Day: August 25, 2006

Some nights coherent thought flees and all I’m left with are bits and pieces.

Howard’s still at World Con. He’s having a good time. I’m glad. I wish I could be there with him.

We’ve all survived the first week of school. I’m not comfortable with the schedule yet, but I’m beginning to adapt. So far no major mishaps have interfered with the kids settling into school too. I’ve begun developing good working partnerships with each of their teachers.

I’ve been rereading my teenage journals. It is very strange. I’ve changed so much since then that it’s like reading someone else’s life. And yet it was mine. It has definitely given me a greater appreciation for the challenges that are inherent in being a teenager. I would certainly chafe at many of the restrictions I lived under back then. I had to ask permission to make long distance phone calls. And a distance of 30 miles seemed an insurmountable obstacle.

There was much crankiness here at the house this afternoon. None of us have been getting enough sleep. Tomorrow we can all sleep in and hopefully we’ll have a better day. Perhaps tomorrow I won’t have to chase Gleek through a video store because she refuses to relinquish a desired candy. Also perhaps I can return the pokemon dvd box that came with the wrong disk inside it. The kids were all very disapointed.

I’ve been a journal writer for most of my life. My journal keeping was particularly abundant during my teen years. It tapered off a lot when I got married and began having kids. But I’ve kept the journals I wrote in. I figured that some day it would be useful to me to go back and re-read them. I had in mind that re-reading my teenage journals might be a big help when I had teenage children. Kiki isn’t a teenager yet, but last week I dragged out the earliest of my journals to see if any of it was applicable to a crisis that she was suffering. It was.

But then there were all those other journals. I kept reading, and reading, and reading. It has been an odd experience. Some of the things in my journal I had completely forgotten, so it was like reading someone else’s story. Other things I remembered clearly and the journal just pulled me back into the memory. Some things have made me laugh out loud, like a list of goals written when I was twelve. Number 6 on that list was “establish personality” as if I completely failed to have one prior to that goal. I am astonished at how busy I was and how social. My journals are full of people I talked to, dances I attended, activities I was involved in, guys I was interested in, all of it mixed up together into one big social whirl. I guess I was much more extroverted during my teen years.

It is also fascinating to watch myself as I develop an identity. I struggled a lot with the emotional/physical desire to be with someone and the intellectual/spiritual desire to be strong on my own. Most of my friends were struggling with simillar issues which sometimes made us perfect confidants and other times we made each other feel worse. There was a strong drive to be doing something. I really wanted to be needed, valued. The practice in modern society of putting teens in limbo where they aren’t children, but aren’t yet adults creates a whole set of problems. And yet teens really aren’t adults. I look at these journals and I was so short sighted and short memoried. I’d make the same realizations and complaints over and over again.

It is odd what got put in and what got left out. I’d ramble on and on about some things and then drop a brief mention of a familial conflict without giving any context whatsoever. I was definitely not writing for posterity, just to sort my own thoughts. Kind of like this entry I guess.

I’m up to age 17 journals. I’m going to finish reading through them all.

Thanks to everyone who has offered to send postcards to Kiki. If even half of the email respondants send postcards, Kiki will be thrilled.

I’m also getting what I wished for. Next week my Mom is coming into town and she’s giving me a whole day for myself. Now I just have to decide what to do with it.