What began as a way to escape family noise came to an end when I found my true voice as a writer.

Tucked away on the very top shelf of my closet is a lidded box, gray cardboard trimmed with metal, and  filled with with diaries. There’s the leather and hand-made paper one (Il Papiro, Firenze),  the cloth-covered one with a musical staff on the cover, the abstract black-and-white vinyl one, echoes of Keith Haring.

Each diary has its own beginning and end; one begins Sat., July 6, 1991, “three weeks in our new home,” and ends Fri., May 14, 1993, the day my daughter loses a front tooth.  Days earlier we celebrated Mother’s Day, the first without my mother, who had died a month earlier. “Here is the sum total,” I write. “I am my mother’s daughter . . . and my daughter’s mother.”  Unlike other diaries I abandoned, empty pages left blank, for the sake of a fresh beginning, this one is its own slice of time, filled up cover to cover.

I keep these hidden away for a simple reason:

I don’t want anyone else reading my diaries, ever.

But every so often they tug at me, come, take a peek, treat yourself to a memory refresh.

Tumult is a word that I would swear was Yiddish until I learned that technically it isn’t. It has Latin roots, tumultus, which means uproar or commotion and there is indeed a Yiddish word, tuml, which means a noise or racket.  It’s all about cadence and cultural appropriation. Come over to the apartment I grew up in on almost any night of the week, listen to my noisy Jewish relatives sitting around the kitchen table and you understand the tumult at the roots of my becoming a writer.  I listened. I grasped the way family stories get rehashed, daily dramas at the heart of them. . . .

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