Feelings! Woah, Woah...Woe?

I don't recall feeling remorse about gifts Lars had given me. That is to say, I didn't feel awkward wearing the jewelry or clothes or whatever that Lars gave me as my husband after I told him he didn't get tenure.

I am not sure, but maybe it was simply that I had long before stopped loving him in any genuine way and therefore did not have any misgivings about strutting my fabulous self about town in the cashmere that was under the tree one Christmas. And didn't feel guilty about accepting a compliment on the fabulous ring he'd run around like a madman to find in time for my birthday one year.

Or maybe I felt it was entitlement. Like I'd earned those gifts. Paid for them with my soul. Many of them I'd come to consider gifts of atonement. As in "Sorry I left with my friends for the 1 o'clock game right after breakfast and left you alone with two vomiting kids on Halloween and you had to ask your cranky old aunt to come over to help with the trick-or-treaters while you attended to throw up detail and I went out for even more beer after the game and returned 8 hours after the final buzzer completely shit-faced. But here's a nice tennis bracelet as a consolation prize."

Truly I feel like these are my things. I'd traded my blood, sweat and tears for them.

I don't feel that way about every gift. I love the knotted gold band sitting in my jewelry box upstairs. But I can not wear it. It is the ring we got me as a souvenir on our honeymoon. Taboo to wear it but can't part with it...though I gladly parted with the spouse. Odd.

So I am having a bout of conscience about gifts from J. Maybe it is my deep, abiding respect for him standing up and waving its arms in my face but I feel guilty wearing some of the gifts he gave me now that we are apart.

Maybe because some of them scream his name to me and I think everyone can hear it?

I know. Insanity.

Don't get me wrong. The gorgeous, astonishingly expensive watch he gave me goes on my wrist every day. I am not an idiot.

But there is a label to some of the other things.

It's like when I was a new mother. I'd had an unwritten rule: If an article of clothing had been worn during either of my size-of-a-mobile-home pregnancies, it no longer qualified as regular clothing. Manufactured to be so or not, they were at once and forever "maternity clothes."

So some of these things are "J. things." Things I got on trips with him. Things he gave me. Outfits from special dates.

Not that I have had to face this yet, but what do I do about the fabulous dress hanging in my closet that I mentioned I'd seen and J. surprised me with? It is a perfect dinner date dress and it will eventually call to me to be worn as such one day. And this - at least right now - is a bit of a crisis of conscience for me.

They say time heals all wounds. I am hoping that while it is healing all my wounds that it also heals this bizarre hangup as well.

Or maybe that is asking for too much and I just need to go shopping for new stuff.