Divorced Moms, what do you do with all those boxes full of pictures and mementos?

I have a cardboard box shoved into the back of my closet. My wedding dress is inside. Somewhere deeper, shoved inside the ratty box are photos of my wedding day.

Thank God the box is draped and camouflaged with clothes I’m too lazy to hang up, because the sight of that box makes me sad all the way to my bones.

What do you do with a boxful of memories like that?

Of course, I’d saved my wedding dress as a memento and souvenir. I long ago gave up any hope that my daughter would ever want to wear it. It’s a long beaded, sexy wedding number. A loud, proud testament that I was wedding in my 30’s and didn’t need the virginal Princess dress. We’d lived together for over 7 years before we finally made it legal, so I chose a dress that was more glam and less sweet.

We got married at a friend’s house in the Hollywood Hills and danced to vintage Sinatra. We even had an Elvis impersonator show up. My dress still shows some dirt from the evening’s party. Red wine. Grass.

And the stiletto heels (which I saved too, God knows why) I wore are marked from sinking into the dirt.

What do you do with painful memories? Donate them to the Goodwill and hope that someone else won’t be jinxed by wearing your bad juju on their special day?

Why do I continue to hold onto these things? Looking at them makes me ache. Sad at my failure. Sad at what didn’t work. But there were also many wonderful things about my marriage that this dress still seems to remember.

In the end, though, we just weren’t a good match. Divorce was our destiny it seems. We were less Lucy and Ricky. And more bickering Fred and Ethel (without the witty comebacks.)

For now this box will stay hidden in the far reaches of my closet.  The dress stained of red wine and grass. The heels caked in dirt from too much dancing. I’ll keep them for now at least as a memento of times past. A tangible chronicle of a marriage born imperfectly in the hills above Los Angeles. Memories of happy, sad, Elvis and a wedding that didn’t quite work out.

Have you kept your wedding dress since your divorce too? If you didn’t, what the hell did you do with it?