Dear Diary

We recently visited Dingle while in Kerry on holidays.  I hadn’t been since a family trip with my parents when I was a teenager. As we walked through the brightly coloured streets, I was assailed by memories of that holiday, a time I hadn’t thought about for years.  I remember we travelled with my uncle, packing fun in, not knowing then that the following summer he would die, leaving us to say goodbye forever.  I remember being curled up in the back of a campervan documenting the trip in my diary.  And as the memories came, so did the regret because a few years ago in a moment of sheer and utter madness I threw all of my diaries into the fire.  They were so personal and contained so much of me – so many ramblings, hopes, dreams, desires, love, loss, sadness, poetry, secrets so tightly guarded that their existence made me feel too exposed.  Too vulnerable.

I first started keeping a diary when I was 9 years old, and although we tormented my oldest sister by reading hers, I think my own managed to stay in the most part, private.  My secret special friend. I wrote in it daily, a bright blue A4 hardback that I covered in stickers and mindless doodles.  Photographs were arranged haphazardly, love hearts drawn, boy’s names scribbled out.

I remember writing about buying my first pair of jeans from the Jeans Den, with money I had earned strawberry picking.  Followed a week later by Metallica’s “Black Album”, the first tape I bought for my inherited Walkman.  That blue book was replaced by many more as the years went on, capturing the highs and lows of my teenage years, leaving home for college, the years I spent living in London and Australia and my world travels with friends.  The unrequited loves and the ones that didn’t last but left lasting lessons.  Today as I write this, the adult me aches to read the childhood scrawl of that small girl, with such big dreams and the strengthening of my character and confidence as I grew in life.

After I had my own children I started to think about what I’d like them to know about their mother.  I don’t for one minute expect them to think I’m perfect or flawless.  In-fact, I know that even my very best efforts couldn’t hide my flaws from them, but I also didn’t want them to know the darkest corners of my mind either.  I’ll regret that decision for a long time to come.  As we passed Paudie’s Bar, I longed to take out my diary and read the words I wrote the night I visited there with my parents, remembering my Dad singing along to the trad band that played to the packed pub. As I grow older, increasingly I think that rather than being shocked or embarrassed by reading my most private thoughts and experiences, that my children would be proud of the mother I grew to be.