Some of the sweetest walks are the ones you take down memory lane, that multisensory road that winds through the joys and sorrows that have delivered you to the moment you are in.
That’s the road I found myself on recently as I stood on the well-worn and cluttered linoleum floor of the “kids’ section” of my ex-husband’s house. That is, the upstairs area of the house that was our children’s domain during their formative years.
Together we stooped, our backs mutually aching, to rip out the carpet in our recently emancipated 22-year-old son’s former bedroom — which he and his girlfriend were now moving back into. Call it a money-saving pitstop before their experimental move to her hometown in Kansas later this summer. The bedroom has become a sort of heavy metal museum over the years, full of skulls, band posters, not-so-well hidden pot paraphernalia and the detritus from too many ear-shattering concerts.
Surrounded by a wall of thickly dusty empty energy drink cans (why this kid collected them as a teen we haven’t a clue), a mountain of metal music swag, and a single penis scrawled oddly next to the closet in black Sharpie, my ex-husband and I kept raising our eyebrows in an unspoken question: “Should we be wearing rubber gloves?”
By the way, the kid swore the phallic Sharpie art was etched by a friend.
“So crude,” Aidan added, with a valiant show of disgust. Nice try, I thought, amused.
It was a full-on family event. As Dad (which is what we all call him) and I cussed out the staples rusted solid to the floorboards, our son packed his Jeep with about 20 years of old toys, clothes, and obscure holiday kitsch and delivered it all to Goodwill.
In the meantime, our daughter, long gone from the house at 25, boxed up her Imelda Marcos-sized wardrobe and shoe collection that had been left behind when she went to college six years earlier. Not a chance of this one ever returning to the nest, I thought as I watched her do what I believed was virtually unthinkable until now: tossing once-precious clothes and tchotchkes from her youth into black jumbo garbage bags like so much nothing.
I am not a saver. Of course there are certainly a few family heirlooms I wouldn’t think of parting with, but pretty much everything else is fair game. My kids will likely need therapy for things of theirs that I “disappeared” behind their backs when they were young — including a bevy of particularly annoying (and so of course prized) noise-making toys my own mother seemed to get a sick sort of glee in sending.
Dad, daughter and son, however, are quite another story.
Up until now, if it was given to, bought for, or found by my children, they would cling to it like the Holy Grail in the hands of a Pope. And, I am pretty sure that Dad has every single artwork, paper, and report card the kids ever brought home tucked away in the garage along with all holiday decorations from the past 25 years, both usable and broken. Not to mention, from the looks of it, Dad has hung on to every book we ever read to our kids and a wide range of never-opened, but annually given board games.
My dear Ex and my children have a symbiotic, albeit unspoken, agreement: they count on him to keep these precious tidbits from their childhood so they don’t have to store them at their own places and he’s a loving, nostalgic papa push-over, easily warmed by these memories within reach. It’s a win-win. I laugh at their penchant for possessing the past, but I have to admit it is beautiful to me, the way they take care of each other. And how, as we cleared out the upstairs, each of them could pick up an object and recall the story that went with it.
As I stood sweeping up pellet remnants of the rabbits that my daughter used to sneak upstairs for a roam, I was glad for their sweet sentimentality. And glad that, despite divorce, they include me in it. We move through the games pretty quickly, dividing them into “keep” and “donate” piles. Miraculously, we each left the house with only two or three.
Games dispatched, I commenced to dusting the heavily laden bookshelves, reminiscing as I did about the 10,000 times I read Everyone Poops and other family favorites. Scanning the full set of Harry Potter books I recalled several bookstore release parties packed with hundreds of little wizards, including our two kids decked out in cape and round black glasses. There were the beat up copies of The Dangerous Book for Boys and The Daring Book for Girls, which while fun to read, didn’t offer up much in terms of activity for our decidedly non-dangerous son and cautious daughter.
I noticed that we were all keeping a wide berth from the mountain of stuffed animals that has sat in the corner of the kids section for at least 15 years—since Dad and I were divorced—and probably longer.
The games sorted, the books dusted, I took a cautious step toward the pile of childhood friends.
“Not yet!” my daughter barked. Now that my daughter’s a nurse at the county’s sizable jail, I notice she’s developed quite the take-charge attitude. “I’m not ready.”
In a united turn of our heads, we all solemnly nodded in the direction of Thelma, the enormous stuffed chicken (or maybe she’s a duck, hard to tell) that brought each of us, at some point or other, through major yuck.
Two hours later, we had officially emptied the kids from their childhood rooms. The painting and repairing would start the next day.
“Ok,” my daughter said, resolutely turning toward the animals. “But we are NOT getting rid of Thelma.”
All beloved stuffies lived in this corner at one time or another or in the open planter boxes above the bookshelves (which we never used as planter boxes what with their being the perfect size for the endless Beanie Babies).
Through the years, different animals might be pulled from the pile in the corner to distract a bored kid, soothe a whiner, or make a barfing youngster feel better. The animal pile represents the people, places, and stories of our life as a family. They arrived in Christmas stockings, Easter baskets, or were found on trips we took. Some I don’t recognize, and realize they came during the time the kids spent with Dad in the house after the divorce. Others bring back illnesses one or all of us had. There are several goofy Beanie Babies that could not be parted with. When I had my cancer surgery down in Los Angeles, my daughter pulled “Doggie” from the pile and flew him down to help me heal. And he did help me.
We look at them, laugh and recall some of their stories. At the bottom of the pile is a green Iguana puppet, which was a beloved nighttime companion once, but never an equal replacement for the real iguana Dad and daughter tried to sneak past me and into the family when she was eight or nine. Iguanas, I learned from the book they purchased but apparently did not read, can grow between eight and 15 feet on average and really should have their own rooms. I was the bad guy who sent Izzy back to the reptile shop.
“But mooooommm,” I can still hear my daughter crying. “I looooooovvvvve him!” They came home with a more reasonable cornsnake to which I bit my lip.
Going through the kids section with the family that I shared it with for 10 years, I felt such gratitude I wanted to cry.
I know a lot of people who have been through divorce and lose in that process any connection to happy memories. I am so incredibly grateful for the friendship I retain with my kids’ Dad, the one I am building with his partner, the one I have with both my adult children.
I am grateful for the Thanksgiving dinners, Christmas mornings and birthdays we still share together. I imagine these gatherings will become fewer and further between as the kids move more deeply into their own lives and that is as it should be. But I know that these nuclear gatherings will continue in some way. And that I will be invited.
In the end, we kept all the animals and stuffies in the corner.
Who are we kidding? The upstairs will always be the kids section as long as there are kids with memories to keep, a Dad who loves to keep them, and a Mom who is blessed by them.
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