This weekend I got myself a new filing cabinet. Exciting, I know. I've been wanting one for several years. I have a little one, but it was too full to hold anything else. I wanted a bigger one so I could really get some stuff organized. So, last night I got busy organizing, shredding, tossing.
I do love a good organizational purge. I went through everything in the little cabinet, everything that's been piling up around it, everything that's been piled, shoved, tossed elsewhere in my house. It was good. And interesting.
Though I know I've been through those piles in the last 10 years, somehow I found things that should have been purged years ago. I found bank statements with the checks hubby wrote for our wedding (for the quartet, for the photographer, for the priest). I found a file hubby's mother had written all over, planning how they were going to pay for his college. I found records from the urologist hubby visited just before being diagnosed with a tumor in his spinal column a few months after we were married.
And then I found, most unexpected of all, records from our infertilitytesting and treatments. The insurance forms from the early tests. The slips from the pharmacy for the evil Clomid that made me so crazy. The bills from the later tests and IUI. All of them useless.
I've been wondering why I still have them. Did I save them for some reason? Did I want to remind myself of it all? Perhaps I thought that once we finally got pregnant (ha - the naivete!) they would help me remember our journey and how worth it all the treatments were.
Maybe.
However, as I've thought about it, I think what actually happened was I shoved them in the back of the drawer because I simply couldn't bare to deal with them. They were such a glaring and tangible reminder of my failure to do the one thing I most wanted. To pull them out, even if only to throw them away, was too much of a reminder. To touch them, even if to shred them, was akin to opening the floodgates on all those memories, and hurts. The ones I had no desire to unleash again.
And so, imagine my surprise to discover first that they were there, because I had thoroughly and completely forgotten them. But second, to find that letting them go, shredding them, left me feeling nothing. No hurt. No sadness. No relief or healing either. Just nothing.
And that, I suppose, is proof that I've come further than I sometimes think I have. I didn't need to destroy those records to feel closure about the inevitability of ever becoming pregnant. Somewhere along the way, I've already found some. By no means am I "over" infertility. But the sharp, ever present pain, it's gone. And, for that, I am thankful.
Today's Lesson: Organizing can be good for the soul.
3 comments:
Good for you! Maybe your de-cluttering will inspire me :)
Love this :)
I am visiting from the Creme and clicked to see what other things you'd written and this post hit me. I am glad that others enjoy organizing and getting rid of old papers (although I definitely need to do it more often than I do). But, I was also glad to hear that you kept your IF paperwork, like me, even though you never got pregnant, like me. My IF paperwork is actually at the bottom of my hope chest (ironic, right?!?) and I know that I'll stumble upon it someday when I go to get a blanket or something out of there, but the files can just stay put until that day arrives. Then, I'll decide whether to shred them or relocate them.
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