Object Diaries
Stories About Human Connection Told One Secret Object at a Time.
Object Diaries
Gabrielle and Pamela's Diary
Gabrielle Blackwell was 28 when she wrote me a letter about a secret diary that she discovered in her mother's drawer as a young child. If this were only about a secret diary, it would be a good story. But this is so much more than that. It's about mothers and daughters, about the secrets we carry, and how sometimes an ordinary object can become an extraordinary tool for healing.
This episode was produced by Jessica Terrell, April Estrellon, and Lisa Weiss.
Consulting was provided by John Barth. Music was provided by Blue Dot Sessions. Initial production development was provided by Isoke Samuel and John Sepulvado.
Thank you to Jill Barancik, Jeanine Cornillot, Charity Elder, and Kerry Donahue for your notes and feedback.
Thank you to Gabrielle and Pamela Blackwell for sharing your story and for so graciously modeling how to have difficult conversations with ourselves and the people we care about.
Special thanks in memoriam to Stan Weiss, who inspired the series. May his memory be a blessing.
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Bring an Object Diaries workshop to your community or workplace. Foster connection, engagement, and belonging through a modern version of childhood "show and tell."
I have in my hands a square ish object. It's probably like five by six inches. It's this really beautiful blue color, almost like you're looking up at the sky. It has a lock with a kind of metal latch off to the side as well.
Lisa Weiss:Gabrielle Blackwell was a child when she found her mother's journal, and what she read inside of it changed her.
Gabrielle Blackwell:It says, this is for all your deep, dark secrets. It will help you remember all the good and bad times.
Lisa Weiss:I'm Lisa Weiss. This is Object Diaries, stories about human connection told one secret object at a time.
Gabrielle Blackwell:I found the journal at eight years old. I believed it until I was 27. I had this truth that was actually a lie.
Lisa Weiss:Gabrielle was 28 when she wrote me a letter about a secret diary that she discovered in her mother's drawer as a young child. If this were only about a secret diary, it would be a good story. But this is so much more than that. It's about mothers and daughters, about the secrets we carry, and how sometimes an ordinary object can become an extraordinary tool for healing. The story begins in the late 1990s. Gabrielle was the child of a single working mom. She didn't know her dad. In fact, there was a lot she didn't know.
Gabrielle Blackwell:Right around seven or eight is when I started noticing that I was one of the only kids that didn't have a dad, that didn't grow up with a dad.
Lisa Weiss:Gabrielle says she tried to ask her mom questions about her dad, but she doesn't remember getting many satisfying answers. It just seemed like one day he was in the picture, kind of, and then he was gone, and she didn't know why.
Gabrielle Blackwell:You start realizing that there's a loss there, that there's this emptiness there.
Lisa Weiss:Gabrielle found herself home alone. A lot.
Gabrielle Blackwell:And I would just go exploring. And I'm like, all right, I'm nosy. Let's find, let's see what we can find. And I open up a drawer and there's my mom's journal, right? So I was just like, Ooh, what is this?
Lisa Weiss:There, tucked away in that drawer, was a journal with a dreamy sky blue cover and the inscription you heard at the start of the show. This is for all your deep, dark secrets.
Gabrielle Blackwell:I just remember, like, sitting down in one of the couches by myself and just reading the journal and reading the words of my mother back from before I was even a thought.
Lisa Weiss:Gabrielle's mother was a college student when she wrote in the journal, and a lot of what she wrote was pretty dark. About her relationship with Gabrielle's father, there's a mention of hellfire, and a lot of regret.
Gabrielle Blackwell:And it talks about things being a sin between them.
Lisa Weiss:Gabrielle's mother had crossed out a lot of the lines she had written in the journal, but there was enough left for Gabrielle to start piecing together her parents story.
Gabrielle Blackwell:It's an extramarital relationship, and then there's this pregnancy that happens. And it seems as though, like, in that moment when my mom was pregnant, there was this divide between her and my father, right? So I'm like, okay, just The fact that I existed drove away these two people.
Lisa Weiss:And then, Gabrielle says she read this one line that would haunt her for the next 20 years.
Gabrielle Blackwell:My mom in the journal says, you know, I just had Gabrielle, I love her, but I, I just don't like her.
Lisa Weiss:I love her, but I don't like her. Those words stuck with Gabrielle. She played them over and over in her mind. She wondered whether her dad felt the same way.
Gabrielle Blackwell:I just started constructing something to make sense out of the fact that he wasn't there. Like, how he wasn't here because he didn't like me.
Lisa Weiss:She felt this responsibility for her dad not being there, like it was her fault.
