Ben Railton reflects on the moments of beauty and sadness that visit him while cleaning up after his kids once they’ve gone to stay with their mother.
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I’m a big believer in the presence of the symbolic in our everyday lives (no surprise, given my line of work as a professional reader and analyzer of the world around me), and I don’t think I’ll ever perform a more symbolic action than cleaning up the boys’ stuff after they’ve gone back to their Mom’s for their week with her.
On the one hand, it’s by far the saddest thing I’ve ever had to do—and the sadness hasn’t lessened at all with the week-in and week-out repetition over the 18 months since the separation. Nor do I want it to—I can’t imagine this ever feeling simply routine or normal, and I will fight with everything I have to keep it from feeling so. It’s a loss, an absence that is a deficit in my life, and it should feel like one. Every. Single. Time.
But on the other hand, and I know I’m an optimist, but I believe this hand is the weightier one: it’s such an amazing feeling, to have these reminders of them in my home all the time, and especially when they’re not here. Their invented version of the Star Wars Monopoly game; their “precious” gem collection, the bags neatly inventoried and labeled in their practiced handwriting; the plates and bowls where they had their breakfast while we sat and talked together this morning; the unmade bed in which they whispered quietly for a while and then slept last night. Even when the boys are gone, they’re not gone, not even the tiniest bit, not ever.
I don’t want to minimize the absence and the loss, not for any of us for whom half or more of our kids’ young lives will be spent away from us, and for whom the things that remain do not and cannot take their place. Yet those things are more than reminders, more even than memories—they are a perfect embodiment of presence, of the space in our homes and lives that will always and only belong to our kids, and that, blessedly and come what may, we share with them.
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Credit: Image—Flickr/DavityDave
” this hand is the weightier one” So very beautiful.