"It's like reading your journal"

Not this layout. This one is just fine because it doesn't say anything at all.

Charlie was looking through some recent layouts last night and ended the evening sobbing in my lap because of the journaling he read on two of them. I don't think I do a lot of layouts with deep journaling; most of them are bland and boring and it's my biggest obstacle when scrapbooking. I don't have a lot of patience for trivial details and I don't tell stories very well. In fact, I'm taking 3 classes right now (the Sense & Sensibility workshop at Debbie's Hodge's site!) to try to overcome that problem.

But back to the tears. I guess I do a fair number of personal journal type layouts, I just don't post them publicly very often. I can remember one that I posted here about my issues with not being able to have another baby. But mostly I do the page, say what I need to say, feel better after I get it out and tuck them away and forget about them. I don't have a writing journal so I guess Charlie was right about the content of these pages.

So he read two of them, not very deep ones or on a sensitive topic - just ones where I reflected about changes he has gone through, changes we have gone through as a family - and the tears started. He has always struggled with getting older; for the most part he's not a kid that is eager to reach new milestones. He likes things to stay just like they are. He is still upset that we got rid of my old Subaru with the worn through carpet and sand in the joints and hole in the seat. He already worries about going away to college and not sleeping in his own bed. He didn't want us to paint the house a new color. So I might have guessed that pages about my feelings watching him get older wouldn't go over very well.

As I tucked him into bed, he told me that I could scrapbook about the fun stuff and the silly things we do but that he doesn't like the other kinds of pages. So maybe it's time I get a journal after all.