your mother kept (unsettling) journals... what to do with them?

a diary of my mother's stubborn resistance to accept help

2 April 2025:

With Ellen/my mother moving to assisted living, my husband and I were tasked with emptying her home. It’s small, but/and she was a quasi-hoarder… months and months of mail, fetid food in her fridge, clothing pell-mell, a threadbare flannel robe, one slipper, an entire bookshelf filled with journals, folders bulging with her stories and poems.

I know Ellen wishes I wanted all of this writing. I know because she’s told me, more than once. She wants more than anything for me to have a deep interest in her life story.

Dear Reader, I do not.

In fact, her journals and her photos fill me with disquiet. Casually flipping through her pictures I’ve stumbled upon photos of her and various boyfriends in flagrante delicto. Not interested! I have heard the story of her ex-husband reading her journals and being filled with jealous rage. In her 40’s, before the marriage, Ellen took a sabbatical and had a sort of How Stella Got Her Groove Back holiday through the South Pacific which apparently vividly chronicled, exploits sexual and otherwise, in her journals. Her ex-husband slut-shamed her. It was a whole awful thing. A thing with which I wanted no part. And yet, standing in her disheveled home, I felt squished between responsibility to respect what she may want to preserve and also to unburden myself of it all.

I thumbed through a few notebooks and what I found was heartbreaking. We all suffer with a cruel inner critic. Ellen’s was/is terribly harsh. It seems, at least at the time of writing in this particular journal, she was so down on herself. I guess she was tasked in a workshop with making a mask that represented her… and here is a peek at her response:

Damn it! I am not doing another one. The first one was hard enough. I always think everyone else is more talented, smarter, better dressed, more creative, more imaginative, a better writer, a nicer person—I wish I could play the piano or was a better cook, or a better gardener or cooler. I am not a Halloween person. I can’t even spell it. Once my father dressed me as a voting booth and I won!

I feel tremendous tenderness for this person, this writer who expresses wit and pain in the same moment. The line about not knowing how to spell Halloween! The memory of dressing as a voting booth as a kid! The comparison game we all perpetrate, making us miserable.

And then her mask… her rage turned inward is crushing.

Immediately I was catapulted back to being a child with an unhappy and depressed parent for whom I felt responsible. I tried so hard, always, to make my mother happy, to ensure our well being by lighting up our house. Reading this journal, ridiculously made me feel as if I failed… again. Self-protection is why I want no part of her writings.

…

I resorted to a duck-duck-goose sort of game, tossing roughly two-thirds and bringing the remainder to her new home. One of the saved journals was a sturm and drang record of Ellen’s time helping her own mother at end of life, details about selling my grandma’s yellow trimmed house in Florida with the white shag carpet she used to let me rake. About Grandma’s quilted bathrobe, emphysema, and oxygen tanks. About depletion. All so awful and sad.

When I arrived in her room with more photos and clothes, Ellen was on her bed, holding the journal out to me, “I can’t believe all I did for Grandma,” she said. I stood, waiting. “It was a lot,” she said, and went back to reading.