Layers
Josh and I had to clean out our bathroom so the contractor could gut the space and make way for a new vanity. The old vanity had chunks of paint missing from the time when I taped the drawers shut so the Wolvog would stop opening them as he crawled around the bathroom during my shower. How was I to know that the tape would take the paint along with it when I finally peeled it away to put tot locks on the drawers?
We dug down into the dark recesses of the vanity, unearthing birth control pills. Birth control pills, people. These were not from treatments; in fact, they expired back in 2002. Why did I keep them? I don’t know. Maybe because they were a tangible reminder of a different time period in life, a time period when I thought I needed birth control?
We threw out an expired peestick. An unused peestick. During the height of my addiction of urinating way too early, I went through several peesticks per cycle, and it felt like an insult to drop this one, unused peestick into the trash simply because the box said it expired in 2014. (Please do not tell me that I could have still used it because I will go to the dump to get it back.)
There were the hotel soaps (you take them, too) and stretched-out ponytail holders and whimsical hair clips that I wore through college. Numerous opened containers of Q-tips because we somehow always lose the box underneath the sink. A cartoon Daredevil with a voice bubble saying, “Not in my bathroom.” So many tweezers. How did I end up with that many tweezers?
And then two things: the positive peestick and the faded hospital bracelet that I cut off my wrist and stuffed in a drawer when the twins came home. The lines are still dark pink. The words are entirely missing from the band. Two ends of a journey I waited a long time to take.
I could have thrown them out. I don’t need them; they serve no purpose. But I slipped them into a box to pack away. They mean something. They’re just useless things. They’re everything.
12 comments
Bathroom vanities are a black hole! I still have my positive pee stick.
I still have mine, too.
I still have a bunch of needles in my bathroom closet from my heparin injections. I figure, you never know when you’ll need those. I currently use one from my progesterone shots to refill cartridges for my fountain pens.
I don’t keep anything I covered in urine though. 😉
Oh the vanities! How they hold so much. They’re like time capsules. And those positive pee sticks I still have too
This made me tear up. I have my hospital bracelets and all my sharps, still. I don’t have my pee stick but I get not letting those things go.
Add me to the bunch that kept the positive pee sticks. They reside in a small drawer with some old barrettes that I kept from when I had long hair.
I was hoping, hoping, hoping those two things didn’t go to the dump.
They are everything.
Oh wow. That’s a lot of history! I still have the first positive peestick in the drawer of my night stand (I think). It’s gross (all yellow colored…eeeeewwwww) and I’m not sure why I’m keeping it, but throwing it out requires a whole new level of self awareness I guess and I’m not there yet. lol I never thought of keeping my hospital bracelets though, only my daughter’s
It never even occurred to me to keep my positive pee stick. My pregnancy was in the early days of the Internet and before loss & infertility, when I was still innocent. Oh well. I do have my hospital bracelets.
I am so glad you posted this today because you and the commenters showed me I’m not alone. I’m moving across the country in less than three weeks so I’m on a mission to declutter, but I have been avoiding the bathroom. It seems silly to pack used pee sticks when I’m getting rid of furniture, but it also seems heartless not to keep them.
Timely post for me because I just moved today and have spent the past several days sorting out and packing everything we have accumulated over the past eight and a half years. Moving sucks but it’s a good opportunity to declutter. (The same is true of renovation, I’m sure.)
I still have all my positive pee sticks too, including the ones that were followed by my miscarriage, as well as expired Clomid and progesterone pills and a myriad of other “souvenirs” from my TTC days. I can’t bring myself to discard them. They really are everything.