, the films they saw at their local cinemas, the evening sing-songs they shared and young Tommy’s early education at Victoria School. They are a reminder that daily life went on even against a backdrop of national and international change. Once our service resumes, Livingstone’s diaries will be publicly accessible to view in the archives searchroom on Level 5 of The Mitchell Library.

It was never Livingstone’s intention to chronicle the home front, but it was a natural outcome of his habit of keeping a daily diary. If you have been inspired to start a diary during this time, please consider submitting it to GCA. We will accept paper and electronic diaries which can be accompanied by drawings or pictures (just like Livingstone’s). Further details are available on our website.

https://www.glasgowtimes.co.uk/news/18785367.diaries-reveal-life-like-glaswegians-wwi/

How My Reading Journal Accidentally Became A Plague Diary

From bookriot.com

By Zoe Robertson

At the turn of the new year, I decided to invest in a modest Moleskine journal and told myself that I would document my most comprehensive, most astute thoughts about the books I finished in 2020. It was going to be great! I was already fatigued from staring at computer screens all day while researching for my degree, and looking to begin a stilted, messy breakup from Goodreads, so believed that reviving my teenage diary-keeping hobby would not only give me space to process my thoughts without a character limit or the embarrassment of being public, but give me a reason to avoid laptops (and inevitable doom-scrolling). 

My journal is nothing fancy; I don’t have any washi tape, stickers, or elaborate charts. I opted for basic bullet points covering some publishing information and any brief comments, funny observations, or crushing remarks on whatever random book comes my way. If anything, this bare bones approach has allowed me to fulfil my fantasies of keeping a nondescript, mysterious black notebook in the kitchen, packed with hastily scrawled notes, and have briefly imagined myself as a cloistered scholar of forbidden knowledge…when, in reality, I am just tallying up my stats each month for nobody’s eyes but my own. In reality, it isn’t a brooding mad scientist journal, but a plain stack of paper full of middling reviews.

Or, at least, that was the plan. 

 

I keep going back to an entry I made in March, in which I’m reflecting on Max Tegmark’s nonfiction manifesto about the future of technology and artificial intelligence, Life 3.0. I was frustrated by this book overall and found his insistence on the dangers of anthropomorphising to be unimaginative at best, suggestive of a larger issue regarding subjectivity at worst. In uncharacteristically steady hand-writing, I bitterly mused:

‘I think it’s interesting to read a nonfiction book which imagines a vaguely sanitised and luxurious future full of intelligent robots when the present day flounders with the failure of government officials and rising threats of misinformation […] Those in control don’t want to anthropomorphise the mortality rate. The people with underlying health issues. People with disabilities or immigrants. The working class. Cos [sic] that means admitting ignorance, carelessness – that thinking about us is too hard, too annoying.’

Thinking back to reading this book and writing this entry sends a chill through me, initially because of the early date (March 13, ten days before lockdown began in the UK) but more so because of the content’s theme: a pressing concern regarding threats to subjectivity and the systemic suppression of marginalised people into further obscurity, by a flustered elite, whilst in the midst of an unprecedented event. The dilution or erasure of the human element of this pandemic has continued to such an extent that case figures barely make the trending page on Twitter anymore, that general complacency reigns in public spaces, that large numbers of protestors and police brutality victims were reduced to aimless mobs by the media. Dehumanisation works in two ways – either your subjectivity becomes erased into insignificance and invisibility through lack of representation or you are absorbed into an impossible mass that is just as nameless, faceless, and easy to tar with a hateful brush. 

As time has progressed, the pages of this little thing have been filled with doodles, drafts of comic strip dialogue, transcripts of voice messages I’ve sent people, intermittent personal paragraphs about the state of my Masters degree or news bulletins. There are even metatextual winks and nods at an imaginary peruser, as though I’m chatting directly to someone else, someone in the future, no longer just to myself. It suggests that I’ve imagined a scenario in which this journal is all that’s left of my past life before I disappear into the woods, or will be my sole companion during an apocalyptic societal collapse, as if I’m carrying around my own expositional flavour text for a bandit to loot from my body if things take a turn for the RPG. On the surface, the contents remains the same: the title of a book, a dated entry detailing my opinions, a star rating. However, between the lines, I’m desperately emphasising my subjectivity amongst the rampant dehumanising movement of the world around me. 

