Debby Does…

I hope what I’m going to say today resonates or helps in some way. I paid a decent amount of money in therapy and spent a lot of sleepless nights to get to this place, so I feel like if you can benefit from it, you should! I’m all about sharing.

You are not the curator of your parents’/family’s museum.

That’s it. That’s the great nugget of wisdom that I’m handing you today. You aren’t. You don’t have to be. You can, in fact, just walk away from that shrine or museum or attic or whatever holds all their shit.

Let’s talk about how I got here.

My mom worshipped her parents. She spent her life trying to make them proud, even long after they passed. I take no issue with that. As a matter of fact, I do the same. I have such deep and abiding respect for my mom and grandparents that I conduct myself in a way that they modeled. My beliefs and passions are, in part, rooted in the way they raised me and how they lived. I consider my life to be, in many ways, a tribute to them.

But, I still don’t have to take all their crap with me on my journey. Neither do you.

My grandparents sold their estate in Pennsylvania and moved into a large home at the Jersey Shore, which they quickly filled with their previous life and trappings from their new life. Additionally, my granny began acquiring a massive shell collection from their travels and purchased out of her “secret” mad money. A huge lucite, lighted shell case welcomed you into the foyer. Another sat at the foot of the stairs. Shells bedecked the top of the china cabinet and so on from there. This does not even begin to address the crafts and craft room.

And, as a good Lebanese family, there were the rugs. Rug upon rug upon rug, the vintage Karastans ran through the house as far as you could see. There were beautiful hard wood floors, but the rugs covered most of those. That’s how it was in all of our Lebanese relatives’ homes.

And pictures. Do not get me started. Okay, I’m started. There were pictures of every blessed patient my grandfather ever treated. Every friend my mom had in high school had a spot in the picture collection. There were hundreds upon hundreds of pictures.

The house also had an attic and three ample crawlspaces filled with Christmas decorations, fishing equipment, scraps of velvet and satin for crafts, and more wrapping paper than you can imagine. There was a trunk full of coin collections (sold) and all sorts of bibs and bobs that might have become something someday—maybe even in my dollhouse!

When my mom moved in to care for my grandfather as his cancer advanced, she added her stuff to the already stuffed house.

Please know, they were not hoarders in any way. They just held onto things and saved things for future use, instead of loading up the trash bin with them.

In 2021, moving my mom to assisted living to help manage her dementia was our only option, but in order to pay for that, the house had to be sold. That was the hardest decision I ever made.

I had never known a day of my life without that magical house on the water. I had slept in hammocks on the roof deck, and necked (does anyone still use that term?) with boys on the floating dock in the wee hours of the morning. I had my wedding reception there and our tenth wedding anniversary party, as well. I had sipped more condensating glasses of iced tea in terry cloth glass covers than can be counted on that porch. That house had welcomed every lost soul on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and any other day of the year. The kitchen was deliciously vintage and still rang out with the sounds of my grandparents, Sally and Ray, laughing and pinching each other’s booties each night as they cleaned up from dinner. I knew such love there. I learned to love there.

Adding insult to injury, I knew that it would be knocked down. That devastated me.

Surprisingly, that also freed me.

I didn’t have to decide where everything would go. I could just walk away and let it go down with the house.

Now, that might sound awful to you, but it wasn’t. I opened the house up to everyone who loved it and us. They could take all the shells they wanted, pick out treasures that meant something special, and take it all in, one more time. Even better, the new owners claimed some things for themselves and have created a legacy in their new home that honors the old and pays it the sweetest respect. How amazing and unlikely is that?

You are not the curator of your parents’ museum (substitute whatever you need for parents).

You are not the curator of your parents’ museum.

Say it with me. It feels really good.

You have your own artifacts. You have your own scraps of ribbon, dried flowers, and sea glass to hang on to. Your museum might include some items that create connection from the past to the present, but you don’t have to walk through it with ghosts.

As I look around my current home, I see so many things that I brought with me from Sally and Ray and Judy’s lives, but they are surrounded by my own collection of color and whimsy and meaning.

I love my museum. And, I think they would too.