Selling Mom's Stuff

It feels like a relief to slowly get rid of my mother's stuff. I guess it has taken me since last fall to realize that she won't be needing it. I don't know where she is staying or if she is taking her meds. Hopefully, she'll stay in the Baltimore area and continue working with her mobile treatment team. It's depressing to wade through disorganized papers wadded in drawers, with even more disorganized thinking on them.  She is so very very sick. I have more papers to go through, and I dread it.  I skim them and keep the really bad ones in case I ever need proof of her illness. Although if anyone talks with her for 5 minutes it is evident.

Our village is having a village wide garage sale Mother's Day weekend. I plan to have a sale for all the things that we brought up from her Louisville storage unit last year.  It seems appropriate. If I find her, I'll send her the money from the sale so she can continue to live independently. Or, if she needs furniture, we'll buy replacements.  None of her possessions are anything I recognize from my childhood.  My guess is that all of those ended up in another storage unit somewhere and was auctioned off like in American Pickers.  I try not to think about the trunk full of heirlooms and somebody bidding on it. Oh well. You can't take it with you when you go, so you might as well let it go now.

Mother's Day is one of the worst holidays for me. It's the one day of the year that I feel overcome by grief.  She is alive, yet gone. I mourn the relationship we used to have. Her smiles and her saying, "I love you," or "I just enjoy you so much."  She may be capable of saying those things still, but other conversation is very limited and complicated. Maybe someday I'll be better able to articulate this. I guess it's like talking to someone with brain damage who has delusions of grandeur about herself and delusions of the worst in everyone else.  Oh, the things I have read!

Maybe Mother's Day will be different this year, knowing that I'm doing something to help her. Maybe I'll be able to think about my own family or my amazing stepmom or my wonderful mother-in-law, or my friends who show me up close how to be a mom.

I look forward to having an empty basement and garage and being able to move on from the hopes I let get too high.