Many things I’ve held onto for a long time:

• That ugly brown blanket I slept with for many years until my parents finally tried to throw it away (and then my aunt kept it in a safe-house of sorts, but when she tried to give it back, valiantly, I realized how dreadful and pathetic it was and finally threw it away).
• A letter from the college counselor giving me a pass due to “anxiety and exhaustion.”
• Journals. And not even the journals so much but the tat tucked inside the pages – napkins from a coffee shop where I used to write almost 20 years ago, dried flowers, stubs from greyhound bus tickets, receipts with impossible budgets scrawled on the back in a stranger’s writing. 
• The imprint in ink of a tiny newborn’s footprint – Maia’s – done back before I ever dreamed that her foot could grow to fill an almost adult-sized shoe. 
• And for a long time I held onto the resentment cultivated over many years of longing for a baby before I had any. 

It’s weird – resentment (and its birth mother, anger) – in some instances it takes years and years to stack up like wooden blocks firmly set one on top of another and then it takes as much time to dissipate and only does so with purposeful work. But other times, it slips through your fingers though every sensible part of you knows you should be holding on. The point is, you can steel your resolve and stay cold as you please, but no tower of blocks has ever stayed in place forever. At some point, someone knocks it down. 

There are things I’ve held onto and then suddenly, in an instant, I’ve known it was time to let go: 

• Each child’s umbilical cord – carefully set on a shelf because it seemed precious and then hastily thrown away several months later when I realized how gross it was. 
• That aforementioned brown blanket. 
• Poems written in journals and then read years later. 
• Single socks, left sitting in laundry baskets for close to a year until I finally said enough already. 

So what’s the point? Why am I writing this? I’m not sure- other than the fact that there’s a curiosity here. Is it time to hold on or time to let go? Is there a greater purpose being served by the holding on? Perhaps. Perhaps not. We are left unresolved.