You never know when the raw emotions will get a tad irritated, causing them to just spill over. Today I worked on getting my office cleaned and a bit more organized. The kids had managed to trash it – again.
This room has a lot of stuff in it and it serves a lot of purposes.
It serves as my office, though I rarely use it as such because most days you can rarely step into the room much further than maybe 2-3 feet. Sad, but true. My desk is always piled up with stuff that the kids have put there for whatever reason. So I have this nice 20-21″ monitor in there that can be connected to my laptop and I can’t even get to the desk. Problem.
It serves as the piano room. Fortunately, the piano is literally right inside the door. The kids have had to climb/stumble over the mess the 1-2 further feet to get to the piano bench. It isn’t funny, but it is probably true because I’ve been ignoring the mess for weeks. I’ve looked in the room, gotten overwhelmed, and walked away multiple times.
It serves as my craft and sewing room. Space for me to work on projects and leave them out. There is a problem with the whole leaving them out concept. The kids do not leave things alone. Thus yields “leaving them out” not truly an option all the time. Since I haven’t been able to get into the room, let alone work in there, the sewing machine has been living off and on on the kitchen table since about Thanksgiving. More on than off, mind you.
It serves as the kids’ computer room. It is open. The door is always open. The screen of the monitor is where it can be seen if we walk by at any time. The kids can go in there and watch a movie on it if they want, that kind of thing. I am not sure how they were getting to the computer, but somehow at least one of the children was in there at multiple times throughout the day.
So as you can see, this room is rather important. Now the level of importance is questionable depending on who in the house you talk to. Since we dubbed this “mommy’s office,” I am not entirely sure why it is such a mess. The confusion only grows when you think about the fact that if they are playing the piano or on the computer, there is not any need to make a mess.
I took out 2 large trash bags of trash from this room that really has no reason to have messes unless the crafter/sewer in the house has made them. Since I am that person and I did not make the mess, why is the mess so big? I mean, the toy/play room is upstairs.
So this morning I took just one hour to try and tackle at least part of the room. I was brutal with a lot of things. I am so sick of picking up their mess that if I didn’t feel the need to pick it up again and it wasn’t anything important, I threw it in the trash bag. What they don’t know, really won’t hurt them…will it?
In that hour, however, I shed some tears. I was doing just fine. Cleaning isn’t a tear jerking event normally. I didn’t think anything about cleaning the room. That was until I found the large bag that I had my knitting stuff in. The last time I used that bag was when I had kept up the vigil at Margaret’s bedside in the hospital. Everything was still in there, right down to the empty water bottle and everything else that I had taken that last time I had gone down there to visit my best friend.
I figured that I should clean it out. At least put the garbage in the trash bag and put the yarns back in the tub with the other yarns. Nothing major, just putting things away since they had been in the bag since October. It was there, peering in that bag that the tears started to flow. Why? I am not so sure why. The trigger, however, was the fact that there in the bottom of the bag was a small collection of origami cranes that I had folded to put in Margaret’s room. She loved origami. I had already left many many cranes in her room though she probably didn’t know it. I believe there was close to one for every day that she was in the hospital that I had folded over the days I was there visiting.
I guess these are ones that I had folded at home that were intended to go to her room on my next visit. A visit that would not come, except to say “Good-bye.” The tears just started flowing. The hurt and ache in my heart came back. The sadness overtook me there in that moment. The truth is, I miss my best friend. I miss her.
It only lasted a couple of minutes and I pulled myself back together. I still had this room to tackle. So I thought this would be the end of it. I had a good cry and I thought this would be the last of it for a while.
Tonight, I went back into that room to move more things around (boxes that need to be gone through and sorted and put away), and it started all over again. This time, however, it wasn’t Margaret. It was my grandparents. In one of those boxes was a bunch of pictures. There laying on the top was a picture from many years ago. My brother couldn’t be more than 4 or 5 in this picture. The picture was my family with my maternal grandparents. It was just a snapshot taken in front of the old house. The tears just started flowing again. I guess those emotions were more raw than I thought they were.
I was only in there cleaning for an hour and forty five minutes and I started crying twice. Now the average person would probably still accuse me of crying because my children are such slobs, but I can’t say that myself. The truth is, you just never know when those moments will hit you. They just sneak up on you. They sneak up behind you and get you when you least expect them.
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