One of the things that my mother said was that if you write something down, you’ll never forget it, and that really helped when I was struggling to remember my mother. One of the things that I think a lot of people don’t realize is that when they lose something, they also lose the — they start to lose the memory, and so I would write down things about my mom that I wanted to remember.
And capturing those memories on paper, knowing that I had those memories forever recorded was a great comfort to me, so that when I felt sad, when I missed my mother, I could open up my little book, and I could read about her, read one of my memories, and know that I had captured that for all time. So it was really a wonderful way to make sure that I was keeping her in my life.
When I grew up, we didn’t talk very much, and I think the idea was that you should be quiet and soldier on, and so there wasn’t a lot of encouragement for expression. I think also a lot of people assume that children will talk when they need to, and that’s simply not true.
Children often feel as if they don’t have permission to say what’s really going on because they look around them, and the adults in their world are not talking either and not really allowing the kinds of honest conversations to happen, so providing a child with a journal and giving the child permission to write in that journal can be a way to enable that child to have some power over the ability to express.
