Hefty Accomplishments

I have been actively avoiding responsibility this week.  I was sick all weekend and although I am finally starting to feel some better, I just don’t want to do anything.  I did stuff last week.  It made me sick. (I know that it didn’t actually make me sick, but just go with it.)  Last week was all about cleaning out clutter.  I got rid of unmatched and warped Tupperware, bagged up some old clothes for donation, and set aside some items to sell (someday).  I even convinced the kids to get rid of some of the plethora of toys that they move around their rooms while looking for the toys that they actually play with.  But the biggest cleanup happened in my eight year old daughter’s room. 

I used to imagine that my kids’ rooms would look like a cross between my own childhood room and a Pottery Barn catalog.  When they were babies, keeping their stuff neatly arranged was easy – they couldn’t actually play with any of it and it stayed wherever I put it.  When they were toddlers, I just gave them a few toys at a time to play with and kept the rest out of reach.  But as they got older, they gained access to all of their stuff all of the time and my catalog dreams were shredded along with most of the paper in my house and it all ended up on the floors of their rooms.

 

 

My daughter loves her stuff.  I mean, she REALLY loves it.  She never wants to get rid of anything.  Ever.  Her favorite things are her stuffed animals.  She had probably close to 150 stuffed cats, dogs, birds, unicorns, hedgehogs, foxes, wolves, horses, etc.  Name an animal – real or imaginary – she probably had at least one of them on her bed.  She has been found asleep on her floor some nights because she has carefully arranged and tucked in 50-60 stuffed animals into her bed and there is no room for her.  When I informed her that she needed to par it down, I could see the panic in her face.  I suggested that she arrange them in a line, starting with her most favorite, going to her least favorite, and that we could start by giving her least favorites to some kids who don’t have any stuffed animals.  She liked that idea, but an hour later, I found her in her room hugging an armful of animals, and she said “I can’t.  They’re all my favorite.”  Sigh.

I was beginning to think that I would one day I’d walk into her room to discover that she had disappeared under an avalanche of poly-fill stuffing and faux fur. 

 

I know what you are thinking: “Well, why would you keep buying them for her if it is such a problem?”  But see, *I* don’t buy them for her.  Grandma does.  Her friends do.  Her siblings do.  Every birthday, Christmas, weekend outing, etc., she gets a new stuffed animal.  She names them all.  They have distinctive personalities with likes and dislikes.  This one prefers the shelf to the bed, that one likes to be near the window, the one on the floor is feigning sleep because he doesn’t want to play with the two under the dresser – there are entire sagas played out in her mind about these animals.  I love and admire her creativity and imagination and I didn’t want to squelch it in any way.  She wants more than anything to have a REAL animal of her very own.  Sure, we have a dog (who she loves), but she wants her OWN animal. 

 

As most parents will tell you, you can send your kids to “clean” their rooms all day long, but if you really want it cleaned you need to go in there with them.  So last week, I went into my daughter’s horribly cluttered room with her, and helped her clean out things so that she could manage it better.  We went through her clothes and got rid of anything that was too small, torn, or stained.  We tried on all of her shoes and eliminated the ones that were snug.  And we tackled the stuffed animals.  We had already taken 4 trash bags full of clothes and shoes out of her room, and so I used that momentum to tackle the zoo that she had collected.  We went at them with the understanding that we were going to be sending at least half of them to new homes and we used the “no touch” method.  I would pick up an animal, hold it for her to see, she would say “Keep” or “Give away” and I would either put it into her toy bin or into a garbage bag.  She didn’t have to touch them at all.  She did great.  Better than great, actually, because she got rid of 3 trash bags full of stuffed animals. 

After we had accomplished the cleanout of things to sell or give away, we had to tackle the trash that was in her room, and how an 8 year old child can have that much trash is beyond me.  There were a few broken things, and some stuff that was simply beyond donating, but the “art” was the main culprit.  You know, in college, I participated in “Earth Day” and I signed a petition urging my campus to consider electronic textbooks and computer based testing to cut down on the use of paper because it killed trees.  Little did I know that one day my child would have enough paper in her room to handwrite the complete works of Shakespeare on in print large enough to be read from across the room.  There must have been 3-4 reams of paper with just a mark or two on them, all wadded up and torn.  They were in stacks on her shelves, in her closet, in her dresser, behind her dresser, and under her bed.  And we had to look at all of them because she was afraid that she might accidentally throw away her masterpiece.  I wanted badly to tell her that she wasn’t Da Vinci, but I didn’t.  We went through all 12,000 sheets of paper and kept less than 50.  We hung a few up and neatly stored the rest in her desk. 

Once the dead forest was removed, I saw something odd under her bed.  I started pulling in out and was bewildered.  She had 10-12 collapsed cardboard boxes stacked up under her bed.  There were one or two big boxes, but there were also a lot of broken down shoe boxes.  Underneath the stack were wads of poly-fill and some fabric pieces.  It looked like a rats nest.  I asked her what it was all for, and she told me that she was saving it to build a house for the cat that she was going to get someday.  All I could picture was that my daughter was going to be a hoarder and that she was going to have a cardboard shanty town for cats in her living room where normal people would have a piano.  I convinced her that the cat that she might someday have would not need a cardboard house and we added the cardboard to the recycling bin.

