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Dec. 31st, 2004 04:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
naomikritzerOver at ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pegkerr's livejournal, Peg posted about trying to separate her daughter Fiona from some dearly beloved, but filthy-and-worn-to-rags t-shirts:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/pegkerr/360689.html
...and got a ton of comments from people suggesting how she could have dealt with it -- make a quilt! Cut out a scrap as a bookmark! Or a button cover! Or take pictures! Etc., etc., etc.
Lengthy commentary follows...
I found myself thinking about this a bit today. I'm quite certain that some (not all) of the armchair quarterbacks on the comment thread do not, themselves, have children. So among other things, they probably do not fully understand the incredible flow of STUFF that comes into your house when you have kids. My children have two sets of grandparents, not to mention two aunts and an uncle, all of whom love them dearly and give them presents. We also have some neighbors across the alley, a really sweet elderly couple, who will occasionally give them small gifts like pinwheels. Plus one of my mother's coworkers likes to send presents via my mother -- she's only met Molly once, and has never met Kiera, but likes to send things anyway. We get toys in Happy Meals. We get toys from vendors that Ed sees for his job. My children create toys from craft materials and discarded items of mine, and Molly creates an endless stream of craft projects. And they never want to throw anything away.
There are a couple of options. My mother's strategy was to throw things away while I was out of the house. This is much easier than doing it with your children present, and every mother who does this will swear that your children almost never notice that stuff is missing. Every now and then I did notice, of course, and my mother would make some vague comment about things getting lost. I concluded from this that I was very absent-minded and prone to losing things. Also, since this was always done behind my back, I didn't learn the skill of separating from the stuff I didn't need anymore. I didn't learn how to discard clutter, how to throw things away. So in our not-terribly-large south Minneapolis home (probably about the same size as Peg's), we find ourselves drowning in stuff. We have slowly been learning to get rid of stuff, though I still shrink from throwing things away that could be useful to someone -- I Freecycled some of the junk from our basement, but even just giving things away on Freecycle can be a startling amount of work. You have to post, answer the e-mails, figure out what day people are coming and set stuff out...
Anyway. So that's one option, the sneaky option. I think most mothers do it that way. Or you can go with direct confrontation, like Peg. This is a lot harder. But I also think these are really useful skills. We need to learn how to separate from things. To identify the stuff that is taking up space and get rid of it. (She said, glaring at the inkjet printer that hasn't been used since 1998, the piles of floppy disks that contain who-knows-what, the nice wooden chair with the ripped-up pad...)
The third option is to drown in your own stuff. Oh! Or, if this is financially feasible for you, you can buy more space. Buy a bigger house, rent a storage unit -- either way, it's a lot of money to spend on an inability to separate from objects, and eventually, you will fill that space, too.
The "make a quilt!" option is a delightful idea if you're an empty-nester or something. I can't imagine where I would find time to sew a quilt, myself, and I have a lot more free time than Peg. (I also don't really know how to sew -- I can do simple repairs, buttons, hems, and so on, but quilts require more precision than I have patience for.)
Anyway, I reflected on this while sorting through some of Molly and Kiera's accumulated junk in the living room. I gathered up a bin of it, took it down to the basement, and tossed most of it, unsorted, into a box marked "TOYS." Molly and Kiera (and Fiona) aren't the only ones who have trouble getting rid of stuff. By the way, does anyone need a fold-up shopping cart? They're welcome to the one using up space in the trunk of my car. They would also be welcome to the folding luggage cart I bought at Target only a couple of months ago, with the idea that I would use it for the carseat when we fly (we have to lug it through the airport to our gate, since we use it during the flight). It didn't work. The tags from the luggage cart got pulled off and lost by the girls, though, so I can't return the stupid thing. Anyone need it?
pegkerr's livejournal, Peg posted about trying to separate her daughter Fiona from some dearly beloved, but filthy-and-worn-to-rags t-shirts:http://www.livejournal.com/users/pegkerr/360689.html
...and got a ton of comments from people suggesting how she could have dealt with it -- make a quilt! Cut out a scrap as a bookmark! Or a button cover! Or take pictures! Etc., etc., etc.
