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Momma took a home test, then had her first doctor’s appointment. It included a sonogram, confirming one baby. Momma has been very nauseous from the beginning. The baby is due October 2.
That is the whole first entry in my grandson’s journal. I wrote it before he had a name, before anybody had met him. So this is what keeping a journal for your grandchild looks like at the start, when there is no grandchild yet to look at. Not a letter. Not advice. A report.
Keeping a journal for your grandchild before there is a grandchild
There is a whole shelf of grandmother journals for sale with the prompts already printed inside. Where did you grow up? What is your best advice? My hopes and dreams for you. Every one of them assumes there is a child somewhere to write to.
Mine does not have prompts. Mine is digital, the same setup I have used for Madeline since the day she was born, and I opened his the same week I heard.
Because things were already happening. The home test. The first appointment. That sonogram picture with one baby in it. The nausea that started right away and has not let up. Every appointment after that one, and what they said at it. The baby shower, and who came, and what each of them brought. All of that is his. It is happening right now, and nobody else is writing it down.
None of it is the kind of material those printed prompts ask for. It is a lot of dates and a lot of names and one woman being sick for months. But it is the only part of his life that is happening yet, and I would rather have it than not.
I did not wait for him to arrive before starting to be his grandmother. I do not see why the record should wait either. Keeping a journal for your grandchild is not something you earn the right to do on the day of the birth.
What actually goes in it
Keeping a journal for your grandchild before the birth is a shorter list than you would think. Mine holds four kinds of things:
- The ultrasound photos, every one of them
- My daughter’s appointments, and what came out of each one
- The baby shower, including who came and what they gave him
- Anything my daughter says in passing that I want him to have
That last one is the whole thing, really. The first three take care of themselves. The fourth is the one you have to be awake for.
Keeping a journal for your grandchild in his own voice
The part of this that nobody seems to talk about is whose voice the thing is written in.
Go back and read that first entry again.
Momma took a home test. Momma has been very nauseous.
Momma. Not “your mother.” Not “my daughter.”
I write his entries as him. First person, his voice, his life, told by him. He is the one telling you about the sonogram. I am the one at the keyboard. That is the one choice in keeping a journal for your grandchild that changes everything else about it.
I do it that way for Madeline too, and have since the beginning. Her entries are hers. When she says something worth keeping, it goes down in her words, not mine, and I do not tidy up her grammar to do it.
Somebody asked me once whether it feels strange to speak for a person before you have met him, before anybody knows anything about who he is.
No. Not at all.
I am putting words in the mouth of a boy who has not been born. It does not bother me even a little. Maybe it should.
The email account that fills up with photos
He has his own email address. I set it up before he got here, the same as I did for Madeline. The photos go there. Ultrasound pictures for now, and then everything that comes after.
That part costs nothing and takes an afternoon. It is the part of keeping a journal for your grandchild that I would put first if I were starting over, because writing requires you to sit down, and photos do not. They just need somewhere to land.
Two archives running alongside each other. Both of them waiting on somebody to open them. Keeping a journal for your grandchild and keeping his photos are two different jobs, and only one of them is hard.
The ordinary entries are the ones worth keeping
Here is an entry from Madeline’s journal, word for word:
“I was telling everyone about our large pine tree that snapped. I was very concerned.”
A big pine came down in their backyard. She was three. She told every adult she could get hold of, and she was worried about it the way a three-year-old gets worried, all the way down to the bottom. That is the entire entry.
Nobody would pick that one. If you sat down on purpose to decide what to save from childhood, you would pick the birthday, the first steps, and the first day of school. You would not pick a tree.
But the birthday is on video. The first day of school got photographed by four people. The tree is only in one place, and it is the place where she sounds most like herself.
The ordinary is some of the best entries. They usually do matter later. Most of what I have saved that I am glad about, I saved without knowing why. The week my mother and I potty trained her went in the journal the same as the tree did, as a thing that happened on a Tuesday, and it reads bigger now than it did then.
