a boxful of memories

My mother has been cleaning house.

Today I received a box in the mail. Its contents included:

• a coin from a show we saw together as a family in Beijing in March 1997
  
• a framed crosstitch that my grandmother had done, that my mother had always hung in the laundry room
• a clay picture I had created as an art project in elementary school, which she had hung, also, in the house
• an envelope filled with photos--everything from me at one week old to the Oak Alley plantation tour we took the week I was to be married, and postcards representing so many of the different countries I visited throughout my 20s
• two sweaters, hand-knit, that my mother had made my sister and I when we were La Princesita's age...she, in fact, wants to wear one of them tomorrow to kindergarten
• a family portrait of the four of us of when I was in the third grade. After my father had his first tumor removed, in the spring of 1981. He was 40. And so thin.
  
• all the Mother's Day cards I had made or given her, and all the Father's Day cards I had made or given Dad
• a couple of cards from my grandmother, who had died back in 1985 when I was 13

I don't know how much I will keep. It brings me such mixed feelings to see all of this in front of me, and honestly the memories are overwhelming--so much so that all I can do is cry.

Why cry? Do I mourn? Do I wish? Is it the handwriting? Is it that I want for simpler times? Is it that I know I will never give my children the family life that I grew up with just because there is no way that I can be happy here? Should I sacrifice my happiness and my completeness in life for after they are grown and out of the house, only so that they might have at the least a façade of a stable, happy home (in which, of course, the parents don't even sleep together, let alone hardly speak)? Is it that I just miss my father so terribly? Is it that my last interaction with my grandmother was that of an emotional, hormonally over-reactive teenager who ran off from her parents and acted like a spoiled brat and worried them all terribly...then she died of a massive coronary two weeks later in the middle of the night, without my ever making it right again? Then felt like I was being more punished when my other grandmother, my only other living grandparent, died not six months later? Is it that I miss my mother? Is it that I miss feeling like a part of a family? Is it that I'm tired of for so long trying to force a family out of what is not strong enough to make that happen?

She says that she has made lots of trips to the Goodwill for donations and has just gotten rid of so much stuff.

I hope she finally let Dad's shirts go. They have been hanging in the closet upstairs for eight years now.

And it makes me so terribly sad to see them still there every time I return to the home of my youth...not so much for her and her need to hold on, but for my missing him so...

But, of the three of us left, I'm the strong one who can't let that be known.

So please don't tell her that.