Need a lift?

Recently I read the book LIFT by Kelly Corrigan and I cannot tell you how much this book “lifted” me. It’s a short book one you could probably read in an hour, but in that hour I promise your thought process will change.

The book had me both laughing and crying and everything in-between. It also had me wanting to journal more about my childhood and my children’s childhood. Journaling about the person I was then. It makes me want to more than scrapbook, but journal all those little details!
The book is actually a letter to her daughters and this excerpt from the book really spoke to me:


I heard once that the average person barely knows ten stories from childhood and those are based more on photographs and retellings than memory. So even with all the videos we take, the two boxes of snapshots under my desk, and the 1,276 photos in folders on the computer, you'll be lucky to end up with a dozen stories. You won't remember how it started with us, the things that I know about you that you don't even know about yourselves. We won't come back here.


You'll remember middle school and high school, but you'll have changed by then. You changing will make me change. That means you won't ever know me as I am right now - the mother I am tonight and tomorrow, the mother I've been for the last eight years, every bath and book and birthday party, gone. It won't hit you that you're missing this chapter of our story until you see me push your child on a swing or untangle his jump rope or wave a bee away from his head and think, is this what she was like with me?