Life has more quiet moments now that school is back in session. This morning I continued cleaning and organizing my desk area. Something that has piled up over the years in no particular order is the paperwork associated with our adoptions: overflowing hanging files, random documents in a pile on a shelf, in an envelope that never got fully emptied. Receipts, papers poached to request social security numbers or a passport and never returned to the file...I looked at and sorted it all. I also dumped all the infertility treatment forms and medical reports into the "shred" pile. They are no longer needed.
Not gonna lie. The emotion swelled and took my breath away a couple of times.
I'm not sure where the emotion came from - I wasn't sad. It was just a period in our lives that was so...intense. To look it in the face again - the checklists of things to do, the piles of receipts, the lawyer notices, the thick stapled packets of information about ourselves or the birth parents, it opened a tender place in my heart that remembered, viscerally, the weight of it all.
At the same time, that period in our lives is OVER. Done deal. And I experienced great joy in keeping only one copy of each item in a file for the appropriate child and throwing out the duplicates. Each child has a file with his or her origins told in the indifferent language of legal documents. One day these papers will interest them.
I'm trying to understand the hollow feeling of loss that is still there when I say goodbye, in this concrete way, to that chapter in my life. It makes no sense - I am glad to leave it behind. Maybe it's that, while there's finally closure for me, it is still something my kids will open up and experience for the first time one day. Those papers are all familiar to me; I signed most of them or took them from envelopes myself while standing on the wooden staircase of our Albany home, reading them in the winter light that glowed softly through the arched window of the front door. I sat across a table in a room lit by fluorescent lights and helped draft some of them with a couple we were just getting to know.
Closure is good, and closure I have. We are truly in a new chapter in our lives. It is apparent in the way our family has settled. We are one. We are parents and children, brothers and sisters, and the "how we got here" does not diminish this bond. And this new chapter is oh so good. So onward.
