Documentation

Do you keep a lot of mementoes related to your kids? What about other aspects of your life?

I tend toward the less-stuff end of the spectrum, but I want to keep the special stuff. At home, I prefer calming spaces that are cozy but aren’t teeming with trinkets - it gives me sensory overload. It’s been said that we shouldn’t document our experiences too much, and that with time the most salient features of an experience stay with us, while the lesser details or perhaps the aspects we’d rather forget dissolve with time. I tend to think this is the best approach to take with the past. That’s not to say I never document, but I don’t get caught up in cataloguing everything. And with smartphones, I find my phone pictures act as a diary themselves. 

At work, of course, we document EVERYTHING and often in great detail. As a family physician, my notes range from a sparse, simple visit to a long and detailed assessment. It’s no surprise, then, that with the amount of documentation I do daily, I feel exhausted at the thought of further documenting. 

Long ago I accepted that I didn’t feel the need to journal on a regular basis, as much as I admired those who did. Writing was often what I turned to during challenging times. It still fills that role, and has also become a way to process different kinds of experiences. Recently I did an online writing course that reflected on motherhood that I would highly recommend. But the constant recording of exactly what I’ve done, when — no, that’s too much.

I recently went through old papers at home and found a card from one of my closest friends, written just three months after we’d met back in university over fifteen years ago. Just seeing her handwriting was such a treat, with most of our current communication occurring in fonts. 

With my young kids I’m saving special artwork in binders with page protectors - it’s quick and easy to slip them in and to look through them that way. I let a stack build up then put them in, in my best attempt at chronological order. Overall, though, I'm trying to focus more on the moments.