We have a spare closet in our master bedroom that we only use to store baby clothes inside plastic bins, baby equipment, and my wedding dress (in one of those plastic hanging protective covers). I hardly go in there, for obvious reasons. The kids aren’t allowed to play in our room unsupervised, and they’ve been told many times that they are not to go into this closet.

I went in today to put away some clothes that had been outgrown, and it was a shit show. It looked like a tornado had come through it. Underneath all the heavy duty plastic bins filled with clothes, I found my crumpled up wedding dress.

I had to text my husband downstairs that he needed to take care of the kids for a few minutes because I needed some time alone. I am not normally sentimental about stuff like this, but I couldn’t help crying. The bust is completely flattened and it’s just a mess.

When I pulled myself together, I came downstairs and told my husband, in private, what I’d found. At one point I said, when did they even do it? It’s not the kind of mess you make in five minutes—they had to have been in there for a while. He said, “Oh. They got in there while you were at the doctor a few weeks ago. I don’t know how long they were in there for.”

So now I’m secretly resentful of everyone in my house. My five year old for doing something she absolutely knew she shouldn’t have done. My husband for letting them do that, discovering the mess, and doing absolutely nothing to clean it up or even tell me about it. I guess my two year old gets a pass.

I don’t know if it’s even about the dress. I just feel like I can have nothing to myself. Everything gets “borrowed” or broken or trampled on. My journal gets torn up, my book gets scribbled in, my favorite shoes are stolen and found mangled under the couch. Sometimes we joke, “This is why we can’t have nice things,” but it feels a lot more true for me than my DH. If I had been watching the kids and I saw they’d gotten into his things, it would have gone very differently. At the same time, I feel guilty for being so resentful. I keep thinking that a better wife and mother wouldn’t let this stuff bother her.