Having Enough

After watching (with some embarrassment) two months ago as a semi-trailer filled to the brim with our possessions pulled away from the curb of our house in Texas, I bemoaned the fact that I hadn't taken the time to sort through things, eliminate, purge before packing and vowed right then to purge on the other end of the move.  In the hotel, I thought about what I would get rid of and what I would make sure to use more.  I made plans for enlarging family heirloom quilts, so they would cover queen-sized beds, and rearranging dish cabinets so that I will actually use the complete set of Korean dishes shipped from overseas five years ago.

As the movers unloaded box after box here in Maryland, filling in turn each room in our new house, I wished again I had taken the time before the move to reduce our worldly baggage.

But now, two weeks into unpacking, I can see that this is the only way to do it for me - the new surroundings give me a fresh perspective on what's necessary and important and what's superfluous, a perspective I couldn't achieve in Fort Worth.  Because once something's usefulness had passed (or had yet to be ascertained), it would be neatly stored away, at the top of a closet, at the back of a cabinet - "just in case" or for some imagined future use.  And then it was promptly forgotten.

Even pulling these items out for the sake of packing didn't really make me take notice of them or see them any differently than I always had - as a perennial part of the landscape of that house.

Spending two months away from these things, though, and seeing them again for the first time crammed into a cardboard box, needing a new home sheds a whole new light on them and their relevance in my life.

Just a few of the things I'm having second thoughts about hanging on to any longer:

The partial set of grocery-store-giveaway china my Memaw had started collecting decades ago that sat untouched on the top shelf of a cabinet in our kitchen for the past four years.

And the 15 or so small throw blankets that mostly sat on a closet shelf because they were never long enough to cover my feet and my arms while watching TV on the sofa.

From our closet, my one remaining bridesmaid's dress (from 12 years ago), cap and gown (14 years ago), and two business suits (4 sizes and 14 years ago).

And the bins and bins of baby and toddler clothes, blankets, cloth diapers, along with the larger pieces of baby paraphernalia - bathtub, johnny-jump-up, pack-n-play.


Earlier this month, for the first time in just under two years, I didn't feel sad or disappointed or depressed when ol' "Aunt Flow" came for her monthly visit, arriving with her dependable punctuality.  And that fact made me happy, made me think that maybe - just maybe - I've accepted where I am right now.

Even during that first hard year of motherhood, when I emphatically insisted to others that I wouldn't be having any more children, I was faithfully and carefully washing, folding and packing away into labeled plastic totes outgrown clothes.  Toys no longer used were disassembled or put into boxes and stored in the attic.  Even then, I wasn't ready to part with these things, had thoughts of using them again.

I've continued labeling and storing through the sizes and had a large tower of plastic totes in our storage shed that were opened and summarily dumped helter-skelter by the packers into moving company cardboard boxes - some mixed with garden hoses or my sewing fabric and supplies.

Now that I'm faced with emptying those cardboard boxes and re-establishing my orderly system and storage schema, I can't help but wonder if isn't time to let these things go, let the space they fill be used by something else, release myself from their literal and figurative weight - their reminders of loss and propensity for creating expectations.  Maybe letting them go is the next step towards embracing what is now, not what was or what might yet be.

Now, I'm not saying definitively that our family will not grow, but I do believe I'm done carrying around the expectation of it.  It's a weighty presumption that takes up lots of closet space and even more capacity for peace and joy.  We're just done "trying" to accomplish it - reaching, grasping, straining to gain it.  "Trying" for the last two years has left us with nothing; plus, we weren't "trying" to have Gideon and look how beautifully that turned out.

We meet lots of new people these days - every day just about.  It's been amazing to us how quickly people think it's their prerogative to query us about our reproductive plans.  Even "he's your only one?" can sometimes seem to carry some judgment with it, but some people feel comfortable even in a first meeting going so far as to ask, "Don't y'all plan on having any more?" That slices right through the skin, down to the bone, gouging deep.

Jeremy's tactic is to completely ignore such personal, painful queries made so flippantly - no nod of the head, no muttering or stammering or "hmmm"-ing.  It's as if they said nothing to him.  I love this tactic.  Love it.  But, alas, it is one I'm incapable of carrying off - saying nothing.  So I swing the opposite way - I say too much.  I figure if they can make me uncomfortable by asking such a personal question, I can make them equally uncomfortable by telling them more than they bargained for - the truth:  We'd like more.  Not going as we'd planned.  Not in control.  Not one, but two miscarriages in the past year.  Hard, very hard.

But as I've been writing this, I've realized that what I want to say, what I should be saying, what I should've been telling myself over the past year or more, is, "What's wrong with our family as it is?  Just because we don't have three or more kids [like everyone else down here in SoMD, fyi] doesn't make us any less of a family.  We love each other, we respect each other, and we truly enjoy spending time together as a family.  Thank you for your concern, but really we are fine just as we are.  We are whole..."

Our tribe

(In the hotel - Sally is the darkness just behind my head)

"We are, quite simply, enough."