All that stuff.

Happiness is inward and not outward; and so it does not depend on what we have, but on what we are. Henry Van Dyke

Yesterday I felt happy. Even when I was cleaning. The family room downstairs is/was a disaster. When Liseanne, my youngest daughter left for Europe and Alexis, her older sister, moved away they left behind boxes of stuff yet to be moved and boxes of stuff yet to be decided what to do with. C.C's son moved in and the area became a recording studio surrounded by stuff that had no place to be. C.C.s son moved out and left behind stuff that still had no place to be plus stuff he had no use for plus the mess of having used and lived in the space for six months.

It wasn't pretty.

And so, I drew on my hip-waders (just kidding), put some tunes on the stereo and set out to tackle the mess.

My daughters have a lot of stuff. I mean it. Lots.

At one point Liseanne called from the Netherlands and I told her what I was doing. "I love you mom!" she cried exuberantly. "Are you going to clean my room next?" she added hopefully.

That was my plan. Just not this weekend. Her room needs more consideration. More fortification of resolve if I am to wade into the fray and not become discouraged.

"You could pretty well throw out anything you want," she said. "I don't remember what's there anyway."

It is, I believe, an after affect of the Conrad experience. During the course of that journey, we had packed up our old home with the expectation of moving into a new home that Conrad and I had purchased -- sort of together but that's a whole other part of the drama. On the day of the move, he called me in a panic. "There's been a delay in the closing, the wife is holding it up because the house is part of her divorce settlement and she's fighting for more percentage points."

What do I do? I cried. The movers are supposed to be here any minute. Everything's in boxes and I have to get this house cleaned up so I can turn over the keys...

The movers arrived and everything went off to Conrad's plant to be warehoused in a back room.

And so the saga continued. I went to stay with friends. The girls went to their fathers.

And in the process, everything was lost because it was all a lie -- but it took me awhile to figure that part out. There was always a story. Always some drama that didn't quite explain but which I was expected to take as 'truth' to justify what was happening.

Eventually, everything left his plant and went into storage he arranged. Storage that he never paid for. It would be almost nine months before I discovered the truth and when I did, Conrad would be in jail and I didn't have the money to cover the cost of getting it all out of storage. The woman who owned the space was lovely. She let the girls go in and retrieve their personals, but I had to decide what to do -- let it go or cling to it all however possible. I didn't have the energy to cling to it. I was trying to save myself from drowning. Trying to find myself again after having fallen so far under his spell.

I let it go.

Gone were all the things I once cherished. The hand painted Portuguese dishes. The fused glass plates. The paintings. The pictures. The nicknack's and trivia of a life.

The girls had their most cherished items -- the birthday books I'd made them as well as photographs and such.

And I had what I cherished most. My freedom from abuse.

So, when Liseanne said yesterday to throw it all out, I wondered how much of that is because she isn't attached to 'the stuff', and how much of it is a holdover from the Conrad years.

I may never know.

What I do know is -- for having lost all our stuff, we've got a houseful of stuff again just seven years later. In fact, I'd say we've got too much stuff.

Go figure.

You're guy magnets, and I'm a stuff magnet, I once told the girls.

And I think it's true.

Yesterday, as I cleaned and jettisoned unneeded stuff, I thought about the day, shortly after Conrad was arrested when my girlfriend sent me a box of stuff I'd left in her garage. I went through 'my life' as it was at that time, sorting through photos and nicknack's that were in the box and thought-- wow, my life is light. I'm light.

And I am.

I didn't need a lot of stuff then to feel happiness. Don't need it now. Happiness is within me. Not without me. Happiness is my state of being when I let go of being connected to stuff and connect to the hearts and spirits of those I love.

Stuff is nice.

Freedom and the lightness of being in Love in a world that matters is nicer.