Two and three-day liver and gall-bladder flushes may be all the rage, but I accidentally discovered a different kind of detox: The 5-Hour Clean Your Adult Child's Abandoned Bedroom Seven-Emotion Cleanse.
It was a cathartic experience I happened upon after my only daughter left our Ohio home for a four-month seasonal job in Montana last November, and 10 months later still isn't back, which coincided with my son's college-student friend needing a place to live for the semester for which he would pay real money.
Across the miles, 1,738 to be exact, Emily approved with alarming swiftness new usage for the childhood room where she slept and played and did homework for 20 years. Which looked pretty much like it did when she high-tailed it out of here the Monday after last Thanksgiving. Which I was forced to enter with a mop and the first of many raw emotions, beginning with sad.
What other emotion could there be, I thought, as I pushed opened the door to the lavender-walled room where I had lain at night answering throaty questions about the tooth fairy and God, where we read together "Winnie the Pooh" and cuddled.
For the first two hours of the cleanse, like a gall-bladder patient dutifully downing olive oil and lemon juice, I stayed wth the grief, dropping tiny gallstone tears over bins of outdated clothes, piles of school papers and the quilt we made together for her American Girl dolls.
And then, sure as gallstones can dissolve into sludge, so did the sadness melt into another fun emotion, fear, as I remembered my one friend who at the age of 55 still missed breast feeding her three children. What if I stay in mourning forever? What if I never get over her leaving behind all these soccer shorts from all those heady high-school years?
As sure as a stagnant organ, I felt the drag of fear's dread as I dusted generic frames on the wall and took cutesy ones down, as I threw crusty athletic socks down the laundry chute and packed away kitty-cat piggy banks, until a third emotion popped out like a gallstone meeting the repository.
This one was anger, not at Emily for leaving, but at society for creating a culture where kids have to go far away to feel like individuals.
I hung with that one for as long as it needed air, like my therapist always said, breathe in, breathe out, this too, shall pass, will it?, which energized me enough to dump the remains of Emily's dresser into trash bags that I stuffed in her toy box, after which I looked under the bed where she kept her craft bins, making the way for a fourth emotion: Disgust.
I remember reading that some people count 2,000 stones after a gall-bladder cleanse. Is there a way to measure dust? Did I ever, in all those 20 years, sweep under her bed?
As I continued to clean and purge, dust and wet-mop, as I swiped shelves and dresser tops free of hundreds of teeny tiny things and tucked prom dresses to the back of her closet to make way for whatever clothes a male college junior might actually hang, I began to observe what the sages say about feelings: The best way past a difficult feeling is through it. Feelings are fleeting. Let them flow and they will shift and dissolve, dark often turning to light.
In fact, suddenly it was nearing Hour 5, and dare I say I was feeling something akin to happiness.
No doubt this had a lot to do with finally seeing the wide expanse of floor underneath all those clothes and boxes and bins.
But there was something else: All that disinfecting, and I could still feel Emily right here. She was in the air, in the closet, in the walls, which, sorry, new male housemate, will have to remain lavender for now.
And something else again: The reason Emily is not physically present is because she has been successful at growing up.
Which is the purpose of all this, after all.
At which point, like the woman who found 2,000 gallstones in her bucket, I experienced surprise.
Surprise, that I spent five hours immersed in my daughter's gone childhood, and was not curled up in the fetal position on her princess bed.
Surprise, that I actually got past the sadness.
Surprise, that her room could ever be this clean.
