Dear Diary
I have been writing stories since I was ten years old and my mom gave me my very own diary, complete with a lock and key (which I suppose didn’t offer any real measure of security given that any kitchen scissors could have rendered the fastener useless). However, sharing a room with an older sister and no real privacy, it made me feel as if I had a way to finally keep something of my very own private.
My diary was the first place where I wrote uncensored, free from a teacher’s grade, a friend’s judgment. It was the place where I practiced my writing.
Since then, I have always kept a journal, writing daily gratitude, observations on motherhood, marriage, and the highs and lows of life, writing and otherwise. Journaling, as it is now called, has become a hobby for some. But for me, it has helped to strengthen me both emotionally and creatively. It is still the place where I am my most unfiltered and it prepares me for the writing in the other areas of my life that do require other eyes, an editing pen, judgment from reviewers and readers.
With each passing year, practicing writing in my diary strengthened my writing and eventually helped me to write the papers for my AP English classes in high school and my college essays. It helped me to earn internships with magazines, write articles for professional journals, and even helped to launch my own blog, Writerhood: Thoughts on Writing, Motherhood and Everything in Between…”, and then it helped me to launch a 30-year writing career, writing about the lives of so many like journalist Ethel Payne, pitcher Satchel Paige, jazz musicians Louis Armstrong and Benny Goodman and historic heroes Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass in over twenty picture books and creating historic fictional narratives for my Finding Langston series and YA novel For Lamb.
But I certainly never imagined it would help me decades later to write the life story of the woman who gave me that diary, my mother. When she passed just weeks ago, my brother and sister assumed, as the designated family storyteller/memory keeper/writer, it would be me, who would write my mother’s eulogy and memorialize her in words during her funeral service. But highlighting the stories of others, those from history and polishing your own credentials is a long way from telling the beautiful and emotional fullness of your mother and how her life breathed life into yours.
But I thought back to my diary. To our early trips to the Malden Public Library. To all the ways my mother believed in me and my writing from the very first time she could see my love of story, books and words, and I sat down and wrote that. And I thought about each and every paper, school newspaper paper article, essay and manuscript I read to her in its earliest stages, and each time I lovingly autographed one of my books with her name or dedicated to her and each time she told me, “Lesa, I think this one is the best things you’ve ever written.” And I thought back to all the times she came to watch my four children when I needed a break or had a deadline or a speaking engagement, ensuring my career would get off the ground. And I thought too about all the times I could see her pride in me. And some combination of all those things made it into what I wrote of her and me and our time together and I hoped that somehow, some way, everyone who attended her service and read of her could see that the gift of my mother was her gift of being just the mother I needed by giving me that diary years ago and with it a legacy of love and her implicit belief that I would one day become all that I dreamed, a writer.
