Children’s Toys and Tears

If you are like me, the unfairness of life tends to creep up on you at times. Okay, it creeps up on me every single day, but not the whole day…just moments, if I am lucky.

This week, I am staring at it, and it’s staring back at me — a hard, glaring, painful stare.

I was finally able to take a week off to visit my son’s family. With one baby, nearly 2, and another coming soon, I feel like I am missing everything. And nothing prepared me for this.

Funny how the world around you lives a certain way, so you make dangerous assumptions (not knowing they are dangerous) that your life will follow suit. Funny.

But it’s not funny. It’s terrible. Because when life doesn’t look like “that” at all, what do you do? Your entire life looks like punting. Just “making do” with the shit hand you are dealt, that’s what it is.

I adore my son. I adore his wife. And I cannot endure the cuteness of my grandson. He kills me, shreds my heart a million ways, with his crinkled-up nose, determined, and affectionate nature. I. Just. Can’t.

This week, while he is napping, I am taking the lids off of boxes and cleaning my son’s toys and allowing my daughter-in-law to determine what stays and what goes home with me. So far, everything is staying, even if it’s just getting stored for a year yet to come.

Toys equal memories, and memories can be a challenge to manage well.

As a single mom, these memories are a killer. They point back to a time when there was still so much hope for our family…a time that I was so deliriously busy that there was no time for quitting.

These toys are the remnants of intentions, love, and the desire for nothing more than the happiness of a child.

I wash the toy trains, Thomas, Percy, and the whole crew. I wash the marble maze, the giant “make your own bug” set, with antennae, wings, legs and thoraxes of all sizes. I wash the Laurie Toys peg set. I wash the foam blocks.

The smell of storage and mildew don’t make it through the process, thank God. But the smell, itself, is a memory…the wet basement at the farmhouse I lived in with my children for so many years.

I ache so badly that there is no stopping the tears. I loved those years, as hard as they were. I loved those babies, as much as I struggled to provide a life for them. I simply could not have loved more.

I loved every sunrise, every sunset, every homeschool breakfast, lunch and dinner together. I loved the wind in summer, the sketchy trampoline, and finding Playmobil people in the sandbox. I loved it all.

The scary and sad thing about love is this: it doesn’t matter how much you love, no matter how good at loving you are, or how beautiful your intentions are…time inches and sometimes catapults forward. Children leave. Children move…sometimes far away. No matter how much you love them.

And we want this, right?

Nothing in my body wants this. My heart is in pieces. It is too much.

Toys. Whoever imagined that toys would make a grown-ass woman cry? I didn’t, until they all had to be placed in boxes, in a storage unit, after keeping the farm was no longer feasible. And now, again, taking them out and cleaning them for their new home.

Maybe it’s not just the toys. Maybe it’s the life that the toys represent. Maybe it’s the fact that I don’t have a toy room or a home for that matter, anymore, that my kids will be away…far away…for quite some time. Maybe it has more to do with what I cannot provide for them and wish more than anything that I could.

Toys and tears…I guess that’s just what it is for now. I’m grateful for the memories. I’m grateful my children hold them with me. Someday, I hope that gratitude is bigger than the grief. Today, it’s not.