Metaphorically speaking.
It’s always strange to me how pieces of a puzzle fit together in real life. A very good friend of mine had a dream about me. She lives out of state and she had to email me the dream to see if perhaps it meant anything to me. She said there were garbage bags littering my yard and my kitchen. And not the kind of trash that has flies buzzing around them. The rest of my house was spotless. When she attempted to try and clean up some of the bags, she was told to leave them that I had to clean them up. They were my burden to bear.
A week later, I talked to my aunt and she was talking about an article she wrote for her Writer’s group on how her mind works. She shared it with me and in a nutshell she has file cabinets in which she has different colors for different things in her life. Happiness, shame, disappointment, anger, frustration. I decided that the garbage bags were my own messed up system of storing things. You see, I think I’m one of the most disorganized people on this planet. I put things in places that are ‘safe’. They’re safe because it takes me forever to find the damned thing again. So, for someone to have an analogy of me with garbage bags doesn’t surprise me. That she knows me that well does. Of course there was more to this dream of hers and I don’t know what you believe. Call me crazy, but I believe in spirits and a very wise man who knows me well came to her. I don’t think she’s the only one he’s used to get me to open my eyes and as Bubba says, “smell the coffee”. His opening up about my Pap and quoting from something I didn’t remember writing…if you do the math, two and two truly add up to four. My Pap is trying to tell me something.
Everyday, I add something more to the garbage bags. This week was no exception. So where do you start? Unlike my aunt who can open, move and even slam the drawers shut of her file cabinets, I have this mess. Memories, frustration, anger, happiness, all jumbled into bags. What if the happy things are buried beneath shame? What if I open up a bag of memories that I closed years ago and don’t want to face again? Or what if that fear keeps me from discovering something good that I’d long forgotten?
And how do you organize your brain?
I know several of them contain a gamut of emotions dealing with my real father and his family. There’s anger for being denied my God-given right to be his daughter. Anger because he has a new family. Frustration that he’s never fully wanted me and my family to be a part of his. Disappointment in myself for letting him more times than he deserved. Shame because if he called tomorrow and needed something, I’d probably do it for him. There’s not much happiness in this bag of sperm-donor memories. But there’s regret and every other negative emotion associated with it. Frustration because in opening that bag, I gave him power again.
Happiness is in the bags containing my children. There’s also pride and accomplishment.
They’re mixed in with other things containing memories of my ex-husband and his family. But I try not to give them much thought. And there are still more bags to conquer. To toss out things that don’t work for me–that never did–and to replace them with new memories, only hopefully I can have a pretty, color coded file room.
In all of this…self-discovery, a story blossomed. It’s not one of the ones I should be writing, it’s something new that will not shut up in my head. It’s like a movie–pieces of this story fitting together like the pieces of a puzzle. It’s one that I can take these memories and give them a new home. It’s not going to be an easy story to write, but it’s one that isn’t going to give me peace until I do.
How about you? File cabinets or garbage bags?
