I don't recall really sharing much about my past here.  Some of you know me personally and have heard aspects of my life.  Over time my story has unfolded and been pieced together as I am able to process.  Becoming a wife and a mother has called me to be self-reflective and other major events like this has definitely shed more light onto who I am.

So why share more intimately now?

Well, we got a truck load delivered to us a while ago that bothered me in a deeply profound way.  Maybe sharing here is for my own good, or maybe for you to have context as a write on this blog, or maybe because this is really what is going on right now and I feel like unloading.

The stuff was from my biological mother.  She was selling a condo she owns that wasn't occupied and needed to get rid of most of the furniture in the place before the sale.  She planned to have people go in to pack up her condo and send most of it to us, to "help us out".

We had already bought or gathered furniture over the last year and we knew this wasn't about being generous towards us, but doing something, anything with her things.  No, we aren't sentimentally attached to furniture that Kathy had as a child.  No, we don't want it.  Give it to someone who needs it, we told her.  That didn't go over well because giving it away to some stranger means you can't receive anything in return, nor can you control how the other person uses it.  She had already made up her mind that we needed to take it all, use it how she determined, regardless of our objections. The next day there was a phone call to inform us that within the week we should expect dressers, tables, couches, chairs, and an enormous piano, plus a few boxes from a moving company.

At the time, no garage to put the stuff.
No basement space either because it's a construction zone.
Entrance, office, and bedrooms already full of our own boxes waiting to be unpacked.

I was so angry and left feeling totally disregarded.  Our friends were gracious enough to loan us their garage when the shipment came in. That just left us the job of sorting through it all quickly because we couldn't hijack their garage for weeks.

We found places for most of it and managed to fit some of the furniture in our home.  That was the easy part.  What was the most daunting task was dealing with all the boxes and drawers full of papers.  As if I didn't have enough to sort through in my own home already.  Seriously.  Just the sight of the boxes in my house got me on edge and that faint smell of her brought back bitter memories.  I had briefly thought about throwing it all away, but I knew I couldn't because good chance there were my childhood things in there as well.

I'm not even going to write down some of the gross or weird stuff I came across.  I brought paper away to the recycling depot because this amount was way beyond the enormous blue recycling cart.  Every magazine she ever got.  Every Christmas card.   Every letter.  Even letters from me.  Every bit of paperwork from her homes.  Every work evaluation.  Even a lengthy psychiatric evaluation.  Every photograph and negative.  Many pictures of me I had never seen.

Having pictures from my childhood meant more to me than I had expected.  When I was apprehended by Social Services, I had no pictures of myself as a child.  Before a visit with my biological mom there was always an empty promise dangled before me that if the visit went well according to her standards, I might receive a photo.   So now with hundreds in my hands there were many emotions.  I was left feeling glad to have them, angry that she held on to them to manipulate me, thankful that she probably had no clue how many were actually in that condo of hers, and still a bit of guilt that if she knew, I wouldn't be allowed to keep them.

It was a bit hard going through her stuff.  A window into her past and a glimpse into her head.  I thought back as child looking across the street and observing how the other parents related to their kids, I realized then that my home was totally dysfunctional.  Going through all these papers now validated my childhood experience.  It also leaves me with more to deal with as an adult.

I got through the physical piles, but now comes another journey of the emotional and mental.  My friend lent me a good book, which I hope can be a start.