Besides life itself, the most precious thing my mom ever gave me was a box of letters my parents wrote to each other throughout their 14-year marriage. I wrote about this in my post titled “Letters – Part II.”

Here’s an excerpt that summarizes the post:

But, as I’ve begun to read and sort the letters in the box my mother gave me decades ago, it’s as if both my mother and father are continuing to speak to me, explain to me, teach me–even though they are both gone now. They were not just our parents. They were human beings. A young couple with struggles, longings, pain, desires, and problems that often interfered with, if not overwhelmed their parenting.

In these letters, I read about all the things that went on between them, about their lives outside of being my mom and dad. I read about their challenges, their passions, their joys, their love, their mistakes, their anger, their flaws — all of the authenticity of being less-than-perfect human beings.

So why then, do I so often hesitate to include my own passions, flaws, mistakes in the memoir I’m writing? Of course, it’s because of the question that has kept me in a proverbial prison my entire life:

What will they think?

My logical side tells me that every person has less-than-perfect characteristics. My emotional side — (okay, even here, that question is freezing my fingers as I try to type. “What will they think if I expose an emotion I’m feeling?” is like a physical barricade, blocking any attempt for thoughts to flow from my brain to keyboard.)

So, if the purpose of these daily blog posts is to “unfreeze,” here I go with some “freeform” typing–typing without thinking too hard, preferably, without thinking at all!

My emotional side tells me:

• What will they think?
• Nobody can imagine what I really think, what I’ve done behind the closed door of “Perfect.”
• It doesn’t matter if I had good reasons.
• Social media makes everyone’s life look perfect — including my own.
• What imperfections lie beneath those perfect lives?
• If we could all be honest about our feelings, the events of our lives, even our mistakes, we’d probably all feel better about ourselves.

There’s my stream of thought emotional thinking. It brought me to what I truly believe about authenticity, that we’d all feel better about ourselves if we could be vulnerable enough to show who we really are.

I am fortunate to be married to someone from whom I have no secrets. Steve knows everything about me, about my past. And I’m pretty sure I know everything about him and his past. It makes it very easy for me to share what I’ve written with him and get good, honest feedback. I probably couldn’t continue writing it without his help.

But I often wonder how my daughter and son will feel upon hearing or reading some of the stories in my memoir. I hope they, too, would see it as a precious gift to learn about my life outside of parenting — about the mistakes I made and what I learned from them. Perhaps it would quiet their own internal criticisms when falling short of expectations — whether society’s, their parents’, their spouse’s, or even their own.

That question, “What will they think?” haunts me most when it comes to my kids. On the other hand, I think about how sad it would be if, like me with my parents, they learned about my life and, after my death thought, “I didn’t know Mom at all.” The chance to talk would be lost forever.

To me, there are few joys greater than learning a truth about someone. The quote at the top of my blog is by Carl Sagan – “Understanding is a kind of ecstasy.”

The quote at the top of my website is mine: “What is the value of saving face, if that face is only a mask?”

I fully believe both of these statements. But, as with any memoirist, it doesn’t make removing the mask any easier. But I’m working on it! 🙂