Leftover Pieces

The last month in our house has been a flurry of cleaning and updating and sorting and moving. 

Our bathroom was an after thought in a house that was built before indoor plumbing was ever an option so it desperately needs redone.  Unfortunately, that is not in our budget, but some upgrades were.  New bathroom paneling, paint, light, shower curtain, etc.  Lipstick on a pig... but it will get us through until we can afford the entire remodel.

The attic was a flurry of totes of baby clothes and toys that all had to be sorted and either thrown away, garaged saled, or kept for this newest little one.  Just yesterday we pulled the crib and the final 6 totes of baby items out of the attic.  All told I would guess I have now sorted through over 30 totes of baby items.

Finally there is my office.  My office was in our 3rd bedroom upstairs.  Since we only have three bedrooms in our house it had to be moved to make room for this little girl.  Which sounds MUCH easier than it actually was.  My office was 6 - 8 totes & a filing cabinet worth of paper, receipts, pictures, cards, letters, etc.  The last time any of it was sorted and organized was in 2007.  In 2008 when things started to fall apart so did my office.  Instead of sorting things and filing and throwing away it just got piled up.  And when that pile started to topple, a new pile was made.  Eventually last summer I got tired of looking at all of it and I stacked it all in totes.  Out of sight, out of mind.  Sort of...

Until now...

Last night I finished the last of the sorting.  My office has been moved downstairs, several garbage bags worth of items have been thrown out and several hundred (possibly over a thousand) documents have been scanned in and then shredded.

What is left, is the pieces.  Some remnants of a shattered life left over in a tote I will open when Zack is old enough to understand what it is.  A tote I will simply label FoTB.  This is the part I struggle with the most.  What to leave in that tote and what to throw away.

I have told myself for years that I would not sugar coat FoTB to Zack.  I am not going to make him out to be this saint with whom things just didn't work out.  That is not fair to me or to Zack.  However, I also think there are parts of that story that may be best saved for older years.  Things to be kept and things to just be shared along the way.

For now, it contains pictures.  Pictures of a man he may or may not remember clearly in 10 years.  It also contains some cards and letters that we wrote.  Those were hard for me to read and hard for me to keep, but again I can't sugar coat this for him.  Almost every card I got from him, birthday, anniversary, etc. is filled with I'm sorry about this, or I'm sorry about that, or things are going to get better.  Years and years of broken promises that are more embarrassing now than anything.  Things I look back on and wonder, was that really my life?  Why in the world did I continue to do that year after year?

Leftover pieces, sealed away in a tote....