It has come to the attention of this office that cleaning your kids' room is ill-advised in the first few weeks after separation.
Going through toys and books and souvenirs of family trips and coming across photographs and ticket stubs and birthday cards -- all of which mean more to you than to your child, sap that you are -- is a guarantee of a flood of tears, which then have to be explained to the curious 6-year-old.
Gak. The things that remind me of The Other.....
For me, today, it was the stupidest thing. A board book. A board book I used to read my son, then read to my daughter. The stupidest f*cking thing. 12 cardboard pages and what, maybe 100 words? God save Ireland.
Because the thing tele-transported me right back to those heady first days after we'd had that first-born. Dozens of memories flashed in an instant. I recalled that, stuffed in a drawer in my office someplace are a bunch of Hi-8 videotapes of him as a baby that I was always going to convert to digits "soon" and which now, I suspect, I'd be petrified to look at.
After that, the deluge. A "kid of the week" poster from D's kindergarten. There we are, smiling into the camera, the four of us. A lie.
Here I am, living in a half-decorated house, broke, emptier than the beer cans in a frat house dumpster, just trying to tidy up, and attacked on all fronts by the Ghosts Of The Four Of Us Past.
