Day 2 Celebrating Independence: Out with the Old

July 3, 2010 by thepranamama
Filed under Parenting, Reflection

It’s 6:30 p.m. An entire day has passed and I am just now doing what I had planned to do since waking up this morning. While writing and relaxing is on my agenda for this weekend at home without my family, yesterday’s cleaning and organizing didn’t go as swiftly as I had thought, so today I went right back to work. It has been ages since I last sifted through the kids’ clothes, toys, books and artwork, and it was starting to take over the house. With the kids away with their dad for the weekend, I seized the opportunity to straighten up and donate things no longer in use.

My husband teases me about my need to declutter.

“You don’t have a sentimental bone in your body,” he has said on more than one occasion.

While I don’t completely agree with him, I will admit I don’t see the value in holding on to things unless it’s currently being used or enjoyed. The yogis would agree – it’s the ultimate practice in Vairagya, or non-attachment.

My mother-in-law has saved every last object from his upbringing, and guess who is now storing them for eternity? (If someone can explain to me why anyone needs 83 broken matchbox cars, a box full of faded t-shirts in size 2T or a high school wrestling jacket three sizes too small with one’s weight class stitched permanently on the sleeve, I’m all ears.)

I came across lots of things today. Most of them were easy tosses into the donation pile, but some made me stop and think.

While separating out books in my son’s room, I found a hand-written birthday card from his sister, exchanged last summer. A sweet drawing of each child with their names printed neatly filled the blank space within the Elmo greeting card. A small heart accompanied the sketch, and my own heart melted as I put it aside for safe-keeping.

Later, as I loaded up three boxes of books for the library’s fundraising book sale, I made a last minute rescue of seven or eight baby-appropriate board books. Just in case…

It felt good to bring a car load of stuff to Goodwill — that is, until I drove home and thought about the conversation I had with an employee who took things off my hands.

“You know we can only take things that are sellable,” she said, grazing the tulle on one of several Disney princess costumes and glancing at me over the top of her eyeglasses. ”This looks kind of ripped.”

I told her I’d be happy to take it back if she’d like, but that it was not ripped, it was tulle – purposely rough on the edges. (Clearly she has never spent much time with a three-year-old girl.) She took my things and I left empty-handed.

As I drove off, I thought about the Disney dress in question, and the eight pairs of plastic dress up shoes, the fairy princess crown and the little white purse that perfectly coordinated with all of it. I felt bad, remembering the way my daughter wore the Cinderella dress on Halloween with black fleece layers for warmth when she was three. I remembered her birthday that winter, when she received the Belle costume from her grandma in the mail, and spent the entire day dressed in bright yellow satin with a matching headpiece.

God, how she loved dressing up. Now I can’t get a dress on her to save my life. She’s all grown up, at the ripe old age of five, wanting only shorts, t-shirts and Crocs.

It feels great to have cleaned out so much stuff today. But with the silence and space to do it without the kids protesting or interrupting, I had the chance to mourn their growing up, just a little. Although I loathed it at the time, my daughter will never go through the Disney princess phase again. And while my son’s refusal to sit in my lap for a book when he was a baby irked me to no end, he is now sitting through pre-school books at bedtime, and has no use for Baby Einstein.

As for the birthday card — there will always be birthday cards. But instead of adorable little drawings of a brother and sister standing beneath a heart with beginner handwriting, they’ll include jokes, like, “Mom always did love you best,” or worse, “Wish we could get together sometime – I miss you! Have a great birthday, little brother.”

I shudder at the thought.

To my husband, who teases but truly believes I don’t get choked up by this stuff, you will just have to see the things I rescued from the charity pile today. Perhaps they will end up in our own kids’ basements someday, driving their spouses mad.