Operation Purge Mom's Superfluous Crap

Understatements Are Timeless (and they promote tranquility) 

Brett Paesel wrote an interesting article entitled I Love You. (Your Stuff, Not So Much) in Parents  magazine this month (well, the article is not interesting  interesting, but it is practical and validating).  Well Brett, I don't like clutter either, in fact I have a rather extreme aversion to stuff that has worn out its usefulness (if it ever had any). 

When I was little, my mother was a card-carrying packrat.  Still is actually.  I found this so bothersome that I used to sneak around the house throwing away decorative teacups and fake plants and dusty ski trophies reminiscent of glory days gone by (bye-bye).  I pursued 'Operation Purge Mom's Superfluous Crap' until a neighbor called her up one day to tell her that there was a collection of mysterious domestic items accumulating in the drainage ditch behind our backyard.  That call marked the end of The Operation.

Ten years ago my husband, Pat, and I threw almost every knickknack we had into a box before our firstborn could destroy it. We put the box in the basement of our apartment building, intending to reunite with our stuff when our son was older. The box sat, like a time capsule, in a cage seven stories below us. When we finally decided that it was safe to bring up the box, however, we couldn't remember what was in it. Which raised the obvious question: If we had done without these items for so long, why resurrect them now? We agreed to leave them below ground.

This simple act started a domestic reassessment of how we viewed material things. First, we became realistic: After our older child poked holes in our furniture with his fork, we chose the floor sample of a dining-room table—with a few nicks and missing screws—rather than buy a new one.

Yet in spite of the fact that Pat and I had reduced our interest in stuff, by storing heirlooms and making peace with damaged items, we still had a lot of it. Our apartment bulged with papers and plastic things, art supplies and rocks. It seemed that stuff literally stuck to our now two children. Every time they walked in the door, they brought in more things that piled up by their beds and on top of their desks.

Added to that was what I can only call "debris." What was it? Little scraps of paper? Tiny sticks and folded plastic straws? The boys left a trail of it everywhere they went, spilling out of their pockets and the cuffs of their jeans. Although the debris was not technically "stuff," the boys were just as attached to it as they were to identifiable items.

"Don't throw that out," my older son, Spencer, would say as I turned his jeans pocket inside out over a trash can.

"There's nothing in here but sand," I'd point out.

Spencer would pop up from his chair and lean over the garbage can and retrieve what looked like a thin, plastic cuff to a juice bottle. "It's a launcher," he protested. Apparently, my sons have an arsenal of things to launch in the event of an attack on our home, because every other item I question is a launcher.

We weren't merely being buried under toys and every little thing my sons couldn't bear to give up, we also needed an extra room for the stuff that the children gave us: hand-painted picture frames, tulips made out of egg cartons, poems lovingly penned to their father and me edged with tissue-paper flowers.

How could I possibly part with these mementos? It turns out that the answer to that question is that it gets a whole lot easier. Initially, I bought a decorative box to house their crafty gems, but it quickly filled to capacity.

At that point, I started simply throwing stuff out after the kids went to bed.

Occasionally, they would ask for their construction-paper clock with the moveable hands, for example, and I would have to face them with a hangdog apology. But they started to accept that most of their artistic endeavors were temporary. Pat and I began keeping a file for each child of items with which we simply couldn't part, and one of my bookshelves was cleared for all their school journals and stories. I defy anyone to throw out a little boy's account of a war between Denmark and the planet Mars.

Casting a cold eye on my children's keepsakes allowed me to view my own amassing of personal mementos with drill-like detachment. It turned out that I wouldn't miss the gift cards from our wedding, or the wooden eggcups I bought in Poland but never used because I didn't then, and don't now, eat soft-boiled eggs.

When it came time for my children to purge their own toys and souvenirs, they had a harder time of it. I would give them each a brown shopping bag with the instructions that they should throw out anything in their room that was broken or that they no longer used. After an hour spent playing excitedly with every rediscovered toy, they emerged. In Spencer's bag I found an armless knight and a deflated soccer ball. Murphy's bag offered up a short piece of string and something plastic that he claimed was a launcher that had never worked.

you can read the rest of Brett's article here:

http://www.parents.com/parenting/better-parenting/advice/i-love-you-your-stuff-not-so-much/

here's a recent Gretchen Reynolds clutter posting:

http://www.happiness-project.com/happiness_project/2013/02/do-you-find-yourself-falling-for-these-12-familiar-myths-about-clutter/


Originally published in the February 2013 issue of Parents magazine.