Lengthy commentary follows...
I found myself thinking about this a bit today. I'm quite certain that some (not all) of the armchair quarterbacks on the comment thread do not, themselves, have children. So among other things, they probably do not fully understand the incredible flow of STUFF that comes into your house when you have kids. My children have two sets of grandparents, not to mention two aunts and an uncle, all of whom love them dearly and give them presents. We also have some neighbors across the alley, a really sweet elderly couple, who will occasionally give them small gifts like pinwheels. Plus one of my mother's coworkers likes to send presents via my mother -- she's only met Molly once, and has never met Kiera, but likes to send things anyway. We get toys in Happy Meals. We get toys from vendors that Ed sees for his job. My children create toys from craft materials and discarded items of mine, and Molly creates an endless stream of craft projects. And they never want to throw anything away.
There are a couple of options. My mother's strategy was to throw things away while I was out of the house. This is much easier than doing it with your children present, and every mother who does this will swear that your children almost never notice that stuff is missing. Every now and then I did notice, of course, and my mother would make some vague comment about things getting lost. I concluded from this that I was very absent-minded and prone to losing things. Also, since this was always done behind my back, I didn't learn the skill of separating from the stuff I didn't need anymore. I didn't learn how to discard clutter, how to throw things away. So in our not-terribly-large south Minneapolis home (probably about the same size as Peg's), we find ourselves drowning in stuff. We have slowly been learning to get rid of stuff, though I still shrink from throwing things away that could be useful to someone -- I Freecycled some of the junk from our basement, but even just giving things away on Freecycle can be a startling amount of work. You have to post, answer the e-mails, figure out what day people are coming and set stuff out...
Anyway. So that's one option, the sneaky option. I think most mothers do it that way. Or you can go with direct confrontation, like Peg. This is a lot harder. But I also think these are really useful skills. We need to learn how to separate from things. To identify the stuff that is taking up space and get rid of it. (She said, glaring at the inkjet printer that hasn't been used since 1998, the piles of floppy disks that contain who-knows-what, the nice wooden chair with the ripped-up pad...)
The third option is to drown in your own stuff. Oh! Or, if this is financially feasible for you, you can buy more space. Buy a bigger house, rent a storage unit -- either way, it's a lot of money to spend on an inability to separate from objects, and eventually, you will fill that space, too.
The "make a quilt!" option is a delightful idea if you're an empty-nester or something. I can't imagine where I would find time to sew a quilt, myself, and I have a lot more free time than Peg. (I also don't really know how to sew -- I can do simple repairs, buttons, hems, and so on, but quilts require more precision than I have patience for.)
Anyway, I reflected on this while sorting through some of Molly and Kiera's accumulated junk in the living room. I gathered up a bin of it, took it down to the basement, and tossed most of it, unsorted, into a box marked "TOYS." Molly and Kiera (and Fiona) aren't the only ones who have trouble getting rid of stuff. By the way, does anyone need a fold-up shopping cart? They're welcome to the one using up space in the trunk of my car. They would also be welcome to the folding luggage cart I bought at Target only a couple of months ago, with the idea that I would use it for the carseat when we fly (we have to lug it through the airport to our gate, since we use it during the flight). It didn't work. The tags from the luggage cart got pulled off and lost by the girls, though, so I can't return the stupid thing. Anyone need it?
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no subject
Date: 2004-12-31 10:10 pm (UTC)It has once more gotten to the point, though, where I cannot find anything when I need it. :sigh:
As the oldest of seven children, I really didn't have to deal with throwing things out. Just letting clothes and toys pass on to the next appropriate sibling down the line.
no subject
Date: 2005-01-01 08:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-01 03:48 pm (UTC)My husband and I have always tried to treat our kids as individual humans first, as our kids (that is, part of the unit we call "our family") second, and as people of a certain age last, if at all. For that reason as well as some others, we have tried to give them as much control of their own lives as possible at every age.
