Planners, Notebooks, and Stickers.

When my mom died she left behind dozens of notebooks. A room full of magazines. Stacks and stacks of torn out pages and recipes. Like many things in the wake of her death, it was a mess. A disaster. There was no order to most of it so the magazines and torn pages went straight into the trash with no look to see what treasure there was inside that caused Mom to save it. It didn't see like there was time to take for all of it.

But her journals I saved. I put them in a wine crate, put them in the garage, and put them aside. It was a couple of years later before I was able to read them. I am sorry I did. The journals were varied and interesting. Cloth covered journals, day planners, lined paper, blank paper. All different but all joined together by my mother's handwriting. It was a jolt to see it, the handwriting that wrote me notes in my lunch box, cards and letters when I was away, cute notes on the coffee maker. Even now when I come across a Post-It or scrap she wrote on it jolts me now.

But in those journals, chronicling decades of her life, reading them felt like an intrusion, and it took me a long time to get over what I read in them.

My mother led an unhappy life, caused and effected by many things. She had a firm belief that happiness, a better life, was just over the horizon, in another job, another place, with other people. And because she always looked for outside answers I believe she never found her happy spot, although she found bits and pieces.

They were sad stories. And stories of joy. And loss.

There were also pages and pages of empty pages. Some journals only had a few lines, started then abandoned. I used to do this, and used to buy notebooks and never fill them as though the expectation was too much. I could feel them judging me.

I don't do this any more. I think it's the usefulness my writer's notebook has. It is a daily habit, always with me. Each page is important. I have something to say. LOTS to say, more than enough to fill every page. And I write it just for me, so no more judgey expectations from others. Not even fancy notebooks.

Towards the end, as she was chronically ill but not terminal, the stories were full of vitriol and hate. At the end she hated me. The journals were long lists of all the things wrong with me, how awful I was, how she could not stand me.

They were hard words to read. I think I failed my mother in those last years I moved home, feeling the need to come home and help but also feeling like my adult life was on hold with no end date in sight. Mom was sick but not diagnosed. No longer seemed herself but angry, violent almost when confronted with this truth. She wanted a different life, and I could not give it to her, and often resented the life I had.

All of this crept up on me, I never meant it to happen. I foolishly thought I'd have days, months, years, to make it up to her. To make it right.
It was not all bad. She was still my best friend, which I think made it harder. I still told her everything. She was still my fiercest champion against the outside world, listening to stories of others and defending me.
I still called her every day at lunch and checked in with her. Which is why my last words to her were "Love you" as I hung up that day and not something else.

In a lot of ways I did not, do not, want to be my mother. I do not want to look outside for happiness. I do not want to settle for a life because I am too scared to live one on my own. I do not want to spend my whole life fighting demons and not living.
In a lot of ways I am everything due to my mother, from the amber scent and cocoa butter I wear to the Dr. Bronner's I use, to the boxes and boxes of journals I keep.

I have kept a journal as long as I could remember. First a diary with a lock and key, then a variety of journals and diaries that so often became screams into the void. A litany of complaints. A downward spiral that never seemed to result in anything.

My first year teaching in Brooklyn I was introduced to Ralph Fletcher's Writer's Notebooks and things changed. Writing became productive, had a purpose again.
Years and years later, the idea of a bullet journal changed it again.

I also get from her my love of fifty billion types of pens and markers and writing utensils. Drawers of them, more at work.
There's a whole scene in Roxanne about him finding just the right pen and stationary to write his letters and I have rarely felt so understood by a movie.

Along with the pens and journals Mom was also a collector of cards. She loved snail mail, and I get them from her too. I kept her cards, I have boxes that in the eight years since she died I've used, sent to friends, sent out into the world. Towards the end one of the things she hated was that she couldn't focus, couldn't get things done. That the Christmas letter she started working on in October didn't go out until February.

I am also very found of stickers. Mom was notorious for glitter bombing cards, so that when you opened envelopes you had to be careful or glitter would go EVERYWHERE and you'd never get rid of it. I loved it.
I still do.
The image of happiness for me is glitter everywhere.

As a teacher, my love of color coding, pens, markers, stickers, and notebooks is put to good, daily use. Each class is a color coded folder and notebook. I color code my grades. I keep a running to-do list. These spinning, concentric circles of organization keep my world turning. The more stressed I get the more regimented things get. Even on good days the order, the color coding, grants me peace. Enhances my calm.

The last few years I've used a variation of a bullet journal/everything notebook.

