I am participating in my ninth Slice of Life Story Challenge run by the team behind the Two Writing Teachers website. We are challenged to write a blog post a day throughout the month of March.
Today's post is inspired by a link in Tammy L. Breitweiser's Slice "Wednesday: What am I reading?".
I had forgotten the title, but recognized the poem as soon as I read it.
So this morning I grabbed my husband's pocket flashlight, the one he uses to find the CDs he wants to play from the shelves by the entertainment center (the lighting is poor in our living room), and hunted for the boxed journal tucked in a bookshelf that is half-hidden by the couch. I found it behind Sarah Bird's The Yokota Officers Club and Loren Pope's Colleges That Change Lives. I paused as I remembered meeting Bird and gushing about that book, the only one I've read that mirrored my life as a military BRAT. The Pope book might be past its usefulness, I thought to myself, with our youngest about to graduate from college.
I opened the box and pulled out the journal, gifted by a then-boyfriend. Skimming the parchment pages, I saw his handwriting and snippets of my lovelorn sentiments...ugh. I was not in the mood to revisit my sappy, dramatically emotional teenage days. Skipping pages and years, back and forth, I found the poem, copied from who-knows-where, written in my own hand in the days before the internet.
Eight months into college.
My mother and brother had just joined my father in Germany to finish out his work assignment.
I was practically alone in Austin. No one else from my high school attended UT. My only connections with my immediate family were expensive collect long distance phone calls, placed once a month.
My relationship with my boyfriend was not really typical. Looking back, we were more like emotional sounding boards for one another. I don't remember discussions of marriage and children. I didn't see myself as maternal or marriage material; homely smart girls weren't featured in the bridal magazines that my friends bought.
But there it is, a poem about pregnancy, with those prescient words: "Something to think about during motherhood." At some point, at eighteen, I was entertaining the thought of becoming a mother. All this time I've said that I really didn't consider it until I met my now-husband; that didn't happen until two years after I copied these lines.
This forgotten poem has pointed out my mistaken memory. I wonder how many other memories I've suppressed, altered, fabricated to suit my current mindset...I'm still not in the mood to read those sappy journal entries to find out.
I love your honesty. It is hard to know what we have hidden away, but those journals can help. You inspire me to dig out a few of mine- like you I want to forget those sappy, dramatically emotional days! Such highs and lows!
ReplyDeleteOne of these days, I'll go back and read the journal from the beginning. But I'm too practical minded at the moment to be all in my teenaged feelings, ha!
DeleteI had a set of journals filled with thoughts and poems. I lost them along the journey of life and I wish I could get them back.
ReplyDeleteRebecca, that makes me sad. Perhaps you could write what you remember now, as a way to slightly make up for the loss? I was not an avid journal-keeper in my youth, unless we wrote for school assignments. Those, I need to dig out and read!
DeleteI'm amazed that you found your old journal and the poem; I love Plath and remember this one. Fascinating how the future was speaking to your young self. Memory is a terribly tricky thing. It's not especially reliable, as you point out. The brain can't retain every detail so it often colors them in for us and the memories feel like the real deal. Both scary and intriguing! Oh dear... I do not think I would want to revisit much of my "sappy" writing either, but there is one short story I wrote as a senior that I'd like to find. I have a box of old stuff; maybe I'll go digging ... thanks for this evocative Slice!
ReplyDeleteFran, it was strange to see that poem with that date; I wish I remembered more, or had written more, about what was going on in my mind at that time. And the bits of writing I did catch while looking for the poem...is there any wonder we characterize young love the way we do? I'll settle for old married love now, for sure!
DeleteSyliva Plath, one of my favorite poets! It's (sometimes) fun to read through old journals. I've considered burning them, letting them go along with old memories, but I haven't brought myself to doing it yet. Perhaps I'll revisit them this summer.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to find my journals from elementary school that we had to write in class. This particular one was full of so much self-inflicted drama that I could barely stomach the snippets I caught while looking for the Plath poem!
DeleteOld journals astound me. I have a friend who burned all hers. She called it cathartic. I had my childhood best friend hide mine in her house lest my parents find them if something tragic happened to me in my 20s, and I believe she still has them..
ReplyDeleteI loved your honesty here. Your revisiting this. And, I like to think of where I was in 85- just 3 years old- and how our paths crossed decades later. Isn’t that fascinating, too? Your last paragraph about mistaken memories is something I grapple with a lot, and maybe it’s just a function of time and the stories we create from the memories that remain, but I always say I can’t remember where my memories begin and my parents’ end. I thought it had to do with immigration, and the fractured nature of displacement. Your words make me think it’s the way we alter memories to fit our current narrative ...
Nawal, I can identity with your comment about parents' memories blurring into our own. What do we really remember, and what are just stories we've been repeatedly told? Knowing you were three in '85, and now sharing this community with me, does shrink time and space that much more. As for the honesty--I was truly shocked when I saw the date on the poem's copy. It was like a subconscious nudge. My current self is so grateful for the experience of motherhood and the lessons my children have taught me (and oh, what lessons they have been, with my unusual delivery stories and beyond). I wonder what their memories will be, and how my repeated stories will impact them?
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