Since my husband and I did not want to give each other the power to tell the other than the other must get rid of possessions (or to simply throw out the other's possessions), we also did not take on the power to tell our kids that they had to get rid of possessions.
I'm not urging this viewpoint on others, just presenting it as one that seems to have worked very well for one family.
no subject
Date: 2005-01-01 04:45 pm (UTC)I'm having problems now with the "should I save this as we're considering having another baby," but otherwise, ruthlessness is going to have to reign. Our house is small, and we just don't have room to keep everything. I have a pile of things in the garage that will be moving to a friend's house when she has her baby (due April), but I really need to prune Meg's burgeoning toy collection. And it's hard for me, too, because I was one of those kids who had bunches and bunches of tchotchkes and toys and couldn't bear to let anything go. I had to teach myself in adulthood to do it.
So go you! and go Peg! for teaching your children to let go. I think it's a good lesson anyway to establish that material goods, while enjoyable and worth having*, are also not worth investing too much in.
*especially books
no subject
Date: 2005-01-01 05:35 pm (UTC)The de-stufferizer that worked best for me was putting stuff in the attic in a garbage bag. If nobody missed it in N months, off to Goodwill it went.
Bless your heart. . . .
Date: 2005-01-02 10:13 pm (UTC)Oh . . . and . . . I never have that much trouble getting rid of clothes and so forth, except I wince at the money I spent on the stuff ("This cost $40, forcryinoutloud!") We're always "junking" (and giving to my brother-in-law) the computer stuff and office equipment that we accumulate, because hubby has a way of upgrading. I do have a lot of knick-knacky stuff that I keep in a big china cabinet-type piece. Occasionally I will go through it, but since we never have garage sales and I usually can't find anyone to take the stuff, I end up putting it back on the bottom shelf ("in rotation"). The last time I tried to give some porcelain and some dishes to a charity, the charity pickup people just slung the box into the back of the truck, and I'm sure it was all smashed. Sometimes, the reason people don't have anything is that they don't take care of stuff, I guess . . . so they're always just wasteful, rather than packratty. I think maybe we packrats are a bit more sensible, though we do need to divest occasionally. And we get a terrible media rap.
What I hang on to is my library. I keep the books that touched me, that meant something to me. Not best-sellers, for the most part (I don't think I have any best-sellers other than the Bible and Shakespeare in the house . . . maybe a few of our cookbooks?), but books that are midlist, that are special, books I read in childhood or teenhood (and had to get new copies of, because The Sneaky Mother used to get hold of every book I had and get rid of it whenever I wasn't looking, because her philosophy is "why re-read, ever??" I knew she was doing it, and it caused issues of trust. (Which I still have. My "trust" and faith in human nature was further eroded by some abuse later in childhood, although not from her. Still, it'd be nice to be able to trust that when you got back to your room, all your writing and notebooks would still be there, rather than hoping to find a good hiding place so the "trash you keep scribbling" would not always be gone when you came back to it. Although it was undoubtedly juvenilia, it was my intellectual property, and it had meaning to *me*. I know that y'all are not throwing out your kids' diaries and schoolwork, though.) I read fast and started reading young, so I had to teach myself to forget what I'd read quickly, or else I'd run out of reading material too fast. We only got new books every couple of weeks or so. Hubby laughs, because he remembers the plot and so forth of EVERY book, and he WILL NOT re-read a novel. I enjoy rereading novels after a period of time, and I always find something new when I come back to the good ones. (This may sound strange, but then I am strange.)
Public libraries no longer keep copies of any works that have not been checked out in the past year or so. (Check the policy at your library.) They buy 90 copies of the flavor-of-the-month and have a library sale where you find Jane Austen. They're not getting shiny new copies of worn-out tomes, either. They're just getting rid of stuff the "patrons are not interested in" and putting in DVDs. I will merely note that if there is to be a "library" of books that I feel are worthy and that I would like to see survive to the next generation, or even have them so that I can refer to them or re-read them, I'd better keep them and then eventually donate the collection to someone who loves books. As long as I'm on this side of the veil, I'm going to keep copies of the books I love.