not theirs
This was the part I didn’t fully expect. It was easy to tell myself I was waiting on my children to decide. Harder to admit that some things were really my memories dressed up as theirs. A tiny pair of rain boots, a stack of construction-paper Valentine cards, a hand-sewn Halloween cape I kept for 18 years—those weren’t things my adult kids had been asking me to preserve. Those were things I wasn’t ready to release.
So I made a compromise that felt sane. I created one memory
