Business

Business.  That's how I have to think of this trip to Tennessee.  Get things rolling for the estate sale, and get out of town.  Quickly and efficiently.

Except we all know that anything having to do with our parents, our hometown, our family's "stuff" defies being dealt with non-emotionally.  The voice I hear screaming in my ear's is my mother's.  She was intensely, actually, pathologically, private.  When her health began to decline, I begged her to get someone to come in once a week and run the vacuum, dust a little, wash the dishes.  She flatly, righteously refused because she didn't "want people nosing around where they don't belong --- looking in my drawers and opening my cabinets."  And now, here I am, having an estate sale, where a team of people is going to be going through almost every corner of the house.  It's like killing her twice.  And I just can't get out from under that.

My therapist asked me to try something: instead of hearing what Mama would say, imagine Daddy's voice.  Which would have been something like, "Baby Doll, you can only do so much.  Do the best that you can, and let the rest take care of itself.  It'll all work out in the end.  All you can do is the best you can do.  Even your Mother would know that."  And then he'd tell me to "kiss the babies" and say how much he loved me.

So that's the voice I'm trying to hear as I wait for the estate dealer to get here.  Not out of any disrespect for my mother's wishes, but because this house, and what to do with it, and how to maintain it, have been shattering weights around me for all these months.  There is pain when I'm in Georgia about not being here, there is pain when I am here because it's all so emotional and overwhelming.  Some of this weight has got to come off, or I'm going to be hobbled permanently.