Diary for a Daughter: August 1969 - August 1970

Katherine Dickson

jan. 2006 · Katherine Dickson Books

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Diary for a Daughter is a personal account of how having a daughter changes one woman's life. It is the story of one woman's experience of herself during these changes and traces her journey toward increasing psychological and emotional wholeness and happiness. The birth of the daughter coincides with the family's move to a new house and the mother's concerns about her own ability to make a home for her family in a tract house in a development. Three weeks before her daughter is born she and her husband move into the new house. She has had strong misgivings about the tract house in a development because it symbolizes what she hates in American life. The happiness she feels she attributes to pregnancy euphoria and after the birth she explores her feelings about the house. She comes to understand that one does not find the house of one's dreams, one creates it. She discovers that she is in the very situation she has avoided all her life, and realizes that the painful feelings associated with her mother, her early experiences of home, hearth, and domesticity are the issues she must face rather than the issue of living in a suburban tract house versus living in the city. She tries to deal with her fears, anxiety, and inner demons and decides that when she was single she needed the city for survival. To avoid regrets and resentment, she and her husband gradually work through questions of power, sex, and money. She experiences a sense of psychic victory and knows that she not only has a right to be happy, she has a right to be angry. She then attempts to create a happy, interesting emotional experience for her family four. The point or purpose of the work is to both present a unique personal account of individual growth as well as to present those aspects of a major experience which are universal. What is valuable and interesting about this journey is that it is told from the woman's point of view and the woman's experience through diary or journal format.