Open the Box: A First Look

Oh open the damn box.
Just look at it. See what's there.

Heart pounding.
Whoosh.
Momentarily felt faint.

Immediately flooded with gratitude for my grandmother's organizational prowess -- Mom's letters are neatly bundled by year.

Just looking at the thickness of the envelopes says so much about each year.
Below, bottom row: Mom's last two years of college, marriage, first two children.
Middle of middle row: pregnant with me, my birth and first year.
Top rows: I start school, we move to Hacienda Heights, then a big gap til 1975.

That's where mom's letters stop.
With her youngest (me) in high school, she went back to school and earned her Psychiatric Tech degree.

So the span of her letters, the tale I'm going to read, is her journey becoming a wife and mother.
(Either that, or there's 8 kilos of smack on my floor.)

These are Grandma's letters. The envelopes turned vertical at the bottom are between her and her husband, after he was permanently committed to the VA psychiatric hospital with schizophrenia.

The red stack is a bunch of Christmas cards my parents received. That'll be fun to see; after Mom died I took over the list for Dad, so these will all be familiar names.

The large envelope holds copies of family Civil War letters.

There's also a fair bit of memorabilia: tatted lace made by great-grandmother Bennett, photographs, a children's book. Ha! Even a hotel stationery envelope with my grandparent's room service order from their honeymoon, "breakfast in bed no less!" she wrote on the outside.

Noticings

~ I'm less overwhelmed. Stacks, structure, finite. I see what's here.
~ Fascinating seeing the intensity of her life just by how thick each year's envelopes are.
~ Mom wrote many many many more letters than I thought. There's a lot here from Grandma too, and maybe Mom didn't save them all, but the vast majority of what's here is Mom narrating her life.
~ This is going to take a lot longer than two months...

My parents' marriage was so strained.
Anger, tension, disappointment, resentment.
That's the biggest part of my trepidation of diving into these.
    ~~~Please, oh please let there be equal parts joy in here too.