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There was no doubt in my mind but that I’d end up doing a fair amount of hauling his stuff hither and yon when at last it came time for the stb ex to move out. I railed against this thought for weeks until I finally I accepted it.
I decided that it would be better for my mental health to offer my help with the moving process as it was happening rather than as it dragged to a close.
“Helping him” move out? That was an idea I could get behind body and soul. “Cleaning up after his sorry ass” once he was already gone? That would have just pissed me off.
Keeping these positive thoughts in mind, I spent a couple of nights rooting through the depths of the basement storage room. I pushed aside spider webs, shooed away dust bunnies and dug through years of boxed-up co-mingled possessions.
I found…oh God, I found so much stuff. I boxed up the things that were clearly his and bagged the outright trash. Anything that fell in the indeterminate range between those two categories was put aside for future negotiation.
When it came right down to it, the stb ex decided to trash rather than move most of the indeterminate stuff. So when I was done (and the storage room sparkled in a way it hadn’t for years), I’d accumulated one very large pile of junk.
Which he promised to help me take to the curb, and then did not.
So in order to hang on to the shreds of my positive thinking about “helping him move out,” I carried load after load of junk out to the trash. I tried valiantly not to curse (or cry) the entire way, because that would have been unhealthy. Or irritating. Or something. I also tried to estimate the total size of the junk pile—five cubic meters? Six? More?
As I hauled and tried not to curse (or cry), I thought about all the other times I’d carried his stuff from place to place. Each time we moved. When children came along and spare rooms became nurseries. When new furniture replaced old.
Every time, the moving process on his end got pushed back to the point that I stepped in to help. I realized while moving his junk to the curb that some of the junk I’d moved before.
Many times before. The pile didn’t have three dimensions—it had four! The pile had moved through space and time!
Oh how I wished then for a tesseract!
I worried what would happen to him and his junk when I was no longer around to intervene. Would he learn to manage his things? Would he become buried someday? Would his house turn into one of those where you have to slide sideways through mazes of head-high accumulated trash?
Guess it’s not my problem anymore, is it? Sure seems like an SEP to me.
Until it becomes our childrens’ problem. Then once again, I’ll need to intervene.
Omnipotent Poobah
...solipsubmissive...
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