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Mother’s Day Reflections From A Mom’s Moving Sale

Maria-Victoria-A.-Grageda-Smith

By: Victoria Smith

 

Having recently sold our home, and to save on moving costs, my husband and I conducted a garage sale—something we hadn’t done in years and should have held sooner, in paced multiples, not the crazy one day seven hour marathon sale we’ve just had. I knew this day would come when we’d have to completely move out of our Midwest home to make way for our new life on the Puget Sound, but I held back until the last minute. It was foolish, I know, and there was no reason for it other than plain cowardice. Daunted by the prospect of facing the accumulation of twenty-five years of marriage and family life—a veritable mountain of redundancies and unnecessaries, I chickened out.

It’s not the first time I’ve done this, so I knew the greatest challenge here was not the tedious, hard work of editing and clearing away of the material stuff—it’s the stuff of the heart and soul that are the heavy weights. Fourteen years ago, after another big move, I wrote the following lines in my poem, “Old Letters”, that appears in my poetry collection, Warrior Heart, Pilgrim Soul: An Immigrant’s Journey:

“Another move, another house, not yet a home. All around me: the scraps and souvenirs of a life stuffed in boxes.

How does one measure how far we’ve gone on this journey?

Or depth of being?

Or success or failure?

First there were two hundred, then four hundred. Now eight hundred?

A thousand, perhaps? A thousand boxes—the accumulation of years!

Projects begun but never finished, vacation snapshots, milestones reached;

The turning at the crossroads, where the fork stared us in the eye:

Did we choose the road less traveled—the one that made all the difference?

Or did we, like many, pick the safer path, rode the bandwagon of mediocrity?

Is this what it all amounts to—this counting of boxes as proof of our lives? Are we simply the sum of a mover’s list? ….”

Presently, we faced the special challenge of having to sort through all the childhood stuff of our children who’d long flown the coop. Having been a mother who could never let go of anything connected with her children, there was a lot to contend with, to say the least—and much of it, the children themselves said they didn’t care to hang onto. So why did I feel I had to? Plowing through boxes and boxes of my children’s things from when they were babies till their high school years was not only physically painful; it was emotionally and philosophically draining. What to keep, what to throw away? One could design a whole spiritual retreat out of this exercise!

It’s been oft stated that we are who we are because of our memories, that we only live as long as someone remembers us. So perhaps I was hanging onto my children’s things because I no longer trusted my memory? Things took the place of remembrance—proofs of events, monuments to extraordinary feats of ordinary life. But these monuments have become monumental occupants of precious real estate! And they, along with the merely ornamental, were proving to be stones tied around our necks, holding us down. It was time to go full Marie Kondo.

But to achieve this, I had to challenge the notion that our memories create who we are. Similar to the faulty belief that we are what we do for a living, the idea that we are only what we remember of ourselves presents a fundamental flaw in our understanding of ourselves. True, it was touching to be reminded of what I did with my children when they were five years old, or even fifteen. But does the loss of a souvenir from that time take away the fact of its occurrence? Forgetting the specifics of the good things I did as a parent—does this make me less than the good parent I was and still am? If it does, then perhaps I have a problem of identity more than of memory.

No one lives forever. No matter how many remember us, in the end, they all die out. And do we need to be reminded that monuments are a risky proposition to keeping latter generations apprised of our self-importance? Just remember what happened to Confederate Civil War monuments in recent years. There is knowledge, after all, that goes beyond physical proof. Only the ego needs supporting evidence for its illusions. Do we really need to be remembered beyond our lifetime, when only maggots draw sustenance from whatever remains of us? And why even attract maggots? I’ve made clear in my will that I am to be cremated.

Truth is, who we really are is not changed by fleeting memory. For myself, I find I don’t need proof I was and still am a good mother beyond the living proofs that are my children. It is with this thought that I bid my daughter’s dollhouse farewell when my husband carries it off to goodwill. I hope another mother and daughter will create beautiful new memories with it that will last them—well, at least a lifetime..

(All rights reserved. Copyright ©2019 by Victoria G. Smith. For updates on her author events & publications, go to VictoriaGSmith. com. “Like” her on Facebook at Author Victoria G. Smith. “Follow” her on Twitter @AuthorVGSmith)

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