Mother/Daughter Journaling

I've never met today's guest, which makes it even more special that she has been so quick to support my blog. I found her through her blog posts about journaling & am glad to have her on my blog to share her love of journaling in a way that will encourage you in your own journaling endeavors.
-Megan

MOTHER AND DAUGHTER JOURNALING

Hello everyone! First let me start by saying THANK YOU to Megan for inviting me over today to talk about journaling on her wonderful blog. Megan is one of our new friends at Carolina HeartStrings and we come and visit with her often. She is doing such a fantastic job with her blog. We love it!

My name is Tammie (that’s me on the left) and I am one of the bloggers over at Carolina HeartStrings. My partner Alessa and I are Southern girls (transplants) that love where we live, North Carolina and South Carolina and have been friends for over 20 years. We love to cook, eat, travel and have varied individual interests and passions that we love to blog about. Today, I am going to share
with you one of mine. Journaling.

I love that word.  Journaling. It makes me think of a colorfully bound book with page after page of space just waiting to be filled with words.  Sounds so easy doesn’t it?  I think journaling can be the most satisfying or frustrating experience. When I was a little girl we used to call them diaries.  I always had one.  I was always off to a good start, but never kept it up.  As an adult I would see a really pretty journal and I would buy it with all the right intentions.  This time I was going to do it, start a journal and do it on a regular basis.  Once again I did not achieve this until. . . . . . I figured out that for me journaling was not necessarily about keeping a diary of my thoughts, but rather about my life experiences.  I was
thumbing through a woman's magazine and came across this little blurb about a mother and daughter who had begun a journal when the daughter was a little girl.  This journal was strictly subjective. It became a book about whatever each one of them wanted write down about a shared experience or an individual one that they wanted to share with each other.

They would pass it back and forth over the years, sometimes weekly, sometimes once a month or even several months between entries. Each of them recording their memory for the other to read and experience. They had filled a journal up with the life experiences they shared and when the mother died and the daughter was grown up, this journal took on a very special meaning. It became their life
journey together. Saved with words in a journal. Something the daughter could hold, touch, read, and remember. It kept her mother always close. After I read  that blurb I knew that I wanted to do this with my daughter. She had no idea I had planned to start this when I found the "right" journal. Mother's day of that year, 2009 she presented me with the perfect journal as one of my gifts. If that isn't a sign I don't know what is, right? That gift became “our” journal. Now she and I do this together, back and forth as we each find that special event that we have experienced and want to document. Sometimes it is a poem that one of us composed or a letter we have written to the other or a shared event such as a Broadway play or a trip.

My daughter is now 16 and I hope we fill many journals in our life journey together. Filling up page after page with whatever we each chose to put in this journal that holds meaning for each of us in some special way. So someday, some far away day, when I am no longer "here" she has our life together to read, remember, cherish.

Tammie