Gabrielle Blackwell:When mom's pregnant, she's pregnant with me. My dad gets mad at her because she's pregnant. My dad is mad at her because of me. And that's why I have no dad.
Lisa Weiss:Gabrielle secretly read the journal a few times before confronting her mom.
Gabrielle Blackwell:Then I remember telling her one day, I was like, I found your journal, right? She's like, oh Gabrielle, I can't believe you did that, and you read it.
Lisa Weiss:Her mom moved the journal after that. And because she and her mom had a hard time communicating, Gabrielle's chance of finding out more about her parents relationship disappeared with the journal.
Pamela Blackwell:Gabrielle's dad is older than me. He was a senior when I was a sophomore.
Lisa Weiss:That's Pamela Blackwell, Gabrielle's mom. We spoke not long after I first connected with Gabrielle. She's much more of an open book these days about a relationship that was complicated.
Pamela Blackwell:We were friends. Very good friends.
Lisa Weiss:They were both in relationships. But they started to see each other anyway.
Pamela Blackwell:There were things about our relationships that we were not happy with, at least that's what I thought at the time. And I felt like we were kind of like filling a void for each other.
Lisa Weiss:He graduated, moved away, got married, had a child. Then in her senior year of college, he was having problems in his marriage and they started seeing each other again. Pamela is religious and she felt really bad about the affair.
Pamela Blackwell:I appreciated him and I loved him and everything, but I felt guilty about it too. I would pray all the time, like, Oh God, please forgive me. Please forgive me. Please forgive me.
Lisa Weiss:She channeled all that guilt and sadness into a journal given to her by a college roommate.
Pamela Blackwell:And so, I know that I was writing things about that relationship with Gabrielle's dad in the journal. And so that was a big secret. You know, very few people knew. I even went and like, crossed stuff out. Cause I'm like, I really don't want anybody to know. If anybody picks up this book, I'm scratching certain things out of there.
Lisa Weiss:Eventually, she broke things off.
Pamela Blackwell:It was my last year of college.
Lisa Weiss:But then, there was this one day after graduation.
Pamela Blackwell:On the day that I got my first job offer, um, he's like, Hey, let's celebrate. I shouldn't have, you know, I had canceled, but I called him back and said, Oh yeah, let's get together and celebrate. And we did. And so Gabrielle was a surprise.
Lisa Weiss:Pamela found herself very unexpectedly pregnant. She was 23. She had just started her first job.
Pamela Blackwell:I wasn't exactly sure what to do, but I did think two wrongs don't make a right. I felt like God knew my heart and I felt like he gave me this gift, right? And now I have an opportunity here. And so my opportunity is to embrace this new life.
Lisa Weiss:Gabrielle's father wasn't looking to have another child.
Pamela Blackwell:When I talked to him, he wasn't happy about it. And I was like, Hey, you know, don't worry about it. You go live your life and I'm going to live my life. And the result of that is Gabrielle's an angel. She was a delight and she just lit up my whole world every day. She was smart and she was talented and she was excited and she loved to learn and, you know, and it was just everything that she did was just, was just wonderful.
Lisa Weiss:As much as Pamela delights in her daughter, as much as she adores her, they haven't always had the easiest time communicating about the depths of that love. And unbeknownst to Pamela, that line that Gabrielle had read her in her mother's journal, I love her, but I don't like her, hummed in the background for years. A secret source of pain that colored all their interactions.
Pamela Blackwell:I think that there are things that she struggled with that I don't necessarily understand. And I think that she allowed herself to believe some things that weren't true. At some point in time, she convinced herself that I thought she was a mistake.
Lisa Weiss:And their conversations about that over the years have not always been productive. Their struggles to communicate extend well beyond the drama over Pamela's secret journal. Here's Gabrielle again.
Gabrielle Blackwell:I remember having a conversation with my mom and it was a tumultuous time in our relationship. I was just kind of not understanding why my dad wasn't around, why it was really hard to talk to her about him. One thing leads to another and I just remember her being like, Well, what would you have had me do? Like, had an abortion? Question mark. It's an intense moment. Essentially, I felt like I was just left in the dark.
Lisa Weiss:Years go by. And in that time, Gabrielle struggles with who she is, her family, and her own place in the world.
Gabrielle Blackwell:I've had a really hard time with understanding how to love myself and how to like myself.
Lisa Weiss:The stress hits an apex when Gabrielle is at work. This happened just a few years back. Gabrielle was in Portland, Oregon, more than 1, 500 miles away from where she grew up. The stress of her day at work triggered deep emotional trauma and Gabrielle had a breakdown. It's so severe she's hospitalized. Her mom flew out to Portland right away. During those dead hours between visiting time and Gabrielle being treated at the hospital, Pamela starts snooping around her daughter's house. By this point, Gabrielle had become a prolific writer and journaler herself, keeping more than 15 journals as an adult. And during Gabrielle's nervous breakdown, Pamela finds these journals.
