Plunge

The plunge has begun.

It all started with our enforced two-hour shifts Thursday night, waking and stumbling to care for a sick child.

And that experience cemented an already-known-yet-not-quite-admitted-to fact: no more kids.

(For those of you with "Oops Babies" or similar stories of that neighbor's aunt's third-removed cousin's wife's sister who said the same thing ... I don't want to hear it!)

Armed with this freshly-acknowledged information yesterday, I started the process.
I went into the attic.
I surveyed the neatly stacked and even more neatly labeled bins.
I grabbed the closest bin and brought it downstairs, followed by another one.
Two plastic containers sat in my living room, this time in front of my face rather than the out-of-sight-out-of-mind attic.
The bins refused to budge.
The journey began.

Yes, I started this new leg of my journey, this sorting through my kids' outgrown clothing. It's funny how my subconscious took over, clearly knowing what was best for me and how I would most successfully survive this first plunge into the icy waters of purging:

- I started with Aidan's 5T clothing. Cute, yes, but I just packed them away. There were no real emotional attachments, other than the fact that for a brief moment I allowed myself to actually think about what I was doing. A momentary choke-up as I reached for the first garbage bag.

- I "randomly" selected a time to begin this process: while the kids were napping. This gave me a goal, to get it done before they woke up, because once they were up they would want to know what I was doing, then I would have to talk about it, then the lump in my throat would expand to a noticeable size, then Grace would undo everything I did ... No time to dawdle, no time to reminisce -- just rip off the band-aid.

- I had the TV on, which I didn't "plan" on doing, but which afforded me the distraction to keep that throaty lump at bay and keep the traffic down on Memory Lane.

And you know what?
4 bins are emptied.
11 smallish garbage bags are in the basement (neatly labeled by size and season, of course)
I am breathing.
I am still alive.
Some personal apocalypse never occurred.
All is well.

I feel good. As I told my friend Tricia, if only that feeling transferred over to my own personal loss of actual physical weight I'd feel even better! But I do feel like I tackled something significant. I feel fairly triumphant.

But here's the thing ... there are many more bins. And I haven't even gotten to the tiny, cute baby things yet. 5T jeans with slightly worn knees have nothing on sweet plush cuddly sleepers. But I took the plunge ... now I just need to start swimming.