You know how I like to take a metaphor and beat it to death.
This is release. This completely full dumpster.
17 years ago, baby Joy bought this house that she had wanted for as long as anyone can remember while her husband was in Iraq. It was exciting and terrifying. I hated making huge, life altering decisions without Nick, but at the same time this was the dream. This house and babies. That was all I wanted or cared about having once I became a grownup.
This old house planted itself in my heart around age eight, and as such I love it despite a great many annoyances that come along with it- bugs love it; I have this incredibly annoying small leak in my bathroom closet that I have been trying to fix for months and every time I think I’ve got it, water gets in again; the person that owned it just prior to me raised the living room floor and lowered the ceiling at the same time, which seems like a weird combination.
Still, my babies came along inside of this house, and it grew right along with us as we finally gave up on the idea of having a dining room (that we never used) at all in favor of a game room; as we rearranged furniture to create the illusion of more space; as the babies’ rooms grew into the rooms of (much too messy) teenagers.
The house had come with a ton of stuff that the previous owner did not want, and it doesn’t seem to have occurred to me (or Nick, for that matter) to have done anything about it. As such, our basement and garage held bits and pieces of someone else’s life.
And then, 17 years of living happened, and Nick never met anything that he particularly wanted to throw away, and when he did leave, he left behind mounds of stuff.
It has taken 5 years for me to get to a place of release inside of my heart to want to claim this space as completely and totally my own. And here we are, and I feel ten times lighter just from letting go of everything that was taking up that space in my heart (and also literally inside of my house).
June normally undoes me. Try as hard as I might, June comes along every single year with her insistence on waking up this part of my heart that I’ve bandaged up and healed as best I can and reminds me that I’m a girl who was left behind. It brings fresh to the surface memories of what that sting felt like, of how helpless I felt and then anger at myself for feeling helpless at all and frustration with myself for any of it.
This year, though, that hasn’t yet happened. Oh, June came, and brought her memories with her, but somehow there wasn’t all of the emotions. There was just, oh, there you are. Welcome back.
Maybe physically releasing things is helping in ways I can’t quite articulate. Maybe it’s just been long enough that I’m used to it. Maybe it’s that I’m over it.
Whatever it is, I’m loving that I chose release.
