The Good Thing About a Mess

Is that messes hide those things that one would rather leave hidden...

I've been working on cleaning up & out our bedroom today. Some friends & I are holding a garage sale this weekend & I've been trying to "sort out" what needs to be gone from our house :)

Anyway, it has amazed me what type of stuff has been dumped in our bedroom, especially on my side of the room.

It has also completely caught me off guard.

Among the things I've found: an old planner, a pacifier, a diaper & feelings that overwhelmed me so quickly that I was taken quite by surprise.

The planner was from 2008-2009 & I thought it was neat to flip through the pages and remember what things were important that year, trying to remember what some of the references were referring too, realizing how much life really does change in 2 years, and then I got to the last page or so & read "[name omitted] Due Date!"

Baby E's mom.

Realizing that Saturday is his birthday & that if things had been different, I would be planning a birthday party for a 2 year old right now...but I'm not. I flipped another page in the planner and saw "Tutoring Meeting 9 a.m." and remembered how I went ahead and attended that meeting and how it was one of the hardest things I ever made myself do. It was less than 24 hours after we had returned Baby E to his mother and no one at school had heard yet that it had all fallen apart. It was difficult, awkward at times & very sad for me, but I was determined to go on with things 'as normal.'

I was still okay at this point in the cleaning process, they were, after all, just memories...sad ones, but memories. Then I found the diaper and pacifier buried in a basket. Both of them were "his." I was still okay, until I threw them away...

the physical act of letting those two items go, unexpectedly, tapped into that well & the tears just started flowing.

I was dumbstruck. How could I be crying? Really?

I tried to make myself stop, but my body was determined to get it out so I let it.

Now none of these things has been just sitting in our bedroom for 2 years straight, they've each kind of 'flowed' from place to place and their most recent landing spot was our bedroom. It was finally time to let them go.

I do still think and wonder about Baby E, probably quite a bit more often than many people would ever realize...wondering how he is, what mischief he might be getting into, what milestones he has reached, and I know that I always will. He was my son, my child, if only for a brief moment. That is a loss that I will always carry with me & it is a loss that will never be evident to most. I am also aware that it is a loss that some will never be able to understand or how it may have affected each of us here in this house.

How can it be that memories can sometimes feel as "fresh" as the moment they originally happened? So, the mess is cleaned up & those memories that were "buried" deep in the piles are now at the surface once again, for the moment anyway. And as I did then, I'm just going to keep moving on (& hopefully, won't find anymore "buried treasures" :) and keep on cleaning!