Pamela Blackwell:I was a bit of a snoop in her house, but for a purpose, not just to be nosy. And I read in one of her journals some things that she thought and was very angry about. And I was like, well, this isn't true. This isn't true. This isn't true. I never said that. You know, why does she, why does she think that?
Lisa Weiss:A daughter reads her mother's diary. And a mother reads her daughters. Is it a mutual betrayal? Or is it a way to talk about things that are just too difficult to say? I think we've all had those times in our relationships as parents or as children, when we don't know how to talk to each other. Still, I wanted to understand how the words they wrote seemed to take on a life of their own. I asked Gabrielle's mom. Do you think words can be things?
Pamela Blackwell:Can words be things? Um, I don't know. I think feelings are things. I don't know if words are things. Cause, at least for me.
Lisa Weiss:Somehow she got this feeling. Um, and then she carried it with her. We carry so many different things with us.
Pamela Blackwell:I think we carry, you know, definitely carry memories, right? And our perceptions of those memories. And memories all by themselves are very interesting because you and I can be two people. Let's say we were twins, right? And we experienced life together and we have a lot of the same experiences. Our memories wouldn't necessarily be the same because what you remember has to do with the impact that experience had on you.
Lisa Weiss:After Gabrielle recovered from her breakdown, she went to visit her mom. It was a good visit. And Gabrielle asked if she could find some old photos to bring home with her. You might have figured out already that she found more than photos.
Gabrielle Blackwell:She's like, you know, just go into the den and look in one of the closets. So I was just taking out like banker boxes full of photos and as I was digging, I came across it. I'm like, I've been searching for this thing for so long.
Lisa Weiss:That it was the secret diary. She found it again. After 20 years,
Gabrielle Blackwell:there it was. I brought it into my room and I just read like, I just, all I wanted to do was just to read those words that it haunted me.
Lisa Weiss:Somehow the journal had changed in 20 years. It's like, For one, Gabrielle realized it wasn't full. In fact, it wasn't even half full. Gabrielle also found herself relating to her mom's writing in new ways. Gabrielle was in her twenties now. Her mom was in her twenties when she wrote the journal in the first place.
Gabrielle Blackwell:It was, um, this interesting experience of being like, you know, my mom has literally gone through the exact same things that I've gone through,
Lisa Weiss:but most amazingly, that phrase that helped define Gabrielle's life. was nowhere to be found. The phrase, "I love her, but I don't like her" didn't exist in those pages.
Gabrielle Blackwell:I read through it, like, I'm going to find the page, I'm going to find those words, I know it's true. Um, and the words never were there. I cried all night long. just carrying around a truth, like a heaviness that I didn't need to carry.
Lisa Weiss:Her memory had betrayed her.
Gabrielle Blackwell:I never saw that phrase. I mean, never in the journal ever said that she didn't like me, and that was just something I've kind of carried with me my entire lifetime, feeling, you know, maybe an ounce of shame of being kind of like an other child or not being born, um, to a married couple, whatever else it is.
Lisa Weiss:Gabrielle hid the journal and took it home with her. She read and reread it. She thought about how young her mom was when she had her. She started to feel a new sense of connection with her mother. And then she did something unexpected. She started to journal in the diary herself. Using those blank pages to have a conversation with her mom that she was never able to have in real life. She even responds to what her mother wrote before Gabrielle was born.
Gabrielle Blackwell:There's a 21 year old, a 22 year old who's writing in this journal, and I, it's almost like out loud, I'm like, come on, you know? Like, when you watch a little kid almost, like, just doing things that don't make any sense, that they're gonna get hurt, you're like, oh man, you should just know better, right? But, um, there's also this, like, All right. Well, I've assumed that my mom is just going to know everything and you know, that she's never been my age and that she's never been, you know, in a place of not knowing.
Lisa Weiss:Pamela, of course, was often in a place of not knowing what to do as a young adult. And she's been in a place of not knowing as a parent too, not knowing why her daughter doesn't feel loved, not knowing how to help her daughter with some of the things she's struggling with.
Pamela Blackwell:To be a mother, on one hand, it's like the easiest thing. But I think the older your kids get, the more difficult it becomes, you know, because you're, there's so many things you can do wrong. There's so many things you can't anticipate. There's so much you can't control.
Lisa Weiss:The journal links the two women in another way as well. When Gabrielle talks about unresolved pain from her childhood, she often talks about this void with her father. Who she did end up reconnecting with later in childhood and having an up and down relationship with. But there was something else that happened not long before Gabrielle first found her mother's journal as a young child.
