I’ve never been very sentimental. In fact, I’m the person my friends would always call when they had a big organization project to tackle. They’d bargain and cower, as I’d dispassionately comb through their stuff, ruthlessly tossing things out. I never understood the need to keep things: matchbooks and menus, ticket stubs, old t-shirts; it was all so much clutter to me. And then I had my daughter, and suddenly I was unable to part with anything. One baby sock (the other lost in the wash)? A precious keepsake! The hat she wore home from the hospital? To be placed in a fireproof box! Every piece of paper she scribbled upon with her sweet hands? To be carefully curated!

I also, for the first time, began writing in a journal. I started the night she was born, writing her a letter from my hospital bed as she slept in her bassinette beside me. I kept writing, through her sweet babyhood, nursery school, her elementary school days, the angsty teenage years. And then, almost before I knew it, she was preparing to graduate from high school and move away from home to attend college in another state. I wanted to do something special to celebrate this time in her life. Of course, her dad and I would take her shopping for her dorm room and help her move in, and she’d be home for Holidays and summers. But I knew a chapter of our lives was ending, and I wanted to commemorate it.

The answer came one night as I was writing in my journal. Just as her childhood was ending, so would my chronicle of it. I wrote her a final letter, telling her everything I wished for her, and included some practical advice about college, some silly things, some heartfelt. I was going to just wrap up all the notebooks with ribbon and give them to her, but then I found a company that would create a beautifully bound book. I had always thought book publishing was some exclusive, mysterious process, but it turns out self publishing is easy. The results were magnificent, I was even able to have a beautiful cover and include black & white and color photos. It looked so professional! I admit, we both cried when I presented it to her. She’ll always be my little girl, and now she’ll always have my memories of those years, no matter how far she travels in her life.

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