Mom, Share Your Life with Me (A Journal)

With Mother’s Day approaching I thought I’d share one of, if not the, best gift I have ever received. My mom sent me the “Mom, Share Your Life with Me” journal as a gift many years ago. At the time I thought it was a cool gift but remember thinking how could I possibly add one more thing to my already full schedule writing everyday in this little book? But as the years passed I’d pull it out every now and then and write in it. I was trying to write on the actual date indicated in the calendar-like format of the journal, but later started writing just when I had time, sometimes answering the questions for multiple days on the calendar.

This clever little gift does a multitude of things: It instigates memories of the past, in some cases many years even all the way back to when I was born, it asks questions that I have never thought about and some that I have, but never answered, it creates a memoir that can be passed to my children at any time, and as all journalling seems to do, brings me into the present moment, even though I’m writing about the past.

I can’t count the number of times my kids have said, “You never told me that!” or “Why didn’t you tell us that?” or “I didn’t know that about you.”, etc. Just this morning when I asked my daughter to proof a brief bio on myself that I’d written, she said she would not have been able to write it because she didn’t know the things about me that I’d written.

I can imagine this being a great gift for parents or grandparents. But of course, the ones that will really get a kick out of it are those that get to read it when it’s done.

Here are example questions:

“Tell about your first memory of celebrating your birthday.”

“What was your first day of school like? Do you remember what you wore?”

“Did your family have picnics? Tell about that.”

Seems pretty simple, huh? But you may be surprised the memories and details that come up. And of course, it’s always interesting to see generationally how things have changed and how in some cases, they haven’t changed much at all.

Traditions, trends, celebrations, practices, milestones – they are all subjects that reveal who we are now and how we got here. You may not ever get to write your memoir and share it with those you love, but this is, I think, the next best thing and definitely deserves a 5 Heart Rating!

You can find one like mine here on Amazon:

And here’s another option:

And here’s one for Dad: