Finding My Footing

We came to visit and there were piles of boxes on their porch, empty bookshelves. Picture albums and old certificates lined the floor of their garage, and boxes of kitchen items cluttered the surfaces. My children took a few last toys and games from the playroom, and poked in curiosity at the box of home videos and cassette tapes, relics from another era.

Visiting my parents on Sundays started to become hard for me, as I watched the physical contents of my childhood home rounded up and boxed. The big glass table in my parents’ dining room was there one visit and gone the next. The paintings and furniture that I’d grown up with were put up for sale on chats and carted away. I told myself that I was lucky, so lucky, that my parents are still alive and healthy, that they were doing this now and not leaving it to be taken care of by others later.

But it was still hard.

One day, about a month before the move, my mother handed me two stuffed manilla envelopes with my name scribbled on them in permanent red marker. I began pulling out a literal paper trail of my childhood. Doctors’ notes and uniform order receipts from 1995, every report card, award, or progress note she’d ever gotten for me. Letters I’d written to my parents from camp, numerous Mother’s Day cards, and kindergarten drawings. It was intense. I pulled out a small envelope with the name of a salon on it, and my mother’s handwritten note, “first haircut.” Bracing myself, I opened it up, and sure enough, there were blond wisps of my own hair from 35 years ago.

I felt guilty. For growing up? For not being that sweet little toddler (long awaited after three boys) anymore? Or maybe guilty that as a mother myself, I certainly haven’t kept any of my children’s hair. Ridiculous, of course my mother didn’t want me to be that baby anymore. And I live in a small space, I can’t save everything from my kids.