All told, we hauled out 5 trash bags of trash (not counting the recyclable cardboard).  You would think that her room would now be a sparse and barren place after a total of 12 bags of “stuff” was taken away, but it isn’t.  However, now she can find her stuff and she can manage it herself.  I was very proud of her and the way that she tackled this with me. 

Unfortunately for me, I have 3 more kids with hoarding potential and rooms of their very own.  I need to recover before I can tackle their rooms.  And I need to buy more trash bags.

 

Letting Go

I have been working on streamlining things around my house lately -- getting rid of the junk, the old, the worn out.  Today I tackled the linen closet.  I finally bagged up all of the old hooded baby towels.  It looked great when I was done, and it no longer takes excellent hand-eye coordination to open the door and put in the clean towels and washclothes so that the entire contents don't come spilling out onto your head.  But as I looked at the pile of old towels I had removed, many of them grayish with the wear and tear of 9 years worth of use and washing, I got a little pang of regret.  I mean, these were the towels that I wrapped William in after his first bath, the washcloths that I washed Bella with for the first time, the towels that Lorelei and Jackson played "super-heros" with just last year, and I was bagging them up to give to Goodwill.  Some stranger is going to buy these and probably use them to wash his car or his dog.  How could I let that happen?  These are precious mementos of my kids, of too many "firsts" to count, and they are destined to become someones "rags".  

I know that you cannot hold onto everything.  It is a lesson that I learned after we moved and I realized that we had too much "stuff."  With 4 kids, I cannot hold onto every picture that they draw, every card that they give me, or every cute outfit that they ever wore.  And the truth is, why would I want to?  I used to think that I would hold onto their "special" outfits and give them to them for their own kids some day.  Then my mother moved to a new house and gave me a virtual trunk load of MY old baby clothes.  Now, I was a child of the 70's -- there was NOTHING in the things that she gave me that I would ever put on my kids unless the only other choice was that they go naked.  The same will hold true for my kids in 25 years or so.  They are not going to want to dress their kids in the height of early 21st century fashion.  And since I know I am not having any more children, what would be the point of holding onto a bunch of clothes that they will never want and that I will never need? 

Memories.  Of course I hold onto the things from when my kids were little because they will never be little again.  William is already catching me in height, Bella's attitude and wit rivals my own, Lorelei is growing like a weed and Jackson (who was never little to begin with since he was over 10 pounds at birth) is almost as big as his sister.  I tell myself to hold on.  Hold on to that sleeper, that blanket, that towel, or whatever it may be as if their childhood is somehow magically contained within the fibers.  It is a HARD lesson to learn that those things are just things.  They are not my kids.  They are not even my memories.  My memories of those times are not going to Goodwill -- just some old gray towels.

So I paused to think about those precious times that are long gone now as I folded each item and placed it into the bag.  I remembered the way each one of them squirmed in my arms all slippery with soap as I gave them their first baths, how clean they smelled as I sang to them wrapped up in those now old towels, and I cried a little as I reflected on how they will be constantly growing and changing.  It is one of the hardest things about being a mother, a parent -- letting go.  I WANT them to grow and change.  I want them to mature, to learn, to try, and to sometimes fail because that is how they become adults.  It would be nice to freeze time and hold onto them for even just a little while longer as they are, but it is not possible and it would be going against my job as a parent.  My sole responsibility to them in this world is to help them grow up -- to teach them how to be responsible, contributing members of society.  I cannot do that if they never grow up.  So I am learning how to let go.  It is a daily struggle, and it isn't getting any easier.

Who Knew?

Well, today I got a wild productive hair up my butt and decided to REALLY clean my bathroom.  Not Clorox Wipes, but actual cleanser and a sponge and elbow grease.  Now, please understand, I am not a "nasty" kind of person.  My house is almost always cluttered, but I do not let it get grimy and nasty.  Or at least I didn't THINK I did.  I started with the double sinks and vanity.  I removed everything off of the counter top, sprayed cleaner and wiped away the spilt toothpaste and make-up residue, etc.  Then I cleaned the mirror, followed by the toilet and the tub -- no surprises, just gave them all a good, deep cleaning so that I could go on using the Clorox Wipes weekly for the next month or so to maintain it.  Then I thought, "Hmmmm...when is the last time I cleaned that shower?"  I couldn't remember.  I am not sure I have ever really deep cleaned it in the more than 2 years that we have been here.  I mean, I have sprayed it with Tilex and wiped it down, but never really gotten in there with a sponge and cleanser and scrubbed it.  So I thought, in for a penny, in for a pound and dove into the task.  We get in this shower every day to get clean.  I never thought it was all that dirty.  It is a small, glass shower seperate from the tub.  Well imagine my shock (and general disgust) when I discovered that our shower is NOT (as I have always assumed) made of "frosted glass."  The "frosted glass" was instead layers and layers of soap scum and hard water stains!!  I am happy to report that our shower is now sparkly clean -- no "frosted glass" left!