Getting Life in Order

I recently went to NOLA to go visit my birth mother while my partner went with his mother, to sort out things regarding his father’s death last year. I was adopted by my grandmother, so my birth mother and I were raised by the same woman. When my mom died (aka my gma), she’s been the only person that I’ve felt like I could talk to about the mixed feelings of grief and loss and relief regarding our mother’s death.

This is a tough topic because rarely do you ever want to admit that when someone that close to you dies, there’s sometimes a sense of relief. But it’s true. As much as I love my mama, there are a lot of things she did that I am constantly uncovering and discovering and healing from.

When I sat with my partner’s mom and grandmother, I listened and watched how they were handling fresh grief. It’s been a decade since my mom died, so while I agree that grief never goes away—it just gets easier to carry?—I was able to see things that I remember feeling when my mom first died but also see the things that I never really “let go” of.

My birthmom’s house feels so good when you enter it. It’s open, clear, there’s nothing underneath things, everything has a spot. I know she has little things here and there that are connected to our mom and her dad, but not the way that I do. In fact, the way that I’d been doing it slapped me in the face with how similar it was to the way that I was watching my partner’s mother and grandmother handling their grief.

I don’t mean that rudely—people are allowed to handle their grief and loss however the f they want to. But I just don’t want to handle mine that way. I don’t want my home full of the dead—remnants of past me’s and past relationships I had with other people: be it friends, exes, or family members. I don’t want to be elbowing through the memories of my life to fit in my dreams for the future.

Hence: the decluttering.

Going through my paintbrushes

I had piles of them that I had never used, didn’t know the difference between, and finally had a good purge and donated nearly half to the library.

When I got back home, I was overwhelmed. Before we left for NOLA, we had crammed as much work into the week as we could. The house was a mess. I just couldn’t breathe—I was surrounded by piles of things that I could barely maneuver around. I was trying to sort through these feelings of past trauma and childhood but felt like I didn’t have the space to tackle that. So I started getting rid of things.

I got rid of anything that I was holding onto that represented a past self but know that I won’t ever utilize.

I got rid of anything that I thought I could possibly utilize but really, if the time came, I could easily replace.

I got rid of anything that I was holding onto for project making that didn’t fit my aesthetic—knowing that even if I did complete a project with it, I’d be left standing with something that took a lot of time and asking, “What do I do with it now?”

The toughest part was going through boxes and one suitcase that I had particularly avoided over the decade: containers full of my mother’s papers and photos that needed to be sorted and either put into albums, or gotten rid of.

TW: Child Abuse

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I found pictures of me and my father, and I could remember when the abuse started and date the photo with my age. I could see how desperately I wanted to be a happy kid and how hard I pretended that we were normal. I could see how much I loved my mother, looking at her and wishing wishing that she would let it be just us. I could see how much I avoided my father in photos, wanting to still look happy and normal, but separated. And in photos, I could see this cloud of vapid darkness coming off of him—seeing the way he would suck the darkness out of every scene, and how brightly my mother struggled to shine.

It messed with me.

It was hard.

I realized that while I’ve gotten really good at taking things as they come, analyzing current situations, being understanding with people that I encounter in my adult life, that I never quite grieved the loss of my childhood or accepted that I just wasn’t going to have it. I find myself in repeated slumps of still longing for that parental caretaker that will make up for what I never had, or do it for others while neglecting myself. I see this pattern repeated in people that I know and when I saw it in them, it became glaringly obvious for me.

Which is why I had to buckle down. It was no longer just about the house. The house is still an ongoing project: I am now time blocking periods of time to go through specific, smaller spaces and piles, clearing things out and making more room for things that were hidden away, that way I can get back to work on my shop and this business. After approximately eight days of NONstop purging, cleaning, decluttering, I not only found myself pretty depressed with all of the feelings and memories that were coming up, but I hadn’t balanced it with anything relaxing, comforting, self-care related. I needed to make sure that I fit time back in to work, create, bring in balance with my actual physical self.

I recently found a YouTube channel called But First, Coffee. I gotta say, she’s been a life-changer. She’s a mom and wife, with two children, living in a small space with no closets, and her channel focuses on decluttering, organizing, cleaning, budgeting—basically, all the life hacks. I’ve been implementing some of her advice from various videos and not only has it helped my home feel better and better, but it’s helped me feel better and better—because now I’m taking care of myself, putting that resentment and bitter longing toward not having a caretaker upon myself, so that I can reparent myself, and give myself the care, time, and discipline in a way that I was never shown nor had.

Interjecting with a slight subject change here because I typed “discipline” and then added, “in a loving way,” then changed it to, “loving discipline” and then changed it back to discipline because even in writing this blog post, I automatically defaulted to considering the child abuse that I endured as “discipline”—but it wasn’t discipline. It was abuse. What I consider discipline now, for myself and even my child, is the ability to stick to specific duties and tasks regardless of emotional interest, done with the goal of personal care and betterment in mind. That was wordy, but I mean that discipline is that mental ability to get yourself to do something that you might not want to do right then because you know that future you will be better for it.

I don’t want to go on a diatribe quite yet about which of Kalli Branciforte’s lessons/hacks I’ve applied that have been life-changing since it’s only been the first week of applying them. I want to wait until I’ve at least gotten a full month, or maybe a few, under my belt, so that I can more accurately see the effects and how it’s changed things for me on a longer term.

I recently heard the phrase that we should “teach from our scars, and not our wounds” meaning that we should only teach lessons from a place of clarity and objectivity of a situation. There will always be some bias, but when we are more emotionally connected to a thing, we have a much more skewed perception. Even though I do feel more emotionally and mentally clear right now, I don’t want to teach from a place where I’m just filled with newbie excitement.

I went ahead and uploaded my youtube video, I have a schedule now for how my days should go so that everything can flow a little smoother, and here I am even updating with a blog post! So I’d say that when it comes to moving forward, we are improving.

As Atomic Habits says, “If you can get 1% better each day for one year, you’ll end up 37% better by the time you’re done.”