My 2 Second Shelf Life

Dear Diary....



I’ve been a diary/journal keeper since I was eleven, or so.
Believe me people..... with a mother like mine, keeping a private journal was no easy feat, let me tell you.
Wherever my little mind thought was a clever place to hide said diary, was a piece of cake for KGB Agent Milinkov to find.
Hide it between books?
Behind the toilet?
Under the bed?
Under a floorboard?
Behind a loosened brick in the backyard?
In a shallow hole under a bush close to the house?

Yeah, sure.

Mama was a compulsive “thower-outer”, and she decided whether I needed something or not.
Saving those Teen Beat magazines because they have posters of Michael Jackson and David Cassidy? (Shut. Up.)
I was not allowed to put them up on the wall "bekaz da tep rooin da paint".

They would disappear in a military style shake down of my room.
With a “vy yu keepink det garbitch?” in passing, from Mama.

To approach her in this decades' teen style of:
“How dare you go into my room!!! I have a right to my privacy!!!!”
Would have resulted in a shpaff across the head, and a reminder of who I was talking to.

Mind you, what was so private in the diary of an eleven or twelve year old?
Page after page of “Richard(names interchangeable) said ‘hi’ to me in the hall today outside of Mr. Murrins’ room...he's sooooooo cute”?
Or
“Lisa said that Keshra is a snotty bitch, and then Keshra told me that she’s not Lisa’s friend anymore, and then….”?
Or…
Endless laments and bitches about my mother?

Bingo!

One time, after a particularly percolated tongue lashing from her for Ican'trememberwhat…. I wrote all about how much I hated her, and what a bitch she was, and how unfair my life was, and how much my life sucked, and then promptly hid my journal between my mattresses

Genius!

My eleven year old mind thought.

Until I got home from school the next day.

Even when I think about it now, my ass smarts.