This shouldn’t be surprising; for the majority of lockdown I had no other companion except myself and the books I had on my shelf. I lived alone, I was – and remain – unemployed, most of my friends scattered to the winds to escape to their homes and quarantine with family. We still communicate over the internet, but I didn’t expect the quiet unravelling that being physically alone had on me. When separated from everyday frames of reference, whether that be advertisements or just the presence of other people, I was left with no option but to make my own in the form of this journal. I love questioning what makes us who we are, and pondering the philosophy of subjectivity, but experiencing such a drastic shift in self-perception first-hand like this was terrifying. How do you prove that you exist when you’re the only one around? 

Reflecting on this, it is clear that my journal anticipates a reader. No, begs for a reader. Begs for someone other than me to hear what it has to say, confirm that it actually happened, confirmed that I actually happened, begging for this experience to be acknowledged rather than brushed under the rug. I know that so much of the news I’ve recorded in this book will be ignored by future historians. I know that so much of this experience will be diluted in docuseries or museums and I have already grieved for the loss of information. I live in a country fuelled by a selfish nationalism, that puts pride before its people, and I will be trodden on to make way for ingenuine celebration should we ever beat this disease. I watch the ways in which the reality of the present catastrophe is erased by deliberately evasive or distracting media headlines, by inconsistent political ramblings, and beg to be spared from that violence.

I don’t know when I began to treat this Moleskine like a living testament. In a sense, its flammable body is as weak and vulnerable as my own; can I really rely on something so destructible to preserve me? However, I am frankly fascinated at how my blasé choice to write down my thoughts on Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell in January (which were all positive and glowing, by the way) has produced an item that has such hefty historical and social relevance to me. Like everything else this year, it was unpredictable. However, writing has always been a means to become immortal, to turn moments into crystal and amber that will endure time, so perhaps it is no wonder that I’ve leaned so heavily on the words of others and my own during this period of isolation.

It is impossible to separate the pandemic from this diary; from the chosen titles, to the frequency or infrequency of entries, the plague has even infected these very pages. However, I am inclined to believe that this act of writing and containing my thoughts is a means to cure some of its secondary effects – it combats the feeling of being dissolved in the mire of everyday horror, it confirms your existence, it speaks to a side of this Hell that is needed to understand the full scope of events. In anthropomorphising myself, in reclaiming my subjectivity, I can begin to heal from the wounds this year has dealt, from the deliberate objectification it has tried to crush me with.

I hope I’m here to reread this journal when I’m older, but, if I’m not: you don’t have to agree with my feelings on what I’ve read – that isn’t even the point of the journal – just agree that I was here to write it at all.

https://bookriot.com/how-my-reading-journal-accidentally-became-a-plague-diary/

The power of writing to soothe private issues by Angie Lake

From femalefirst.co.uk

Angie Lake writes a piece for Female First upon the release of her new book Mina Mistry Investigates

If I had to describe what life was like as a child living with an anxiety disorder, it would be: “It was like having a hangover every day.”

My childhood was picture perfect until I was about eight. My family moved around between England, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria before finally settling in Spain. I remember the first couple of years being fairly stable and prosperous, with my Dad still working abroad and my mum running the house.

Dad came home from his last contract in the Middle East in 1990 when the Gulf conflict broke out. This marked the beginning of the end; everything started disintegrating at this point. I was ten years old at the time.

My parents began scrambling for work and money, and routines and tempers became frayed. You could cut the atmosphere with a knife around birthdays and Christmases.

At ten years old, keeping a diary had taken on a whole different meaning: writing in it was something that had to be done every day, so when mealtimes and bedtimes were starting to fall by the wayside, it was a consistent piece of routine to cling onto.

I have since spoken to a lot of people who have had similar experiences and, in most cases,, we can agree that there’s a point of inflection: a moment at which children pass from being the family’s main concern to becoming an additional problem.

When not having any friends or anyone to talk to started to become an issue, I opened up one of my horse and pony magazines and wrote to everyone in the pen-pals section. I did the same thing with all the magazines I had at home and I ended up with seventy-two pen pals.

When I needed someone to talk to, I’d just write. I’d write to organise my thoughts, to share my sorrows with my diary and to plan my actions. Being averse to confrontation, I’d often write letters to people to tell them how I felt; that custom persisted well into my adult life and I still write long letters and emails when I have an important personal matter to deal with.

I still keep diaries, make lists and plan things on paper: somehow an idea looks different when you see it written down.

I know that times have changed, and that social media tries to fill the gap left by distant families and pen pals, but not having these resources at that time was a blessing. I gained a strong sense of self reliance and I was able to discuss my cringiest thoughts with myself or with a pen-pal at the opposite end of the world. I may have felt vulnerable, but I didn’t feel exposed.

