Loco Parentis: A Clean Sweep

WHICH BRINGS ME back to the suitors. There’s more than one way to view a room full of clutter. You can see a failure of self-control, or you can see monuments to the past, smaller in scale than pyramids or Stonehenge, but still present, dusty and crumbling, in tribute to something grand that is no longer here. In Doug’s case, that was standing up onstage and playing his heart out on the trombone. In mine, it was standing at the center of my children’s lives, being the sun they circled round, depended on for light and warmth.

Last summer, our refrigerator died. I went out and bought a new one, and it was so white and sleek and clean that I didn’t have the heart to cover it up with the magnets and school pictures and drawings and newspaper clippings the old one had been papered in. “I like not having all that crap on the fridge,” Doug said approvingly. But then the announcement of a friend’s new baby arrived, and one of Jake’s football buddies’ moms gave me photos she’d taken of the boys, and Marcy mailed a postcard from her week in Ocean City, and there were reminders about doctor and dentist appointments, and a fortune-cookie fortune that says “Dance like no one is watching.” And now the refrigerator looks pretty much the same as it ever did.

I can pretend all I want that I’m preserving the gargoyles for the sake of my children. I can rationalize hanging onto the third-place volleyball tournament trophies and baking-soda volcanoes by telling myself Marcy and Jake would miss them if they disappeared. I can even convince myself I’ll want the building blocks and Legos for grandchildren someday. The truth is that come August, I’m going to need all that stuff — need to walk amongst it, touch it, to convince myself it wasn’t a dream. That once upon a time there was a place called Camelot, and I was king. No one is ever going to need me that much again. I’ll never loom so large in the world.

And that, I’m pretty sure, is what made me erase my graffiti from the dining-room chalkboard. Letting go is hard. Maybe Doug will never get around to getting rid of the piano and tuba. Maybe I’ll have to go on serving Thanksgiving dinner at the kitchen table even after the kids are married and have kids of their own. So what? It’s a big kitchen. It looks damned nice with the new refrigerator and that fresh coat of paint. And I want Doug to be there carving the turkey, no matter what job he has off from for the holiday.