A month ago, a friend who’d recently separated from her husband asked me what the hardest thing about being divorced is. Without thinking, I blurted out, “Getting the mail.” I took that back pretty quickly. Getting the mail is by no means the most difficult part of ending a marriage, particularly one with children. In the grand scheme, walking or riding to the mailbox—even if, like me, you’re not used to the task—feels like a grain of sand on a beach of problems. But in my defense, on that day I was fresh off a series of embarrassing incidents stemming from my inability to retrieve my furniture store circulars and L.L. Bean catalogues.
You might be wondering if I, say, have a PO box five miles away, or a mailbox covered in briars, or any previous letter-related trauma that would prevent me from checking the box like a normal person. The answer to all is no (though my mailbox does sit at the end of a long, little-used secondary driveway). And I’d like to be clear: I’m not generally lazy in my homemaking. I cook nearly every night that my kids are at home. I “am doing” laundry longer than I am actually doing anything else. I have an uncanny number of pictures on my camera roll of me cleaning my floor. I have more thriving houseplants than many houseplant stores.
Furthermore, I’m willing to bet I think about getting the mail more than any person who actually fetches it consistently. At times, it becomes a little game I play. “Should I hop out of my car and grab the pile of paper on my way out, so I can stare at it on my way to work? Nope, not this time. I’ll get it on my way in. I promise.” On and on in a loop I volley. Then one day, I received a text from a casual community friend whom I admire for the kind, purposeful way she conducts herself. She wanted to know what my new address was, because her Christmas card had been returned. Apparently, the postal service had come by and retrieved my mail for me. Or rather, repossessed it.
To be fair, mail-related quirks run in my family. My dad religiously gets the mail, sometimes waiting in his truck from a perch across the street until the marked vehicle with its driver’s seat on the wrong side makes its daily stop. Then Dad riffles through the letters immediately, throwing the junk in the trash can in the back seat, storing the “unsure if it’s junk” selections on his dash, and finally, filing the important pieces away in the hole where his stereo system would have been, had he chosen to have such a frivolity. Everyone who knows Dad can easily spot him coming from a mile down the road because of the mound of mail crammed behind his windshield. My brother-in-law, while not related by blood, has an issue similar to mine. He solved his problem by getting a PO box and making friends with the postal clerk, who calls him when it gets full.
Unfortunately, I lack my brother-in-law’s forethought and political skills, which is why I found myself scoping out the parking lot of the Pink Hill Post Office early last December after I’d heard about the Christmas card. As I sat in my car, I watched to ensure all the patrons had left the building before I entered to request what, if anything, remained of my mail.
I wanted an audience-free environment for this retrieval, because I had already gone through this process once before, about eight months prior. The first time, naive and prepared only for a basic transaction, I instead had to withstand a public inquisition and shaming as to why exactly I had been unable to get my mail. Mortified at having to justify my quirks, on the fly I did the only thing possible: I lied. I have been traveling for a long, long time, you see. The enthusiastic, problem-solving postal clerk immediately punished me for the fib by explaining in great detail how to alert the post office the next time I took an extended trip so they could hold my precious paper until my return. Sadly, it ended up being breath wasted.
Somewhat inexplicably, on my second trip to claim my neglected mail, I had not prepared any sort of excuse. I assumed my first experience had been an anomaly and that, surely, most members of the postal service minded their own business. But no.
This time, the postal clerk retreated to the back only to return empty-handed. She didn’t know where my mail was, she said, but she did want to know why I hadn’t gotten it in the first place. Unwilling to lie again, I answered plainly:
“I have a problem…getting the mail.”
By this point, a young gentleman had lined up behind me, and I turned to promise to both him and the clerk that I was usually a highly productive individual. Getting the mail was just something I couldn’t do.
The clerk, a petite woman who looked to be in her early thirties, called her counterpart at the Deep Run Post Office to see if my mail might have ended up there. I could hear their exchange. Naturally, the lady on the other line had to know, too: “Why didn’t she get her mail?” The Pink Hill clerk looked me in the eye as she answered. “She…has a problem.”
I wanted the clerk to elaborate. To share that I was an otherwise upright citizen. I even flashed a smile so she could see my straight, white teeth. What I really wanted to do was swing around and share with the growing audience behind me that the only mail I had missed was junk. Junk that would end up in the trash. Better theirs than mine. Right?
Wrong. When the postal clerk hung up the phone, she told me all my mail was gone. Returned to sender. She dropped this nugget like a doctor delivering a terminal diagnosis. I, however, was unfazed—thanks to my holiday card friend, I already knew at least some of my mail had been sent back. All I wanted at that point was to get my postal rights restored. I wanted to start getting mail like a respectable citizen again, and so right then and there, with my hand on my heart, I promised to gather my mail in a timely manner or pay someone to do it. This walk of shame was even worse than the walk to the mailbox.