The psychological benefits from using social media pale in comparison to keeping a diary and writing letters, and I think that this is something we should be very aware of as we raise children in the digital age while they deal with their own private issues.

https://www.femalefirst.co.uk/books/mina-mistry-investigates-angie-lake-1261416.html

Do you ever get bored of being you?

From majorcadailybulletin.com

By Frank Leavers

The current pandemic has caused many problems in our world over the past months. Most of it very well reported and understood. From health issues, unemployment - social disruption and economic problems. Nevertheless, on a purely personal level for many people untouched by some of the real problems of health and wellbeing, some folk have been, or are still are, suffering from a sort of terminal boredom. However, for others of us it goes deeper than this.

For instance, do you ever get bored being you? If you are anything like me, on occasions I mentally float above myself and observe myself being both predictable and tedious. Do you know, it feels sometimes that I know what I’m going to say a month before I say it and my own particular ray-of-sunshine has confirmed that my thought patterns and mental reflexes are so obvious as to be beyond tiresome - more like sleep inducing. Let me explain. After living with oneself for many more decades than you care to remember, I maintain that within a person’s brain there is a sort of ‘reset’ facility that requires a person to chunter-on about the same subjects and hold the same mild prejudices for year after year. I thought about this the other day when talking to a couple of new, youngish (for me!) friends and found myself for once holding my tongue and actually listening to what they had to say. This in complete contradiction to my usual practice of maintaining and articulating an over familiar procession of cliches, truisms and age-old assertions.

If this is all true, how do I go about changing ‘Me’ or maybe you - if you also suffer from the same inevitable drift into yawn inducing dullness? Perhaps, I will pretend to be someone else. That’s it, I will become someone else - at least until this Covid business is all over. Now then, this is not to say that I want to change my lady love, or indeed friends that I have accumulated over the years - indeed, she’s lovely…well most of the time, and although they are not what you would describe as ideal, I suppose they will have to do. No, my problem is clearly Me - and to be perfectly honest I might have to let myself go. The pity is that there is no way of refreshing your personality so as to exclude the boring bits. For instance, it would be nice if when the news is on I don’t say the same things over-and-over again. I caught her the other day ‘mouthing’ the very words that I was using when some person or another on the television irked me.

Sometimes I lie in bed of a morning, and as I look down at my body I am moved to think - “Oh no, not you again.” I don’t know what I was expecting, but it would be a nice change, if it wasn’t just Me.

Let’s face facts, after more that six decades (God help me!) most people would get on their own wick wouldn’t they? I have this theory that if you had the chance, it would be pretty cool to be someone else for a change. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t want to do it permanently because I would probably miss Me eventually.

But all the same, a change - can be as good as a rest and just think how good it would feel not to be lumbered, even for a short time, with your own silly obsessions and tiresome go-to opinions?

LET’S LEARN FROM IT!
It also has to be said that I doubt that my feelings of self-irritation are mine alone; because with various forms of lockdown continuing to be in place, my thoughts on this matter might not be as daft as they might have seemed just a few short months ago. Indeed, when certain enjoyable social facilities cease to be open to us, it is perhaps quite natural that we become much more inward looking than we would have imagined in the past. It is said that a good way to neutralise anxiety is to write down what causes these feelings. From keeping a diary to drawing up lists, they are supposed to be good for the soul. I will admit that writing regularly my thoughts about this pandemic has sometimes focussed my mind, not just on the realities of the current situation, but also reporting on how its absurdities has helped me cope. And so expressing your innermost feelings to nobody in particular is no bad thing. Making random lists are also a good idea, but it is said that - ‘to-do’ lists actually make you less likely to complete those annoying tasks. And if you’re making a list as to what stresses you out - only to discover that lists are top of your list - now, might be a good time to think of something else. Hey, here to help!

So there we have it; what we all need is an occasional break-from-ourselves. Anyone want to swap personalities with someone else for a few days? When at long last, this pandemic passes - it may in its wake, give us pause for thought in a number of different ways. Perhaps, primarily the fact that any disruption to our normal lifestyles will have effects on the way that we think about what is - and what is not important in life. Secondly, although Covid-19 is a fast-spreading physical disease, its side effects clearly leave a lasting mental reaction in many people. Wouldn’t it be good if we could all learn from it?

https://www.majorcadailybulletin.com/comment/opinion/2020/10/01/72899/you-ever-get-bored-being-you.html