Loving and Letting Go AKA Cleaning Out the Spy Closet

I constantly ask myself:

How can I stay connected to my higher self?

How can I stay in the truest of the truths, love?

How can I let go of the pain and hurt caused by my ex to me and my children? (You hurt me? Okay, it sucks, but I can move on from that. But you hurt my children and I become a character in The Godfather, “Leave the gun, take the cannoli.”)

Divorce reminds me of the scene in Monty Python when Arthur chops off the arms of the Black Knight and while his shoulders spurt blood, he says, “It’s only a flesh wound!” Divorce feels like having your limbs cut off but you aren’t allowed to show any emotion. You have to say, “Tis only a scratch!” and keep hopping.

Will there ever come a time when I can see my ex’s face and not want to

a. flog him

b. throw up

c. feel like I’m being stabbed in the heart ?

My dream is that I make my life so incredibly wonderful that I barely remember his name. I’m working on it.

So, today I had to call in and cancel teaching because my daughter is on Day 7 of Strep throat and when parenting a sick child, it’s kind of like being in the trenches. You are sick with worry, you don’t comb your hair or get out of your sweats because you are running between your child’s sick bed and kitchen, administering medicine, and making healthy food.

In the middle of stress, it’s always a good idea to bake some muffins and clean out your closet, right? Right!

So while my daughter slept, I made my famous pumpkin chocolate chip muffins and as the smell of melting chocolate and warm pumpkin wafted through the house, I opened the door of the spy closet.

We call it the spy closet because the kids used to play hide and seek inside and there are some really good hiding shelves way up high. Also, we keep our spy stuff in there—invisible ink, flashlights, binoculars, rear view glasses, fingerprinting kits, antique spy phones that are perfect for playing spy, etc.  (I actually teach a spy class to kids where we focus on a different literary detective every week and learn a new spy skill: Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Sherlock Holmes, Harriet the Spy, The Great Brain, Encyclopedia Brown, Nate the Great.)

I’m sure you have a spy closet too, right?

I also keep our many colorful umbrellas in there along with my current teaching bags and supplies, so at any point you will find a cornucopia of feathers, glitter, glue, fairies, flowers, beads, pine cones… you get the idea.

If at any time anything is missing in our house, we say, “Look in the spy closet!” And the missing item usually appears. Like magic.

So I wonder, can organizing the spy closet help me connect to my higher power? I know who would say YES—Marie Kondo. She’s perfect for those of us struggling to get to the next step of our lives. “Marie! It’s dark in here! And messy! A beautiful mess, but still messy! HELPP!”

She would giggle like a fairy and pat me and tell me to hold each item in my hands and if it didn’t spark joy, I should thank it for its use and send it on its way.

Okay.

Maybe cleaning out the spy closet will usher in a new era for beauty and prosperity and joy for us.

I have been wanting to clean it for a year, and I usually open the door, look around, feel overwhelmed, then close it and carry on with my day. But today, without thinking too much about it, I dragged everything out.

Then I swept and mopped and organized everything and put a few beautiful items back in.

Hmmm, I don’t feel any different.

I’m not sure how cleaning the spy closet helps me stay connected to my highest self, but having a clean organized closet seems like a good first step, doesn’t it?

I don’t know! All I know is that my dirt pile was gorgeous—full of feathers, jewels, glitter, half-eaten nerf bullets—a basic microcosm of my life.

And I wonder if I can Marie Kondo my mind. If my thought doesn’t spark joy, maybe I can give it a hug and sweep it away.

I wonder if I can throw out the painful things my ex did and focus on the good things, because he really did do a lot of wonderful things. There’s a reason I fell in love with him and adored him for so many years. For example, he stared at me and constantly told me I was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. He wrote me love songs with titles like, “You Brighten the Corners” and “I’ll Keep You Safe If You Keep Me Wild” and sang them to me every Christmas Eve with tears running down his face. He stayed right next to me when I gave birth to our daughter and son and wept when he held them and me. He opened up beautiful worlds to me like transformative food and stunning wine. He paid for stuff. That’s big. Money has never been my strong suit—well I’m great at spending it, not so great at making it. He loved Christmas and holidays as much as I do and supported my writing and made me feel magical.

So if I leave out the lying… and the cheating… and the betrayal… and the searing pain… and the dark sickness he brought into our home…

I guess it’s not so easy to Marie Kondo your brain. Unless, there’s a way to keep the thoughts that spark joy, while still holding the space for the darkness too?

Is there a way to do that?

I remember my professor at UCLA telling us that the mark of a well-adjusted person is someone who can accept the dialectic of life in their mind, and still function. This means holding two diametrically opposed ideas at the same time in your mind and knowing that at any moment either or neither or both can be true.

For example, I call having kids the “cruel dialectic of parenting” meaning, you create and hold these beautiful children, guide them through their lives with the sole purpose of letting them go. WHAT? If you do your job well, they leave???? It feels too cruel.

I tend my garden, water my flowers, aerate the soil, nurture them every day, and I have a beautiful garden. I do the same to my children, with the purpose of letting them go. It’s so painful, and beautiful, and the essence of all life, right? And the garden doesn’t last forever either. It blooms and dies and blooms again.

Loving and letting go, like writing in disappearing ink. Write something beautiful and watch it disappear.

Loving and letting go, like opening up my rainbow umbrella and having the wind flip it inside out and whip it out of my hands, then realizing I don’t need it after all. As my Mom always said, I’m not made of sugar, I won’t melt in the rain (if she knew how many cookies I was eating, she may have rethought the whole “you aren’t made of sugar” thing).

Loving and letting go—my Dad’s warm gnarled hand in mine, but then finding his handprint on my heart.

Loving and letting go—my Mom laughing and singing “La Cucaracha” while dragging me into her conga line, and then I overhear my son singing “La Cucaracha” to himself while he gets ready for school.

Loving and letting go—my best friend, Kim, her huge brown eyes, her loving smile, her ability to make me laugh so hard I didn’t feel bound to this earth anymore, like the tea party in Mary Poppins, and realizing that now when I laugh, I feel like I am with her.

Loving and letting go—every day when I drop my beloved bunnies at school and let other adults be their teachers and mentors.

Is this the lesson in divorce? Loving and letting go—my marriage, my plans for the rest of my life to sleep next to this man I vowed to love forever and ever.

Can I hold in my mind that my ex is both wonderful and a nightmare? Kind and cruel? Beautiful and ugly? Loving and hateful?

I have to eat a warm pumpkin muffin while I think about this.

I don’t know how to do this, but I’m doing it anyway. It’s not sparking joy, in fact it’s sparking sadness, but there’s not a darn thing I can do about it.

I don’t understand how this can be, but I live how this can be.

Because that’s the choice, right? To live means to love and let go.

Clean out the closet, clean out the mind, clean out the home, clean out the heart, love, loss, learn, and do it all again.

And have a warm pumpkin muffin while you ponder this.

And remember, warm melted chocolate and opening a door to a clean closet almost always sparks joy.

And while I have no answers and life just keeps smacking me in the face, the one thing I can definitely do is make sure my dirt pile is full of stars and sparkles and feathers and jewels.