The Pear Tree

I recently, thanks to the powers of social media, got back in touch with a friend from my university days.

She now has three kids – two boys and a girl – that range in age from four to nine. She refers to them collectively as her “Monkeys,” if that gives you any idea of their level of capriciousness. She is one of my favourite Facebook friends because her status updates, which often detail the crazy antics of her children, are always entertaining.

Lucky for her brood, her reports of their goings on are not only posted up into the vast, cyber wasteland of status updates, where they’re guffawed at by their mother’s long-ago friends and then forgotten. No, at some point between herding said monkeys, keeping house, working and, occasionally, sleeping (and, apparently, spending time on Facebook), she’s actually writing these stories down in three dedicated notebooks for them to keep and look back on when they’re grown.

They’re not, as far as I know, long, rambling diatribes. Just quick, sometimes humorous and sometimes poignant, vignettes. Sometimes it’s just a random quote that one of them said, and the date.

When she first told me about this project of hers, my son was only just starting to talk, and not saying anything decipherable enough to actually record for posterity.
I thought, though, that I would definitely do this for him when he was old enough to warrant it. You know, when the things he was doing and saying were reaching beyond the purpose of his baby book.

But he’s been talking for more than two years, now, and has been partaking in his share of crazy antics for even longer.

And yet, I had still (until this week) to pick up a notebook for him. Or his sister, for that matter, who, now two, could fill a few pretty pages in a notebook of her own.

In fact, I haven’t updated my own diary for the last, oh, four years or so. A diary that I kept somewhat faithfully for more than 15 years before that.

I just don’t have the time. Or energy. Or the creative thrust.

“Oh, I’ll remember that,” I tell myself. “How could I forget something as significant as that?”

But I have to admit that, even months later, the details blur a bit, the emotion wanes, and the outcome effects what you think you thought about the events preceding it.

Now, I know that failing to chronicle every adventure or funny thing my kids say doesn’t make me a bad mom. After all, how many of us have immaculately kept diaries of our entire lives? And we’re just fine.

But how much richer would it make our personal tapestries to have, and know these histories of ourselves?

My sister’s mother-in-law, Chris, recently told me about the gift her own mother gave her.

Because she raised her kids (including my sister’s husband) far from her parents, she kept in touch by letter, sharing the cute stories of what her kids were up to as they grew. Some time after they all reached adulthood, Chris received in the mail a notebook, with all those stories consolidated into one place. Her mother had gone through the old letters and transcribed the stories for her.

“There were things in there that I didn’t even remember happening,” she said. “It was so wonderful to have all those details written down and brought back to mind.”

Life and time carry us along so quickly. What a gift it can be to record little bits and blips of it to keep, to page through later. To remember what we once were and how that might have influenced the us we are today.

Or, if nothing else, to inspire a good laugh.

So, earlier this week, I finally broke down and bought my kids a notebook, each, to record some of these moments in their lives.

For them. For me.

If nothing else, I can give some of my status updates a more permanent home.

***

The Mother Load is a mommy column by Pear Tree editor Lori-Anne Poirier that runs weekly in The Penticton Herald’s Southern Exposure.

***

- Words and photos by Lori-Anne Poirier

2 Responses to “The Mother Load: The Notebook”