dual personalities

Today, a guest post from daughter #2, midwest returnee and proud prairie mom. We have officially been Illinois residents for six months, and to say I am happy here is an understatement. I could weep at the sight of all this corn. Miles and miles of green fields, with nary a high-rise apartment building in sight. I drive around with a smile plastered to my face!

One privilege of living driving-distance from my mother is that she has steadily supplied me with a lifetime of nostalgia in the form of plastic tubs she unearths from her basement each time we visit here or there. I mean it when I say I am so grateful for this “archival work,” as I have gone through countless photographs, scrapbooks, diaries, and other belongings from about age 8 or 9 onward. Because I am my mother’s daughter, I myself was prone to recording, saving, and preserving quite a special collection of things.

A few highlights…

By all accounts — my own diaries, these family Christmas gift tags, notes and collages made by friends — I was extremely celebrity obsessed. I plastered images of the teen male-du-jour on everything, including academic notebooks. So special. The diaries, which began with the Mulan journal (that originally had a lock) and eventually evolved to simple spiral-bound notebooks, were filled with experiences I do recall vividly. Fifth grade was full of drama surrounding who got to record the homework hotline for our teacher, my scathing reviews of terrible outfits another girl wore, and a rotating catalog of crushes I had. (I was in a class full of boys, which was terrifying at first, but wound up being OK, apparently.)

Things did not change in the following decade. My high school journals also included class time drama, harsh commentary, and crushes. So much detail about the crushes. Like an embarrassing amount of focus on boys whom I never came close to dating.

I also read through a large amount of writing from these years, including stories I wrote with friends in notebooks we passed back and forth, and, of course, assignments for school. I re-read a fifteen-page book report gushing about East of Eden; the assigned length was five pages, about any book of your choosing. I found my files from the Summer Writing Institute for teens at the flyover university where my mother worked, and re-read four chapters of an extremely autobiographical novel I wrote about a group of high school girls. Hilariously, I had named all of the characters after my mom’s childhood friends. (Years later, I would transfer schools to that flyover university and be randomly assigned a dorm room with one of the other girls from the writing institute. The first thing she said when we met again was, “Oh my god! I loved that novel you wrote. Muffy and Jane and Harriet! How are they?”)

While it was a little soul crushing to remember how excluded I felt most of the time, and how desperately I dealt in the social currency of inside jokes, I’m glad to have taken this gander into the past. I do get the sense that I have always been supremely myself — and while I’ve certainly grown up, I haven’t really changed.

These tubs will go straight down to my own basement for continued perusal, and you can bet that the prairie girl archive starts now!