Old diaries

I'm working on starting a private blog where I can vent about a few things that would get me in trouble here; it'll be mainly for some relatives and perhaps a very few longtime AOL friends; it really isn't anything that would interest most of my readers.
I wanted to get a time frame on certain happenings I want to discuss in that blog, and went looking through old diaries; turns out they were no help, since I had stopped journaling before the events for which I was looking occurred.  But I did find some stuff that took me back in time; so I got lost in the eighties for a while.

For several years I would make an annual purchase of a rather fancy daybook to use as my diary.  By the time I glued photos and stuck clippings in them, they weren't so fancy any more.  But they were what I wrote in during my most intense record-keeping period, and they are the ones I usually peruse most frequently because they're the ones with the pictures and clippings.  

I used odds-and-ends books as diaries before I discovered the fancy ones; since these aren't fancy, and don't have room for clippings and pictures, I seldom look through them.  This morning, though, I opened up the 1983 one.  Wow, what a year.  
For two-and-a-half years, we had rented out our old house here and lived near Oak Grove, closer to Cliff's job at the butcher shop.  In 1983 we moved back home; Cliff wasn't happy away from this place, so when the renters moved out that spring, we returned.  
1983 was the only year my son played high school football, and there was quite a bit of mention about his training.  My daughter didn't seem to stay home much back then:  she was always spending the night with one friend or another.      
The thing that really shocked me was that I complained about Cliff's attitude at times.  In later diaries, I was pretty careful (most of the time) to keep negative stuff about my husband to a minimum.  Why?  Because I knew some day I would die, and if Cliff read complaints I had penned about him, it would hurt his feelings.  
I'm not talking about anything major.  He was in a difficult place with his job at that time, and of course his discontent with work spread over to his family.  He hated living at Oak Grove, so that didn't help things either.  Actually, my griping on those pages comes across more as pathetic whining.  
So I looked at these mildly negative statements I'd written down for posterity and asked myself, "Should I tear out pages like this?  Or should I take whiteout to them?  Should I perhaps throw away the whole diary?"  
No, I won't do any of those things.  I'll remind Cliff here, in this public journal, that in 1983 I was still manifesting PMS regularly.  I'll tell him we all have bad days and bad years.  
So, Cliff, remember this if you ever read these old diaries.  I've always loved you.  I know if you'd been keeping a diary, you would have had many occasions to gripe about my behavior.  This goes for any other relatives, also.  My daughter was once reading an old journal of mine and found a petty gripe I had written about a relative I love dearly.  To all who may read my diaries after I'm gone, don't feel bad if I once wrote something negative about you.  I'm not even that person any more.   Remember, too, that those writings were originally meant for my eyes only. 
As Ree would say, "I'm just keepin' it real."