Journals

When I die, my children will no doubt rifle through my stack of journals looking for odds and ends and trying to confirm what they will have come to believe about me.

I can just see my oldest coming across that entry I wrote after coming home from the hospital with her.

Dear Lord, I think mothering might kill me. I don’t think I can do this. How do I press rewind???

I can only hope she has a few kids by then and can look on those words with compassion and humor!

It may also help her understand why my journals will only chronicle 1993-2002. She was born in June of 2002 and my last journal entry was entered very shortly thereafter. Well, not really. I have stumbled through a few tattered spiral notebooks since then, but it’s been much more sporadic.

I bought a new journal a few weeks before Christmas, resolving not to allow my children to doodle in it in doctors offices, not to write my grocery lists and menu plans in it, and certainly NOT to rip out half the pages to supply my son with paper airplane supplies.

Well, things aren’t going so well. But, it’s just a reflection of my life –  filled up with doodles, and menus, and the kind of giving of self that fills me up, even if it does strip my journal bare.

My thoughts and hopes and meditations are much further from the tip of my pen than they used to be. I can barely articulate what I’m processing, but God is still very much at work.

I hope the monkeys will think back on these years and forgive the absent journals and fill in the gaps with good memories and graceful remembrances of me.

And so, onto some thinking on the gospel of Luke while I fold undies, mop floors, and sew a pillowcase or two. Couldn’t ask for a better way to spend this life.