This post was originally published at The Second Road on October 4.
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| Image credit: Photo by ryan loucks photography on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons |
My daughter, Janie, came home from kindergarten this week excitedly telling me about the journal she has started keeping at school. At five, she and her classmates can't write much, but her teacher has them draw pictures if they'd like instead.
I told my daughter that I keep a journal too, only it's in words instead of pictures. I've been keeping journals on and off since about age nine, with early entries consisting primarily of details about what I watched on TV and ate for dinner and later entries increasingly concerning puzzles about myself I was trying to work out.
Before my husband and started dating, I typed up and e-mailed him pages and pages of my journal entries from high school. There was something about him, about the particular dance our growing relationship, that seemed familiar and dangerous to me, and I threw my puzzles at him hoping he could help me work them out. I think he was touched (and ok, more than a little overwhelmed and frightened) by the avalanche of words I sent at him, but he didn't know what they meant, more than that I loved him and was scared. Now I see what it was I was trying to figure out, the familiar pattern of codependency and passion I was seeing, something I recognized but didn't understand at the time.
When I first met Mark, he was (quite to his own benefit, of course) a stickler for privacy. I told him when we started dating that I wouldn't hesitate to sneak a peek at a lover's journal, which certainly wasn't an incentive to him to start one. He was aghast at my poor morals, and told me that he would never read my journal, even if it were lying out open on a table. Of course, I told him, he had my full permission to read whatever I hadn't shared with him already, because I'd learned that keeping secrets from my lovers was poison in my relationships.
My previous boyfriend had read my journals and read the poison secrets. He told me that he knew I was having an affair with Mark because he'd read about a chocolate-dark body that he himself didn't have. He never realized, though I did, that what he'd actually read was a fantasy. It's not that I didn't have an affair with Mark, it's that when I did, I stopped writing about him. I wrote about him when I was puzzling over whether or not to get involved with him, just as, in my adolescent journals, I only wrote the name of my crushes before I fell in love with them; afterwards, I would use only pronouns so that only I knew who I meant. It's a little like the exercise of using pseudonyms in my blog now: the people I most want to hide from would still know what I was talking about if they found me.
That night Janie was telling Mark about her journal, and he told her he kept one too. He started journaling as part of his recovery, at about the time in my recovery that I decided I was done searching out and reading his secrets. Janie asked to see our journals, so I went upstairs and pulled the small leather bound book from my bedside table and opened it for her to see. On the first page is an inscription in Mark's writing: "To Mary on our 6th anniversary, May these pages be filled with your insightful reflection on six years of history and hopeful speculations on decades to come. I love you, Mark." The journal was the first gift Mark gave me in recovery.
The journal continues on in my handwriting: "It's nice to have this new journal as a place to start over. Somehow I couldn't face telling the old journal what had happened: that there was a break, that something had shattered, that something had gone terribly wrong. We are all about new beginnings these days... I would have told the old journal of the birth of my daughter, that beginning, but not the end of my dream of marriage that has been the beginning of a new life..."
As my daughter watched me flip through the pages, she saw the blank pages at the end and said, "Look at all those pages. You need to write more. Do it today!" And since I'm not done solving puzzles, I will.
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