Jen's Column / Diaries

The toy room is history. Now that my kids are bigger — which means their toys are smaller — I decided to reclaim the toy room and turn it into a library. Two trips to IKEA and a new appreciation for power tools later, I was ready to fill the shelves. I pulled boxes upon boxes of books out of storage — excitedly shuffling through the eclectic mix of volumes I've collected through the years, from college texts to vintage classics to cheesy paperbacks.

At the bottom of one large container, under The Norton Anthology of English Literature and The Tao of Pooh, I found six cloth-bound volumes stacked neatly on top of one another. My diaries.

From junior high to college, I kept a running log of my life — a collection I haven't thought about in years. But yesterday, surrounded by stacks of books in the middle of my living room floor, I became engrossed in my teenage self.

I read about my classes, my friends, my crushes. I read about my first pair of Guess? Jeans — and how "absolutely mean" my mother was when she wouldn't drive me into town to visit friends on a snow day.

Sometimes I'd write several times a day. ("May 12, 1988. 3:12 p.m. Update: He called!") Sometimes I'd go days or weeks without writing.

Because my mother promised me she would never read my diaries -- and I believed her -- I included details that, well, no one would want their mothers reading. (Sisters, however, don't hold the same code of ethics. I found a sixth-grader's penciled comment in one diary: "Amy was here!")

Sometimes it hardly seemed it was me who'd written the passages I was reading. I'd find myself appreciating the writer's candor — her ability to tell how she felt even when it wasn't attractive. I was taken by the passion of adolescence — the fervor felt for everything from hate to love to injustice. I felt the pain during the hard parts, and I laughed along at the funny parts — even if they weren't intended to be funny.

April 1, 1987. I now have 14 posters of Kirk Cameron. He is so awesomely choice.

February 20, 1988. I stayed at Lynn's last night. We did our hair. I crimped mine and put the sides up in a side ponytail. Then I ratted the bangs up — it looked really neat.

November 3, 1990. Why it sucks when your dad is a cop: If you get busted, your dad is the first to know even if you're 18 and were gonna tell him anyway.

And, oh, the song lyrics! Pages dedicated to the words of Billy Joel, Cheap Trick, Aerosmith, Frank Zappa. After one momentous break-up, I recorded every last word of Against All Odds across several pages: "How can you just walk away from me, when all I can do is watch you leave?"

So now the question is this: What does one do with their collection of old diaries? They don't put them in the library for their children to read, I can tell you that. And they don't seem appropriate on the nightstand for evening reading, either. I mean, this foray into teenage me has been fascinating. But it's dangerous to spend too much time in the past.

I've contemplated burning them — thus saving future embarrassment. But it'd be difficult to light that match.

My friend LaNae thinks I should keep them. "You can't throw them," she said adamantly yesterday. "Someday your great-granddaughter will read them and think, 'If Grandma Jen got through it, so can I!'"

Grandma Jen. Now that's something to write about.