It started out innocently enough, as all impulsive projects do.
While Maven pulled things off the dining room shelves to play with (throw across the room), I was reminded of my recent TV binge: The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning. A short obsession that started because my friend’s adorable coffee camper was featured in every episode, but then grew into a tearful love for the concept of ‘death cleaning’- a process of letting go of things now to enjoy the life you have, and free your family and friends from the task of going through your stuff when you’re gone.
With that idea in mind, I joined Maven. Pulling everything off the shelves, slowly and methodically.
These shelves are perpetually filled with papers and bills. They’re the catch-all for kid art and coffee rings, and letters that never get mailed. I found some sweetly scribbled love notes between me and Brian on the back of old receipts and scrap paper. There were a couple of “I’m sorry about last night” notes that felt more like us than the lovey love notes. Just a bunch of our messy lives stuffed in every crevice of these shelves. All of the artifacts that make our life rich and complex, right here in my hands.
I started to tackle the bottom corner, the one with all the webs and dust, and I came across something that beckoned me to sit down. I don’t know why, but my body obeyed, sitting slowly and crossing my legs in reverence. It wasn’t our wedding vows, or some sentimental picture. In my hands was a tall stack of never used placemats.
As I ran my fingers across them, taking them in, I thought about the me that picked them out. I registered for them. Somewhere, at some point in time, a 22 year old version of me clicked these on her registry as something she wanted to have. I chose these placemats as artifacts for the life I hoped to build, for the me I hoped to be.
The funny thing is if I could go to every other age of myself and sit and chat with her– she would tell you at 10, 16, 19 … that she was not really a placemat kind of person. So I sat there in nostalgia and curiosity for the girl who thought she needed placemats to be a wife. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with them, I like placemats alright in theory, but something about holding these in my hand was like visiting an old friend you’re not sure you want to be friends with anymore.
I felt a wave of shame. A knowing that I didn’t rise to the occasion. Because although I disagree with her now, I know that 22 year old very well. And I know for a fact I did not become who she thought she should become once she got married. I remember her expectations. I remember them, because they haunt me still. It’s her desperate and scared voice that meets me in my panic attacks, or glimpses in the mirror, or looks around the house at it’s worst and very clearly says, “Who do you think you are?”
I can’t write those words even without summoning the tears, streaming down my face straight from the pit of my stomach. She’s not very nice. She calls me out as an imposter, because she was committed to being an imposter forever. She wanted me to be anyone else but me. She wanted me to play the part with placemats and emotional walls and the life of the party attitude.
I have so much compassion for her. She thought marriage was going to be where she held it all together. She thought she had seen the hardest of times. She thought she needed placemats to make a dinner meaningful. She had no idea what was ahead was so much worse, and extravagantly better than she could imagine. If I became who she wanted me to be, I’d be missing the most deliciously imperfect parts of my daily life. The parts I have fought to love and accept.
The life I live despite her best efforts is one where I have some of my favorite meals on the floor of our kitchen, not a placemat in sight. Where my car is always a mess and I sing No Doubt songs as lullabies. Where I can be both a well of forgiveness, and easily annoyed. I am a chronic mistake-maker. I share my real feelings with people and with God (which might be the worst offense of all). I let myself say the unsayable things to friends. I am wildly imperfect. I am everything I didn’t think I was allowed to be. I have become everything she tried to protect me from becoming because she thought it was weak.
Even with the shame it admittedly brings, I am so so so proud to disappoint her.
To me, this is one of the great mysteries of faith. A knowing as we look back that there are a million decisions we would have never made if we knew how they turned out. And a million we would do all over again. We were so sure when we made them, and hope was promised either way. We made every decision with the information we had at that time and place, and we’re doing the same now.
Though our stuff is just that- stuff. The items do carry with them our memories, our hopes, our projections. Today it was placemats that allowed me to mingle in the past, but other days and for other people it’s a circled date on an old calendar, a favorite shirt from 2001, a wedding ring. It’s the distressed low rise jeans, the too-big dresser, the chunky necklace you just can’t get rid of it because of the memory of the version of you that just loved it so much.
These divine moments of interruption and reflection are healing. I feel as though me and that 22 year old Iesha have been shoving our fingers in our ears and yelling towards each other like siblings, “LALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!” But today we sat together in relief and disbelief, and I asked her simply, “Why don’t you let me take it from here?”
And with those words, on a regular afternoon, I felt the weight of impossible expectation lifted off of me. This first born, immigrant raised, always in-between two cultures girl who thought no matter what, her one job in life was to rise to the expectation. Being herself was the cost of that, and it’s a price I no longer have to pay.
Is this what it means to grow up? A perpetual grief of what you thought would be, while celebrating that it isn’t? Maybe future me is already laughing at my current expectations for my future, maybe she can’t wait for me to see the magnificent life waiting for me, maybe she has seen grief she wishes she hadn’t.
Regardless, I find comfort in knowing that I was made my Someone who has never been surprised by any version of me. A Someone who has only ever cheered as I have become more of the uniquely created me. That Someone stops me from the need to meet expectation, and reframes the goal to a depth and breadth of patience, forgiveness, honesty, noticing, advocating, and listening. It was never about the placemats.
These placemats are prop I thought I needed to play the part. And because of that, I feel happy to let go of them today. Maybe less a death cleaning, and more a growing up cleaning. Turns out I have always had everything I needed to play the part of me, as me. And so do you.
You have never EVER have asked me to play a part. You have only ever wanted all of my authentic heart. I can see looking back what I could not see in the moment, but you could. Let me flag the moments of failure and victory, like ebenezer stones. Remind me that you have witnessed every moment of pain, and every frantic attempt to mask myself in shame. Your voice does not shame me. You have worked miracles in my soul. Thank you for the gift of growing up.
Amen.