Letters from My Younger Self Update for Tackle it Tuesday

Several weeks ago I posted about the huge pile of letters that I “inherited” when my mother died. She had saved every letter, birthday card., postcard, and message that my brothers and I had ever sent her. When we cleaned out her house, my brothers and I each saved the letters that we had written her. The letters have sat untouched in my back bedroom for three years. I posted that I was going to start going through them and figure out what to do with them. It didn’t seem appropriate to throw them away without looking at them, but there’s such a huge pile that it is overwhelming. I committed to spending at least an hour a week sorting the letters.


I have now spent several hours sorting the letters into groups by year. The photo above shows the letters from 1968, the first year that there is a collection of my letters. There are 21 letters, 4 postcards, and two copies of my college newspaper written between September, 1968 and December, 1968. This is the year that I graduated from high school and left California for college in Oregon.

There are letters for every year up to 1990. I have read only a few of the letters. Some of them didn’t have clear postmarks so to determine the year I had to open them to find the date…and several times I couldn’t resist reading. I think it must be a little like reading a diary years after writing it. I revisited long forgotten people and events.

There are many letters from 1976-78, the years my husband and I served in the Peace Corps in Nicaragua. I read several letters from 1980-82. These years my children were the same ages as my grandchildren are now. I was never very good about writing down in their baby books all those cute things my kids said and did. In the few letters that I took time to read, there are anecdotes of their development. I had forgotten completely that my son’s first sentence was “Drink beer?”

I guess it was a good thing that I didn’t throw them away. But I’m still not sure how to proceed. I do want to recover the stories of my children’s childhood. Now that they are organized by year, I will start reading through them. I’m thinking about writing a timeline of what was going on in the world each year and what our family was doing.

There aren’t any long lost secrets buried in my letters, but I am enjoying revisiting my youthful self. …and then I’ll get the courage to throw them away!

Messages From Myself at a Younger Age

My mother kept every letter, card, and message that I ever sent her. When she died my brothers and I cleaned out her house and claimed our childhood relics. For three years my cards and letters sat in boxes in my back bedroom. It doesn’t seem right to throw them away, but what am I supposed to do with them? I’ve decided to set aside an hour a week to start to organize and read through them. If they are as uninteresting as I think they are, I can throw them away with a clean conscience. Once a week I will post on my progress.

Maybe I’ll throw them away. Maybe I’ll find insight. Maybe I’ll find inspiration. Maybe I’ll just organize this one small part of my inheritance from my mother. It’s a journey I need to take, if only to spare my children the burden when they inherit the leftovers of my life.

Mother Theresa Comes for Drinks Part 1

I’ve been wanting to write about my relationship with my mother, but even three years after her death, I still struggle to describe our connection without falling back on clichés. I loved and admired her at the same time that I loathed and rejected some of her behaviors. Advice that is often given to writers is to “show, don’t tell.” So here’s a story about a time that my mother visited me.


My mother usually made the trek from southern California to eastern Oregon to see me and her grandchildren once a year. She would visit for at least a week, stay with the grandchildren while I was at work and do all those housekeeping tasks that a working mother never has time to get to.  I would come home from work to dinner cooking, all the laundry clean and folded, and my ironing basket empty. I appreciated the help, but like most things of value, there was a price.

One day after work I invited several co-workers, including my boss, back to my house for drinks. We sat out on the patio enjoying the warm spring weather and my mother charmed my guests with her English accent and self-deprecating humor. Everyone told me how lucky I was to have a mother who would spend her vacation digging through piles of laundry and ironing. My mother basked in the glory of her newly adopted Mother Theresa persona. We ate appetizers and had another round of drinks. Our conversation rambled over current events and local controversies including a teacher who had been arrested at the middle school. I went in the house to get more snacks and returned to the patio to hear my mother saying “Jann was molested when she was five by a school employee.” I stood stunned watching my boss and co-workers listen to my mother tell the complete story of my molestation, reporting the abuse to the police, and the eventual trial.

As I write these words I am still at a loss about what to say. That day I served the snacks, returned to my seat, and pretended that everything was fine. That’s what we did in my family…never talk , never confront, pretend that everything is fine.