Pamela Blackwell:I had this breakdown and I ended up in the hospital. I was working like 70, 80 hour weeks and, you know, trying to balance everything. And then I actually had a breakdown and ended up in the hospital for two weeks. I got out I think on the 24th of the month and probably spent the next at least three months like what happened to me and being very ashamed of that and wondering what other people thought of me and it was this weakness, you know, what is it? So that was probably the start of trauma for my child because while I was gone for two weeks she thought I was dead.
Lisa Weiss:When Gabrielle rediscovered the journal in her 20s, it was not long after she had a similar breakdown of her own.
Pamela Blackwell:And so this story is interesting to me because my daughter has struggled with this negativity. And she's so much like me that she's had the same type of struggles emotionally that I have. Which brings us back to our object.
Lisa Weiss:The journal that played such a huge role in this painful rift between them and then helped bring them back together.
Gabrielle Blackwell:I enjoy journaling. I think that journals are beautiful.
Lisa Weiss:That's Gabrielle again.
Gabrielle Blackwell:I love the way that ink hits paper. You just have these blank pages that are waiting to be filled with something beautiful.
Lisa Weiss:At first, Gabrielle didn't tell her mother that she had taken the old journal. But she started to feel like maybe there was a reason that more than half the pages were left blank.
Gabrielle Blackwell:This journey was meant to tell a different story, right? I'm like, okay, well, I have this opportunity to do something that is, uh, I hope like an ode to my mom. Cause I'm like, there's things that we both said to each other that are hurtful. And you just, I'm like getting teary eyed. But it's like, you don't know any better. And so I'm like, I've taken a lot of time to, to grow compassionate with myself, to grow compassionate with my story, with my mom, too. And it's almost just like this is like a token, like a requiem of love to an extent that's like, I just want you to know, mom, that regardless of everything, that there's love. It's like nothing but love, even if I didn't know how to express it at the time.
Lisa Weiss:Gabrielle didn't just start filling out her mother's old journal. After all these years of keeping their hurts a secret from each other, of snooping through each other's diaries looking for clues, Gabrielle did something different. She told her mom about taking the old journal, and she showed her what she'd done with it.
Pamela Blackwell:I started reading it, and then I was like, Oh, this was really good for you to have. This is a healing thing for you because all these things that you wrote in your journal that you were upset about, that you believed about me, this was written a long, long time ago and it 100 percent conflicts with what it is that you believed. And so you believed these things, and these beliefs cause you pain. You read the truth now, right?
Lisa Weiss:Pamela says she doesn't hold on to many objects. She's not the kind of person to keep things for sentimental reasons. The diary is probably one of the only things that she's had for Gabrielle's entire life. She's a religious woman, and she thinks maybe there was a reason that she needed to hold on to this one. Somehow, the journal was always meant to be Gabrielle's, always meant to help the mother and daughter have a conversation they otherwise might never have had.
Pamela Blackwell:We should be having these open conversations because when we do we'll feel better. But we all do it. We're afraid of conflict. We're afraid to tell people, well, you did this and this is how it made me feel. And we don't give each other the opportunity to learn that we were wrong.
Lisa Weiss:The postscript to the story is that Gabrielle and Pamela are doing great. Pamela helped Gabrielle move to Austin, Texas, where her daughter got a really good job. Pamela still lives outside of Chicago and says she feels much more grounded after all these years about who she is, what she's done, and how her life has taken shape. Gabrielle's relationship with her mother's diary has continued to evolve as she works on her own process of healing and growing. She's ripped out some of the pages, rewritten some, burned some others, all a part of letting go of stories that no longer serve her.
Gabrielle Blackwell:I don't want this to be a place of deep, dark secrets. I want this to be a place of honesty and of openness and of celebration, and that's what I turn this journal into. So being able to make this really my own, my life my own was incredibly important. I feel like it's a bit symbolic of the journey of life, of you're not always in control of things that are done or that are said, but you can always turn the page and finish your own story in the way that you would like for it to.
Lisa Weiss:You've been listening to Object Diaries. I'm Lisa Weiss. This episode was produced by Jessica Terrell, April Estrellan, and me. Consulting was provided by John Barth. Initial production development was provided by Isoke Samuel and John Sepulvado. Thank you to Jill Barancik, Jeanine Cornillot, Charity Elder, and Kerry Donahue for your notes and feedback. Special thanks to my dad, Stan Weiss, who inspired the series. May his memory be a blessing. Thank you to Gabrielle and Pamela Blackwell for sharing your story and for so graciously modeling how to have difficult conversations with ourselves and the people we care about. Thank you.
