When even divorce can't save you from the mental load of being a wife

Thoughts on when you're left holding the bag of your collective life together

Photo by Saad Chaudhry on Unsplash

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Last weekend I cleaned out my basement closet.

I wasn't planning to. I went down there to look for something specific and found myself going down the rabbit hole of organizing and consolidating boxes, sorting things in to keep or trash or donate.

I'm usually terrible at donating things, allowing them to sit in my basement or garage for months or years on end before finally giving up and chucking it in the trash or having it all hauled away when I move, but lately I've been trying to do better, trying to tackle things as they come up instead of pretending I'll do it later and forgetting. 

As I was sorting and discarding, I came across a box of boxes. You know, the boxes for old phones and laptops from long ago that you don't need but for some reason we elder millennials compulsively hang onto just in case. All were from years ago, which means I deliberately made the choice to keep them over several moves. God only knows why. 

But this time I decided enough was enough and that I was going to finally get them out of my house. After checking to make sure there were no hidden headphones hiding in them (which I'm sure I've done every single time I've come across them), I snapped a photo for the fun of it and put them in the bin. 

And then I waited for the anxiety to come. When it didn’t, I realized that all I felt was a lightness, a tiny glimmer of happiness that I no longer had this thing hanging over my head (we can talk about the box of cables another day), and that got me thinking about how therapeutic it is to purge that which no longer serves us. It’s a lesson I’ve learned many times, but one that never ceases to surprise me.

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When I got divorced, I kept the house.

Doing so provided some stability for my son and allowed for as little disruption as possible. But in keeping the house, I also kept all of the clutter, the boxes in the basement, the old files, the decor I never liked. The things that you leave in taped-up boxes over the course of several moves. 

I didn't have the luxury of picking and choosing the few things I wanted to take and starting fresh. I wasn't home for the move out, instead I was visiting family in Florida with my son, an intentional choice we made to make the process smoother. And it was smoother, but it also left me holding the bag of our collective life, the mental load of it all once again mine to bear alone. 

So while I've taken care of most of it - the painted walls, the upgraded furniture, the new decor - there's a lot left to go through. For there, in the deep recesses of my basement closet, are the leftover boxes of our life together, some important and some not. Old tax returns and moving receipts but also our wedding cake topper and invitations. 

Most I can toss, some I’ll keep, but others are his, things he didn’t take with him but that I know he’d want or need, and so I sort, compile, and return them because I am, even two years later, the keeper of the important documents, the unseen mental load of being a wife mine even when I no longer am one, the time and effort expended expected rather than acknowledged, and this work still separate and in addition to that of being the primary parent, which I’ll dig into another day.

When I came across some of these items I expected to feel something, whether it be nostalgia or sadness or a gratitude for what had been. But instead it was like looking through the items of a long-gone relative that I never knew all that well. I recognized that these were items that were once important to me but it was in another lifetime, a different person who carefully chose and decided to save them. A person that I'm not entirely sure even knew herself all that well, although present me has a lot more compassion for her than she did at the time. 

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They say that reducing your physical clutter reduces your mental clutter and that has always been the case for me. Usually this applies to cleaning the countertops and getting the laundry off of the floor, things that free up some mental space for the day-to-day, but there’s something to be said for clearing the clutter out of the unseen spaces. In wading into the back of the closet to pull out the forgotten relics that once held meaning, to remove the weight of them both physically and energetically, in lightening the load you didn’t even know you were carrying.

So while I never did find that thing I went to the basement for, I did find a renewed sense of gratitude for the life I have built for myself and my son, for the lightness that comes with sorting and organizing and purging, and for the peace that comes with letting go. 

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