Other people have looked into what it does for a child to know their own family’s stories, and the door is open if you want to walk through it. That is not why I do this. I do it because I write things down and always have. But it was nice to find out I was not the only one.
Keeping a journal for your grandchild from ten hours away
Here is the part the how-to posts leave out.
That pine tree did not come down in my yard. It came down in theirs, ten hours from here, and I only know about it because Madeline told me on the phone.
Most of her journal is like that. I was not in the room. My daughter tells me something, or Madeline says something to me on a call, and I write it down after.
I was living with my daughter when Madeline was born, and I was in the delivery room. I will be in the delivery room for him too. Then I drive home, and it goes back to phone calls and whatever my daughter thinks to mention.
Right now I am not ten hours away. I am in the house, helping get a three-year-old ready for her brother, and everything goes into the journal the day it happens. That ends a few weeks after he gets here, when I get in the car.
I write things as they happen when I am there for them. When I am not, I write them that evening, sitting down with my own journal as I do anyway. That is the only trick I have. I have kept a journal for forty years. Theirs ride along with mine.
If you are keeping a journal for your grandchild and you do not live near them, that is the piece I would tell you about. Not the notebook. The habit you already have, and hanging theirs off it. I was never going to remember to do this as its own separate chore. I did remember to do it because I was already sitting there at nine at night with a pen.
Some of what is in Madeline’s journal I did not see firsthand. I got it secondhand, and I wrote it down anyway, in her voice, as she told it to me. I could have some of it slightly wrong.
Keeping a journal for your grandchild from a distance is mostly just paying attention to what your kid tells you on the phone. It is not the version I would have picked. It is the one I have.
Keeping a journal for your grandchild without keeping score
Madeline has three and a half years in hers. He has a handful of entries and a due date.
I am not going to even that out. I am not going to go back and catch him up, and I am not going to slow hers down so he can gain ground.
Each will be different, just as they each are.
There is a lot of talk out there about second babies and the memory book that never got filled in, and how bad the mother is supposed to feel about it. I do not carry that. Keeping a journal for your grandchild is not a scoreboard between the grandchildren. It is a record of what happened to each one of them, and what happened to them was different.
Hers has a pine tree in it. His will have whatever his has.
The other thing I would say about keeping a journal for your grandchild is that the second one gets something the first one did not. Madeline’s started the day she was born. His started before that. He has weeks in his book that she does not have in hers, because by the time he came along, I already knew this was worth doing.
What I hope happens when he is twenty
A while back, I opened a keepsake bin from my daughter’s childhood and gave Madeline some of the clothes from it. I kept that bin for over twenty years without knowing there would ever be a Madeline to hand it to. My daughter liked sharing them.
I gave my autobiography to a few friends and watched them read it and tell me what they thought.
So I know what the moment looks like. It feels good to give somebody a piece of the past. Like a time capsule.
I figure he will be somewhere in his late teens or early twenties when I show him his journal. Maybe we sit down and read it together. I hope he is excited about it. I hope he is curious. And if he decides he wants to keep it going himself, that would be the whole thing.
I still don’t know if he will care. You do not get to find that out for twenty years. Keeping a journal for your grandchild is the longest wait I have ever signed up for.
Where I would start
If you are thinking about keeping a journal for your grandchild and waiting for the baby to get here first, there is nothing to wait for. It is never too early. From the moment you find out.
I would start with how you felt when you heard. Or how you were told, and who called, and what you were doing when the phone rang. Then keep going with whatever your child passes along to you. Another grandmother started hers the day she got the news and kept it up past the first birthday, so I am not out here on my own with this.
That is the entire method. There is no week two. You write down what you find out, in their voice, on the day you find it out or that night when you are tired, and then you do it again the next time something happens.
Mine is not fancy. There is no leather cover. Keeping a journal for your grandchild does not require a nice book, nor good handwriting. It is a file, and an email address, and a woman typing at the end of the day about somebody else’s Tuesday.
He does not have a name yet. He has a journal.