The Notebooks

There was a cabinet built into the dresser that my mother kept in her room. In this cabinet were kept various picture albums and baby books that chronicled her life as well as the lives of each of her five children. Also in this cabinet were notebooks that my mother kept throughout her adolescence and her early years of motherhood. In this books were columns she had written for her school newspaper, poems that she had written and also poetry from well known writers that she had particularly cherished.

Often when I would find myself alone I would sneak to my mother's room and open that cabinet and read her notebooks. In those notebooks I found a soul that I did not recognize, someone separate from my mother and yet secretly defining her. I found someone who had some of the same dreams that I did and experienced the same desires.

Growing up, I used to think that she didn't understand my need to write...that she didn't support my dream. But, looking back, I remember sadness when she thought that I wouldn't reach it; as if in some way she was losing sight of her own dream once again.

I have one particular memory of my mother asking all of us once what we would take from the house when she died. I remember very much the pain that crossed her face after each of us, thinking, for she wasn't going to die, what a horrible question, told her there was nothing we wanted. I think she wanted to know that we wanted a piece of her that we would carry away with us into our own homes.

Until recently, I still thought of my mother as completely different from me; as being driven by amazingly different forces than I had been. Yet, as I think of her notebooks, I am reminded of my own notebooks that I hope someday will go to one of my children, and I realize that I want them to want them, just as much as my mother wanted me to want her notebooks.