Sibling Supernovas

Pleiades and Stardust. Credit: Rogelio Bernal Andreo (Deep Sky Colors)

MY KIDS ARE exploding this spring, turning into ever-evolving, endlessly fascinating, newly reinvented versions of themselves. And though I try to pay attention, it seems that many days, I’m just hanging on for the ride.

You know when you just have your head down, as a parent, and you realize that time is passing, and changes are occurring in your kids, but you’re so bogged down in getting through the days that you don’t really stop to marvel at exactly what transformations are taking place? That’s pretty much my normal state, and with my solo-parenting stint still ongoing, I’ve been even more focused than usual on just making my days, collapsing into bed, and getting up to do it all again.

Occasionally, I’ll mention to someone (usually someone whose kids are grown, it seems) something amazing or wonderful or funny the Rock or the River did or said, and they’ll say, with a slightly desperate-sounding urgency, “You’re writing this stuff down, right?” Err. No. Not really. Should I add that to the list of my (many) maternal failings?

I’ve never been much of a journal keeper. Whenever something hilarious or magical happens, I tend to tell myself to make a mental note of just how momentous that particular moment was; I reassure myself that I will, of course, remember it…and 20 minutes later, I’m wondering just what it was I was so determined to preserve. Huge chunks of my own past have disappeared from memory in this fashion, and finally, this spring, I realized I had to change my lazy ways.

Reading the bestselling book The Happiness Project (which I highly recommend: it’s a fast, enjoyable read and full of excellent, actionable, small suggestions for improving your life) gave me a strategy that’s working thus far. Author Gretchen Rubin (who happens, in the interest of full disclosure, to be a college acquaintance of mine) suggests keeping a daily one-sentence journal. One sentence? How hard could that be? She does hers on her computer, and so I adopted the same strategy.

Ok, my entries aren’t daily (and they are often more like four sentences, because I’m a lazy editor late at night) but in the month that I’ve been practicing this habit, I am happy to report that milestones that otherwise would have been buried in mental detritus are forever (or at least until the hard drive crashes) preserved.

Because of my short but sweet journal, I will remember that the River said the day he received his first-ever electric guitar was the very best day of his life. And I will never forget that the Rock, who is just starting to read, and therefore needs to know the spelling of every word she can think of, said at bedtime last week, when I asked her to please, please, quiet down and save her questions for tomorrow.

Her response?

“But Mommy. I just LOVE this WHOLE world. And I am a curious girl.” Indeed.

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