Putting Things Away
I put so many things away: the groceries, in our mess of a pantry, the dishes, on their sticky paper-lined shelves above the coffee machine. The kid board books. Both of my girls’ laundry: my hands passing over small pink socks and Minnie Mouse underwear. There’s always something. The stuffed animals and teacups and Mr. Potato head parts and puffy jackets and sun-dried watercolors and knit hats for cold heads.
I put our oldest daughter’s art away: in categorized piles by date, by year – an ad hoc chart of growth, a timeline of improving shapes and stick figures, collages bursting out of accordion folders.
But I’ve found there is no neat place to tuck the hard things in motherhood without my own mother. My grief, a deep longing to be held, fills the corners of my home. But I’m too exhausted to confront it, so I push anger away, muffled behind a couch cushion. I tuck my irrational fears behind books on our shelf. Anxiety hides behind my curtains. I feel overwhelming sadness when my bare feet hit our cold oak floors in the winter. But I try to hide it all. It impacts how I keep my home, and myself, together. Where I put things. Without my mother’s comfort, sometimes I’m undone by the smallest task.
My youngest has collections of pinecones and crunchy maple leaves and colored rocks scattered around the house. I gather them and place them in mason jars, and small boxes, and mark their year. So many years.
I pick up clipped toenails off the floor. I play the “is this chocolate or poop?” game when I find something dark on the rug. I scoop up clumps of dog hair; I pick up the broken hair elastics cut from braids. I pick up puzzle pieces and googly eyes and jax and dice and every little crumb from the morning muffin that’s caked on the placemat.
I pick things up and write things down. So much to hold onto in a day, so many things I forget. But not everything. Lists need to be visible and written in different places. An app for appointments; school events on the zoo calendar tacked to our wall, yellow sticky notes on the cabinet. Walking through our home there is an everyday reminder to remember.
In home organization, I’ve heard there are five categories for sorting: trash, laundry, donations, things with a place, and things without a place. Everything must go somewhere. Even if it doesn’t seem right.
I put so many things away. I just can’t hang the framed picture in the living room that’s been sitting on the floor for three months or scrub the brown grout that’s accumulating on the shower tile. Sometimes I just don’t have it in my bones to turn on the tap, submerge my hands in hot soapy water and get to work on last night’s egg pan. I just want to leave it soaking in the sink, hoping that time will take care of it, or that I can forget it for a while. Hard chores make me tired; I feel like I’ll sink again. It is the accumulation of a million tiny tasks that paralyze me.
I have put so many things away. I didn’t want to attend an open casket funeral for my mother when I was 25. That morning, I wanted to break away from the gathering in my kitchen and hide in my childhood backyard. I didn’t want to walk in a processional with hot lights, and choking Catholic incense, my family’s despair on full display. I didn’t want to stand at the end of a receiving line over 100 faces long, offering sweaty palms and strange condolences and awkward silences. Many cried more than I. I didn’t want to wear a long black skirt and Clinique Dubonnet lipstick. I wanted my mother there. I didn’t want to bury her on a sunny September day.
Have you ever hugged a casket? It’s unbelievably hard and unholy. It is smooth and wrong. You cannot fit your arms all the way around that much oak, even though you stretch to try. You will want to lay your head there forever. Your arms shake when they pull you from it. You will wail. This scene will haunt you as you hold your firstborn ten years later, wishing for your mother to appear. You will find that being alone is not a feeling but the air around you.
Today, there is a ten- and seven-year-old, and endless crafts busting out of an art drawer left ajar. There are two framed five-by-seven school pictures of my girls on the sideboard in our dining room. Their elementary school smiles, the familiar blue wash background. I so clearly see the sparkle of my mother in their eyes. She’s in a frame in another room, a 1970’s picture, cradling me in my christening gown, ruby red lips beaming with pride.
I can no longer tuck away the intangibles. It feels right to have my daughter’s pictures, my mother’s face, my tired grief coexist in one space.
I see my husband in the kitchen, the afternoon sun on his face as he stares out the window, his flannel sleeves rolled up, suds covering his arms, scrubbing the egg pan. I pick up another sponge and join him. We breathe, braiding together the easy and hard, easy and hard of this life.
I have put so much away. There is relief in leaving what I love out in the open.
Natalie Serianni is a Seattle-based writer, instructor, and mother of two with essays at HuffPost, Brevity, Insider, The Manifest-Station, Motherwell, ParentMap, Mutha Magazine, and other literary journals and parenting publications. Her essay, “Subtle Shifts,” was included in the 2021 anthology, “The Pandemic Midlife Crisis: Gen X Women on the Brink.” She teaches personal essay writing at Hugo House, and is writing a book about midlife parenting and long term grief. Connect with her at natalieserianni.com, and on Instagram at natserianni.