Is this closure?

asking for myself

Today I called the local Domestic Violence Center and asked if I could donate my children’s crib and some of their other baby items that we’ve outgrown.

I’ve been putting off the call for months. I knew I wanted to donate their things, but actually doing it was heavy. final. And yet, lighter.

I’ve been intentionally going room by room and decluttering things. We have entirely too much stuff for this sweet little house.

It’s hard when it feels like the objects have memory. Like by giving them away, I’ll forget. Those sweet and tender moments were made all the more precious by the violence that preceded and followed them. How can I let those moments go? I hold on to their clothes like it will keep them little, but the reality is that my youngest will be 3 in less than 6 months. The clock is never going to turn back.

I wish it would. There’s so much I wish I could redo. So many experiences robbed from us by my ex-husband’s violence and neglect. Those early days of motherhood were a nightmare. Cooking dinner with a baby attached to a nipple and a toddler begging for attention, still bleeding into an adult diaper, and fending off a husband who thinks that if he’s “gentle” it’s okay to have sex and throws a fit when I hold my no.

Begging for help only to be met with silence or manipulation. “My mom and therapist were stay at home moms and they say it wasn’t as hard as you’re making it seem.”

Being told the house is just going to have to be dirty and to get used to it because we have two small kids, while he drinks and plays video games and never lifts a finger to help me unless company is present.

I don’t want to hold on to those memories, and sometimes I fear that by donating their things, those will be the only memories left. Even though I logically know it’s not true.

I won’t ever forget staring at my brand new baby in the middle of the night after they were each born, absolutely enthralled and in love and utterly devoted. I hope I never forget the weight of their bodies on my chest or the buttery soft feeling of their skin. I hope I never forget the sweet, sweet baby smell, or all the tiny lines on their feet. Their feet that, when they were born, were only the length of my thumb.

There are so many things I wish I could change for them. I wish that I’d been able to soak in more of the tender moments instead of having to rush to the next fire that needed to be put out. (Sometimes literal fires, like the one he set across our entire backyard and neighbor’s tree line by burning boxes on dead grass and then going to bed… that I had to put out after the neighbor came banging on our door.)

I wish that they hadn’t had to endure so much trauma. I wish that I didn’t have so much healing to do, that it wasn’t so easy to trigger me, that I could laugh more easily, that I wasn’t so overwhelmed.

So I’ve been putting off this phone call for months. Even though it feels like closure. Even though I want to grow something beautiful out of this trauma.

I like to think that there’s another version of us that wasn’t separated by domestic violence. That my children had grown up in a loving and equitable household. That their dad had been healthy and not an entitled, drunk predator. That we could have experienced things how they should have been. But I can’t change the past.

All I can do is keep moving forward, the next right thing at a time. I’ll keep doing it messy. Because as hard as this is, it’s still a hell of a lot better than being trapped with him, and I know I’m choosing the right kind of hard now.

I am healing. I am whole. And I am letting go.

With love and fire in my heart,

Sarah ❤️‍🔥