I like the recycled composition books best. I put in my monthly and weekly planning in it. But I also put article ideas, rants about selfish people, long term plans, wish lists. I like structure and order, but other than an index and some common pages that go in each notebook (budget, list of accounts, long term planning, goals) I do not keep a strict order like the bullet journal and everything notebook require. I like the fact that my notebooks are whatever they need them to be. They are all parts of my life.

This year, with starting a new job, moving to a new place, I tried a different planner. I've done this before. I have a Day Planner I LOVE. Like, love, love, and have loved since I first saw one in Working Girl. I will use it, realize it doesn't quite fit, and after spending $50 on Day Planner fillers I'm back to my $10 composition books. I thought maybe now that I was a professor I needed a planner planner so I got Sarah's Scribbles because I thought the cartoons and stickers would bring daily happiness. But it started in September and school started in August so I ended up making my own pages. Then what happens is what always happens. I went back to my composition books. 

There's always a period of guilt that follows, for the money wasted, the failure to conform. My notebooks very much reflect my neurodiverse brain, a thing I struggle with, and work hard to accept. Maybe one day I won't even attempt to fit into other people's expectations, skipping the anxiety that comes from failing to meet them, and just jump straight to the stickers and markers.

I think it's because I am a writer and a teacher and a planner and there are no hard boundaries between these parts of my identity and at any given moment I want to Crayola marker next week's schedule, and then sketch out a future article, and then jot down ideas for a class. So I need all of these things easily accessible all the time. If I ONLY have a planner then my writer's notebook is elsewhere. Guaranteed when I need one thing it will be not there and I'll lose the thread, the thought, the idea.

My weeks in my notebooks have to-do items, appointments, ideas. I color code my pens. I put stickers on rough days and weeks to make things better. I layer my weeks in multi-colored Post-Its.

I go through LOTS of notebooks. They stack up and stack up.

It always makes me laugh when I watch a movie and a character has a single notebook that they've written in their whole lives. Are you kidding me?

Never happen.

At some point they'll move to a bookcase I imagine, stacked on the shelves in chronological order. There's a story in them, "This Is Not a Memoir" a book I'd love to write some day. And when/if I'm ready the pages will all be there to flip through, remember.

I think a lot about what happens to them all when I die. 

I am not always kind in them. I tend to be sharply analytical of people I feel have failed me. The pages often reflect what a hot mess I am as I struggle with difficulties in a life lived alone. I try to celebrate as much as I kvetch (a lesson learned from Fletcher's Writer's Notebook). My notebooks are as much scrapbook as anything else. I print pages out, pictures, and glue them into the pages, layering with writing and Post-Its and drawings.

When I die, there is no one to sit down and go through it all so I'm not sure why I worry. The instructions in my will say to dump anything personal and take the rest to Goodwill. I am deeply affected by my mother's death in this. There will be no one left after me, but I also don't want to leave a mess for whoever does have to deal with it all. It's been a guiding thought in my paring down. 

The thing is once I'm dead I don't care. Let the things be of use. I suppose it's the same reason why I'm an organ donor, a Body Farm donor. I'd like to be of use. Despite my faith I do not know that I believe in what comes after anymore. That too is my mom. Given how she dies I really think that if there was anything after I would have seen her. And I never have.

I don't think my notebooks would ever be of use. Maybe if I can refine them, mold them like Play-Doh, share what I want them to be. But in their unfiltered form? They're strange artifacts of decades of an odd life. Out of context and incomplete.

I feel better when I color, mark them out, plan in color coded order. They make day to day life better, easier. I often show my students pages from them, as I provide models of process, thinking things through, how an article or chapter or post evolved from one thing to the next. Quite a few of the scribbles end up here more fully formed, detailed, and hyperlinked then sent out to the world.

I have always been a writer I guess because I've always been my mother's daughter. I have always been a reader. A dreamer. These things worked together feeding into each other, feeding each other. It was only years later that I encountered the gate-keeping idea that only some people could be writers or readers that there were checklists and expectations on how this looked and who could do it. This made me feel bad, like an imposter, like I did not have a right to claim the title of writer. One thing that my writer's notebooks have given me back is the core sense that I am a writer. 

I always have been. 

I write stories and novels and articles and chapters and blog posts. 

I imagine worlds and criticize them. 

My tools are Crayola markers and tape and stickers and rulers and color coded pens.

I prefer not to think of them as artifacts waiting to be left behind but instead as creative pieces I haven't yet sent out into the world.