It just took a light tap on a sweet spot, but the crystal glass shattered and shards scattered amongst my feet.
It was the last of a crystal wine goblet in a pattern called “Stephanie” that my mother bought with a giggle some 15-20 years ago because they bore my name. And now they’re all gone, just like she is.
It’s strange, the glass breaking the morning after Mother’s Day, the morning after I’ve finally thrown out the last of her clothes that I just found in my closet last night.
But sometimes life indicates to us when it’s really time to move on.
And this where I’m at now, the point of breaking from the life that was to the life I hope will be. I’m tired of being linked too tangibly to my oft-sad past. I want to move on. Lord knows I’ve been trying.
I was a bit bitchy yesterday, but that’s to be a given. Mostly because everyone on social media these days wants to shout “Happy mother’s day!” thinking ignorantly that everyone’s happy about this shit. Here’s a clue, folks: Tell your mother happy mother’s day, and then shut up about it, because the odds are some people are in the audience who have just lost their mother, and they’re going to be completely fucked up about it. The media is bad enough, but the inundation of stupid “Happy Mother’s Day!” bullshit on Twitter and Facebook is just unnecessary. I found myself becoming cunty in a hurry.
But then it passed. Then I had a nice day because I kept effecting change around my home. I have so much more to complete and go through… Many little boxes, more organizing, more disposing of things that have no point in my world anymore.
It’s a long process, the paring down of one’s whole life. Over the coming weeks and months I want to try to slowly dispose of more and more. I’ll need to revisit things more than once. I’ll be donating goods to people who can use them, who will love them, perhaps even need them, but freeing myself of the chains of possessing things just because they’re representative of some part of my past.
And I find this a very difficult journey. I’m a packrat who loves mementoes. One look at my Door of Shame on my TV unit is a good example — concert tickets, notes scrawled from fun with friends, logos off my old cars, gum wrappers, you name it.
For a few years, I’d put my life on hold. Then my past became more important to me. Proof I had lived, even if I wasn’t doing so at the time. “See? I’ve been around, I’ve had a life.”
But I’m done with using the past as prelude, validating my existence through who I was and not who I am.
I enjoyed my Mother’s Day. That hasn’t happened often in the last 11 years, if it’s happened at all.
I’m sorry my glass broke this morning, but it wasn’t unexpected. And it took me 10 years to make it happen. I knew it would, one day, since I never adopted the Holy Grail attitude about it to protect it since it was “important” to me.
No, I used it. Almost every time I’ve drank wine in the last decade, I’ve used that glass. I’ve always been prepared to pay the price, too. And here I have. The morning after Mother’s Day. Funny how it works.
Life, apparently, approves of my ridding-myself-of-what-was plan of action, since it’s keen on getting into the act, helping me be more thorough. I don’t mind, I can use the help.
Gone is another 1.5 shopping carts of things I just don’t need around anymore. But there’s more. There’s much more. In the coming weeks, I hope I’ve ended it all — the clutter, that is.
There’s no more profound thing I can do than to finally get the strength to dispose of all my sentimental shit that belonged to my mom. I see some heady days before me, but I’m happy to think of the emotional freedom that should come with.
Creatively, I suspect it’ll be the single greatest freeing act I could do. Any chains that shackle my mind or heart also shackle my creative abilities.
Over the next month, this project will continue. I will keep what I love of my mother’s but not what simply is there to be kept.
The hard part will be looking at my motivations behind each piece. But it’s in those moments that we own who we are, what we think, and what’s gotten us here.
So, here goes.