No more baby season

The tears came slowly from hot eyes. I didn’t realize I was crying until my nose started running. I can ignore the tearing (allergies, you know), but the sniffling is too much. A heavy weight was sinking from my shoulders, lingering for a moment over my heart, then settling heavily in the pit of my stomach.

And what could inflict such great dispair on my heart? I’m bagging up the last of my baby stuff today.

Leaving baby phase

My baby is now two years old (nearly three if I’m honest) and moving into the room with the other big boys. My “lost boys” are taking their steps into the land of the Lord of the Flies. Not ready to grow up, yet ready to be “BIG”. The nursery is getting turned over to our only girl to become her own personal paradise of femininity.

For me, that means that I have to take all the hording of unneeded babiness that has happened in that closet and fully iradicate it from the house. At first I thought this would be an easy job. A simple flipping of dressers and moving of hanging garments. Then I began this undertaking and saw it for what it would really be to me.

Shock…

I was ridiculously stunned. I came out of the room to look for some sympathy from someone and found my husband instead. He finds my expressions of emotion over these motherly things confusing and amusing and is no good at hiding his thoughts. He did affectionatly embrace me and rub my back while I let my few tears fall. Once I got a handle on the outpouring he graciously reminded me that it was time for this to be done. It’s time for the babies to grow up.

Issues: take 2

The second angle in this story of exagerated emotion is my adoption “failure”. Of course thats not really something you actually fail at, but my melencholy mind likes to seek out my many points of effort and chalk them up as failures.

When we had closed the door of our natural family growth for medical reasons I had hoped to continue it through adoptive channels. I am Native American and I have heard how difficult it is for children to get placed in families because of laws they have to protect Native children. We pursued foster care as an option of helping out our county and being available for an adoptive child.

I have never heard of this happening, but we did not recieve a single placement in the whole year that we were licenced. Because of our young children, and the fact that we have four, we were not an ideal home for the children that needed help in our community. They couldn’t place family groups with us because we could only legally take one more child, and they couldn’t place children with certain special needs with us for the safety of all the children involved. My hopes were to have recieved an adoptive child by now, but we are back at square one as far as that goes. And it would appear that my husband is more than ok with the idea of just having our four. So, the “failure” to adopt may be ended here.

Issues: Take 3

There is a third angle to this story that intensifies things slightly more for me. I was raised in a family culture of hording. Getting rid of things not only ignites the inner flame of nostalgia for me, it also triggers the anxiety of not letting things “go to waste”. It’s very hard for me to just get rid of things that are in perfectly good working condition, even to a thrift store, because in the depths of my psyche I am convinced that someone I know needs the stuff I am getting rid of.

My husband is the other extreme. He imagines that just because something is no longer useful to him, no one would ever find a use for it anywhere.

I would hold on to things indefinitely for that one other person I will meet that needs it. He would throw everything away immediatly, even if it means we have to go and buy it again in a few months.

Overwhelmed? Maybe…

So where does that leave me? With three trash bags full of baby stuff and a week to find a home for it. It leaves me here, writing at the blog to try to bring a leveling to my stress that I inflict on myself by my own neuroses.

It leaves me reminded, once again, of the myriad of little ways that the hand of God touches and directs our journey of sanctification, even the cleaning out of a nursery.