On a recent trip home for the holidays, I had a startling
revelation.
I had been preparing my whole life to live out the plot of
every campy soap opera ever made.
No, I wasn’t aspiring to become a scheming mistress to a
miserably married millionaire just so I could humiliate my nemesis—his wife, of
course—at the country club soiree, nor was I plotting to steal the family
fortune by locking my brother in a basement and planting evidence that he had fled
the country with a greedy French supermodel.
No, it was much worse. Without realizing it, I had spent the
first roughly 20 years of my life preparing to be afflicted with the worst of
all soap opera plot devices: amnesia.
I figured this out when my mom hauled out several (okay, it
might have been more than several) plastic storage bins full of stuff I had
left there when I moved out eight years ago.
Preparing for amnesia really seems like the only way to
explain the exhaustive collection of articles that I found in those bins. It
seems I had attempted to capture as much of my young identity as could possibly
be contained in physical objects and stuff it into storage for the inevitable
day that I would have no idea who I was.
Really, how else could I explain the collection of award
ribbons from the soccer team I played on from fifth to seventh grade? The
puffy-painted posters I made promoting my ill-fated run for class president in
sixth grade? The art projects spanning most of my elementary school career? The
trophies, buttons, t-shirts, and random flotsam I accumulated during my high
school colorguard days? The box of cassette tapes, most of which were bad-quality
recordings of songs off the local alternative rock radio station? (Not
surprisingly, we could not find a working cassette player to listen to any of
these tapes.) The box of letters from my junior high pen pals, and the get-well
cards I received after my appendectomy when I was 12? The Happy Meal toys and
personalized key chains and Styrofoam-accented diorama of me and my childhood
best friend? And that unholy Tupperware container full of my greasy, half-melted
miniature clay sculptures?!
I'm sure it's normal to keep a few things to remind you of
your childhood, but I apparently thought it would be much better to keep everything. After all, if I contracted
amnesia someday, how else would I remember where I came from? How would I ever put
the pieces of my life back together?
Lest you think my parents were partly responsible for this
sentimental hoarding, I'll assure you that my mom has been nagging me to get
this stuff out of her closets for several years. But I had expertly skirted
this duty by moving 1,000 miles away and keeping my visits just short enough to
make closet-cleaning seem like a cruel drain on our precious family time.
This visit, though, I wasn't getting out of it. Mom was
insistent. And now that I'm preparing for the birth of my own child, it seemed
like high time to cast off these childish things (or at least get them out of
my mom's closets).
So I spent quite a few hours of my visit going through all
this stuff. Some of it was easy to part with, as I had long since forgotten its
significance. Many of the items were fun to share with my husband and to
reminisce over with my sister and brother, but they didn't really warrant keeping
for another 20 years. Ultimately, I ended up with one medium-size bin
containing the things I just couldn't part with—things that I might want to
share with my own child(ren) someday. Or
that I might take out every few years if I feel like I'm forgetting where I
came from—or, heaven forbid, I feel a little amnesia coming on.
I've since thought a lot about why childhood-me had such a
strong attachment to those things that most people would consider insignificant
junk. As I grew up, I think I was hoping to leave a breadcrumb trail that would
lead me home if I ever got lost. I loved childhood, and I grew up reluctantly.
The future seemed like a scary, unpredictable place full of struggles and
challenges that I just didn't know if I could handle. So I wanted to hold on to
the person I thought I was somehow—the person who loved her friends and got A+s
on her school projects and enjoyed making things with her hands and received
awards for general awesomeness in sports and activities.
The truth was that I didn't always see myself as that
person. I, like most people, and young people especially, often felt inadequate
and uncomfortable in my own skin. I didn't see myself as the "winner"
identity I projected out into the world. I saw a chubby, nerdy, introverted
girl who was self-conscious and afraid to be herself. But I thought if I could
just attach myself to the identity I had created, I would somehow become it.
And no matter where adulthood took me, I could always return to that identity by
simply following the breadcrumb trail.
That kind of attachment, I have since come to understand,
leaves little room for true growth or self-expression. It's all we can do to
maintain the persona we created.
If I continue clinging to my past self, how will I ever
become the person I'm meant to be? How will I be able to see my life
objectively and move closer to my true desires? How will I ever take on the new
identity that I'm hurtling toward with each passing week: mother?
The simple answer is that I won't. So instead, I think it's
time that I come to grips with the unlikelihood of the soap opera plot ever
happening, and embrace the present me, with all her imperfections (including a
mild hoarding problem). I know that once our child is born, I will probably
still keep far too much sentimental crap, but I will do it with the knowledge
that it doesn't define my child (or me). Like a trail of breadcrumbs, it can
show us where we've been. But it can never show us who we are, since that's
changing every day.
