A week of massive cleaning out. Around the house, I have been packing up clothes, paying bills, and discarding innumerable tiny scraps of paper, tissues, toothpicks, spent cartridges from electronic cigarettes, and the like. I am grateful for my godmother, who once again jumped into the fray -- this time paperwork -- and uncovered the fact that my mother's insurance policies had lapsed. Sing ho! for progressive.com. Oh yeah, we got that baby insured!
I am also grateful to my mother's friend who came over and emptied the Drawers of Danger. The Drawers of Dangers were... well... can you bring to mind any very personal items that would be really embarrassing if a casual acquaintance saw them? Now imagine finding such items in the possession of your own mother. Sorry, that was roughing my audience, I know. But I had to share the pain. (As my ecology professor said, the solution to pollution is dilution. Now my brain has a little less ick and yours a little more. Your kind services are noted.)
Beyond that, there is the cleaning out of the head. I am surprised at how little I have met in the way of current feelings about my mother and her death. Feelings from the past, I got plenty. The one thing now is that I sometimes think about how we left her in that hole in the ground. It just seems odd. In much the spirit that I asked my mother when I was five, "Mommy, is it okay to walk on dead people?" I now want to know, is it okay to leave dead people in boxes in holes in the ground?
The anxiety bit me on Monday, and I was out of sorts for a couple days. Out of sorts here refers to being uncomfortable and unable to stay on task. As of the last couple of days, I am not completely out of sorts. Sorts may be in short supply, but I at least have one or two on hand. I noticed an interesting thing, though, which is that while I was anxious and out of sorts, I didn't have any trouble focusing on tasks which were important to me. It was only the urgent-but-unimportant-to-me tasks that I couldn't handle. Beating anxiety being one of my main goals at this time, it occurs to me that it may help if I make time for the important stuff.
Oddly, the thing I feel sad about is that fool of a feller. I suppose because I had actual hopes for him, whereas I had given up many hopes in relation to Mom. And because talking with him felt fun and exciting, whereas Mom... well, she was dying of cancer. I am ashamed of feeling anything about a feller I have only known for a grand total of two months, but I will say that I have been doing some archaeology of the mind on this account. I am remembering that an unpleasant aspect of sexism in my school experience was that boys were in charge of who was treated like a real person and who would be ridiculed. Girls could also ridicule a person, of course, but my experience was that they mainly ridiculed me on the topic of boys, and so the net effect was that association with a boy pretty well indicated whether one got any respect or not. Outrage at this whole state of affairs still dictates that I act too proud to acknowledge that having a boy matters. Worse still, I think a little part of me is still waiting for their approval. What would Martha Stewart say about how to clean up that mess?
Tomorrow I head out to my first Jewish women's study retreat. This should be refreshing, enriching, and even distracting if necessary. And it will fill my mind with more edifying topics. The solution to pollution...
