Purge

My parents are cleaning out their basement. Suddenly all of my childhood things are taking up too much space in their downstairs landfill. My junk is therefore being transferred here box by box, and I have the job of going through it all and deciding what is worth keeping and what I need to throw out.

Really, very little of it is actually worth keeping. I mean, there's nothing of value. But there are things like my sticker albums from elementary school that are just difficult to let go -- an entire page of scratch-and-sniff stickers, and the pizza one still smells! There are things from high school and college as well -- prom pictures, class notes.

I came across some unfinished letters I'd written to my college roommates after they graduated and I was still in summer school wondering if my double major was such a good idea after all. The letters were all poignant for one reason or another -- I smiled through tears as I read a letter about the wedding of a roommate, for instance. But one of the letters particularly upset me. It contained a word-for-word account of a conversation I had had with my father -- one of the conversations in which I was told no man would ever want me.

I had forgotten just how painful it all was -- the intense anger and the feelings of worthlessness, the way I loved and hated each man I met, the way I assumed they were all as disgusted by me as my father was, the way I both dared and begged them to prove him wrong. As much as I loved college, as much fun as I had with my roommates, I am glad that time in my life is over. It was several years before I began to realize my father might be wrong, and even longer before I truly believed he was wrong.

And lately, when I think back, sometimes I wonder if it really happened at all. Maybe I imagined those cruel words coming from his mouth. How could the man who so totally adores my children and treats them with such tenderness, have said those things to me? I must have made it all up, right? Or provoked him? Or allowed the memory to become an unfair exaggeration of the truth?

Yet here is a letter I wrote only two days after an incident about which I had completely forgotten. I remember pieces of earlier conversations -- ones in high school and one in my freshman or sophomore year of college. But the one I wrote of in that unfinished letter I had allowed myself to forget totally.

It reminds me that I have exaggerated nothing, that in fact I have allowed myself some forgetting, choosing to forgive rather than hold on to every wrong. I am glad about the forgiveness, and in some ways the forgetting. Yet I don't want to forget completely -- I need to remember that it happened, that I shouldn't let my guard down completely, that I have a daughter to protect, that it wasn't my fault.

I hold it in my hand and can't let go of it, this yellowed piece of paper, my absolution.